Continuing with my theme of tavern signs, this post will lay out my publishing goals for 2025.
Those goals, in priority order, are:
1. The Assassin's Code
Not a lot to say about the next book in the Assassin Without a Name series other than that it's on track for its release date of February 4.
2. Elemental Unification
I have bad news for readers waiting to read the next (and likely) final book in The Alchemancer series. After reviewing my financial numbers for 2024, one thing became painfully obvious. Readers prefer my Assassin Without a Name series by a hefty ratio of 3 to 1. In terms of royalty revenue, my Assassin series made up 70% of my sales in 2024. Given the benefits of having more cash to reinvest in my business, I can't ignore these numbers (nor can I ignore the majority of my readers). So, I'm pushing the release date of Elemental Unification to 2016. I really do want to finish the series, but my readers have spoken with their wallets and they want more Nameless Assassin stories. So, that's what I intend to give them in 2025.
3. The Quiet of the Night
The title is tentative but this will be a new short story or novella featuring Elizabeth West that I will begin work on as soon as The Assassin's Code is out the door. More details to come.
4. The Assassin's Skill
This is the next/fourth book in the Assassin Without a Name series. I don't have a release date yet, but it will probably land sometime in the 3rd quarter of 2025.
5. Magic & Mayhem flash fiction stories
This is an ongoing endeavor I'll work on throughout the year. I plan to write 12 stories—one for each of the monthly Magic & Mayhem newsletters. Each story is an original piece featuring a different character from my books. So far, Magic & Mayhem readers have enjoyed The Witch King, Weathering the Storm, Against Time, and Master Thief. Many more stories are to come!
6. Character Profiles
These are sort of like NPC character sheets for the characters from my books. Each book page lists the characters featured in that book, or you can start at the World of Uhl's People section and drill down from there to view them all. I'll continue on these in 2025 with a goal of completing as many as possible.
7. World of Uhl
This is all about providing nuanced background information about the people, places, and nations where I set my books. You can see what I've accomplished so far by visiting the World of Uhl section of my website. My goal for 2025 is to build out all of the missing information. Something like this is never really done, of course, but I can get reasonably close.
8. Investigate new revenue streams
Not much to say about this yet but using my books as the foundation, I plan to explore other sources of revenue and different channels I can utilize to get my stories into the hands of more readers.
9. Signed print books
With so many other things going on in 2025, I may not make much headway on this. But it's here as a placeholder if nothing else.
10. Advertising Coursework
Another placeholder in a sense, but I have some coursework I'd like to tackle this year to make better use of things like Facebook advertising, for example.
I'm excited about these goals and can't wait to start checking them off. As always, I'll revisit in one year's time and see how I did.
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