The Year In Review - 2025

[R. C.]

What I Expected From 2025

2025 began with the belief that momentum would finally carry me across the line.

I had projects outlined. Series plans mapped. A sense, maybe borrowed, maybe earned, that if I stayed disciplined, the work would move forward on its own. That progress was a matter of consistency, not resistance. I told myself this would be the year things clicked. That I would write cleaner and faster. That doubt would quiet once routines were locked in. That the gap between intention and execution would finally narrow.

It felt reasonable at the time.

What Actually Happened

As is often the case, plans changed.

Writing took on a different shape. I revised the same passages repeatedly. I circled ideas without committing. I set aside projects that looked promising on paper but rang hollow once I was inside them.

Momentum did not carry me, but persistence stayed with me and kept the light on.

What It Cost Me

Confidence first. Then patience. Then the quiet belief that effort always equals progress.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from knowing how to work and still struggling to do it. From understanding craft well enough to recognize when something is not working, but not well enough to fix it quickly.

There were weeks when silence felt safer than producing something I would have to confront later.

Burnout did not arrive loudly. That is not my style. Still, effort may not equal progress, but it does create space to learn.

What It Taught Me

This year stripped away a few comforting myths.

Writing every day guarantees nothing. Discipline does not automatically solve doubt. Unfinished work is not failure. I learned that stopping can be a form of listening. That resistance sometimes carries information. Not all progress moves forward. Some progress hunkers down.

I also learned that my work has patterns I cannot outrun. The themes that resurfaced were not accidents. Neither were the questions I kept circling, but I hesitated to answer directly.

The page does not let you lie forever.

Why I?m Still Here

Because even in the worst weeks, stopping entirely felt worse. Because the stories did not disappear. They waited. Because writing, for all its friction, remains the clearest way I know how to think.

It was an honest year. And honesty, it turns out, is harder to abandon than ambition.

Next year is not about doing more. It is about writing without demanding progress. About finishing what earns its ending. About letting go of what does not.
I am still here because the work is not finished with me yet.

And maybe that is enough.

Summary Metrics

Everyone likes metrics. Here are a few of mine:

Stories published: Three novels, three novellas, and half a dozen rewrites

Marketing: Still negative ROI, but meaningful progress. For the first time, I sold a book a day and reached 10,000 KU pages in the first month after release, with a 4.7 rating! Yeah, I know!

The Patreon experiment: Not a bust. I learned a lot, and I will revisit the effort in 2026

2026 Goals

Live the best life possible.

As always, I'm happy to answer any questions.

R.C.

Also, if this is the wrong forum, let me know and I'll move it.

[TimothyEllis]

I revised the same passages repeatedly.

Honestly, I think that's where too many writers go wrong.

For me, I write it, edit it the next day, edit it when the book is finished, proofread it several times, and publish.

Everything gets let go when I upload it, and is signed off as complete after the few goofs get reported and fixed in the first 72 hours after publishing.

I don't feel the need to "craft" a sentence. I just write the yarn out, make it read the best I can, and move on.

My 2025: 17 novels for just over a million published words.

I did 16 in 2024, so continued to improve a bit.

Financially, it's been a very good year, and the current series is doing better than the previous one, now I'm back with a mage instead of a fighter pilot or admiral.

I've had less than a handful of days off all year. 1 of them was the day we moved everything after some renovations were finished, and the other was Boxing day AM, when I was simply too brain dead to get the next sentence out after editing. That was not enough sleep before xmas, and then too long a day, and way too much food.

Otherwise, I get my writing done reasonably consistently all year long. Come New Years Day AM, I'll be writing my words for that day.

It works for me, but everyone has to do them.

[PJ Post]

Progress is a many-headed beast, and different for everyone. As for quitting: craftsmen quit, Creatives just change gears and head for new terrain.

[Lorri Moulton]

I kept my business in the black by having Kickstarters.  Book sales alone probably wouldn't have done it.

These were not huge (or even big) Kickstarter campaigns, but they were profitable.  Honestly, the ebook sales are my favorite...all profit.  The physical books can be showy, but they can also be expensive.  Kickstarter wants some physical product, so that's what I promote and think of the ebooks as frosting on the cake.

I don't write fast.  I wrote a few books this year (mainly fairytales) and did a lot of branding/covers.  Fairytales don't do that well for me at retailers, but they seem to do better on Kickstarter than other genres.  Fantasy is big!

Focusing on the bookstore idea made it important to clearly identify series, genres, etc. I need to do a little more proofing on older books and publish those paperbacks and hardcovers.  Money has been really tight this year, so I haven't had much left for advertising.  Maybe next year...

2026 Goals

To finish a few more fairytales, or what I call fairytales.  They're probably fantasy novellas, but I think of them as stories I'd make up for my nieces/nephews. 

I also have some other books planned, so I want to get to those too.  Night Skies is a short WW2 story that is supposed to be part of a series of WW2 short stories, so I'd like to get those finished before summer.

So many ideas, so little time.  I've always said this was a plan for my retirement.  I hope it's making more money by then. 

ETA: One thing I did this year was publish some old history papers that I wrote in college.  I already had some from graduate school (including my thesis, which is the railroad book), but these were on my site for free a while.  Not many people saw them, so I put them on retailers with first one free.  It's had a LOT of downloads compared to what I expected.  So I'll take whatever positive results I can get.

[alhawke]

I set up my own bookstore, published three ebooks (with paperback/hardcovers), published 4 audiobooks, created a handful of trailers for my YouTube channel and attempted one kickstarter. Some of these marketing approaches came about from suggestions from some of you here on writersactum 

Financially, I made more $ this year than ever before... I also spent more.

Interestingly,  my ebooks lagged in audio sales for 2025. In my case, some of this might be because people have the ebooks, but don't have the audio yet. All my audiobooks were published only recently. All of them feature human narrators, so my overhead is very high.

At the end of the day, I'm getting readers and listeners to check out my stuff and I'm eternally grateful to share my artwork with them.

[LilyBLily]

I got ambushed by life this year. I was steaming along at full speed, writing lots of words, and then somebody died. And left a mess. I had to abandon my writing most of the year in order to honor a more important commitment. It wasn't just the time I had to use for other things; it was also how those other things so preoccupied my brain that I could rarely be released from those concerns to attempt writing. As for publishing anything, hah!

But books did get sold despite everything. Not a lot, and I had almost zero energy to play the marketing game. But my perma-ad for my nonfiction title delivered as usual and, rather to my surprise, people continued to find my women's fiction novels on the various wide venues, Apple being the biggest seller, with Kobo next. And one person actually read every book in my western romance series. Hurray!

I may have to give myself a pass for all the years I didn't write novels last century, when I was also enmeshed in complex and emotional situations. I could read books back then to gain peace of mind, but I simply did not have the peace of mind to write them. I could only consume, not produce.

I have fairly realistic hopes that 2026 will be better. I'm not operating in crisis mode now, and much of the winter I will be doing monthly writing challenges. I'm also about to hand off some of my volunteer work with writers' groups, which should help. I also look forward to having the mental space to consider which new book to write after I finally revise my last western.

[Post-Doctorate D]

Writing every day guarantees nothing.

More people need to understand this.

I write every day.  I don't remember the last time I missed a day.  But, that doesn't mean I make meaningful progress.  A lot of what I write will end up being scrapped entirely.  Yet I persist.  It's at a point where I am just going through the motions, but I feel compelled to keep going.

What I should do in 2026 is something I've done in previous months or years.  And that is to write a short story every day or every other day.  Not the whole year, but maybe a particular month.  Or maybe the whole year.  Who knows?  I've done that before and it gives me stories I can use in my newsletter/magazine or elsewhere.

Or I could do a poem a day for a month.

I think it helps where you actually finish something.  A poem or short story is something you can finish in a day and then you have not only something you can use but also a sense of accomplishment.  And that helps you on those days when you're working on a novel and it seems like you will never finish or never get past a particular block or something.

The other thing I miss is Skype.  Used to hang out with a group of writers and readers and other creative people there and it helps to bounce things off other people or just engage in silly conversations which sometimes generate story ideas or ideas to get past sticking points in your writing.  Forums aren't the same.  Skype was instant.  Forums require waiting for a response.  The conversations don't flow as well.

I revised the same passages repeatedly.

When that happens, I've learned it is time to toss in a dancing gnome.  That is, throw in a wrench of some kind to shake the characters up and get things moving.

The first novel I published in 2012 I had started in the 90s.  The first ten chapters or so, I wrote and rewrote trying to get the story to work.  I think I did seven drafts, maybe more.  At one point, I got so frustrated I actually threw the whole thing in the trash.  I dug it out a short time later.  Don't recall if I worked on it again but it wound up sitting in a file for years and years until publishing on Kindle became a thing and people in my Skype group encouraged me to start publishing to Kindle.  So I remembered that was, I thought, pretty far along so I dug it out and I found I could make it work once I tossed in a dancing gnome, some squirrels, a talking fish and a bunch of other stuff.  And then I was able to finish it, have it edited and publish it.


I too had a bunch of objectives for the year but life gets in the way sometimes.  Hopefully, 2026 will be the year.

[LilyBLily]

Various romance writers' groups do Zoom-based writing sprints, some daily, some mornings, some evenings, etc. There's often a fair amount of chatter on them, so one gets a bit of writing social life in addition to focused writing time.

Additionally, there are monthly writing challenges sponsored by RWA chapters. You pick the one that suits your calendar. I did NaNoWriMo for many years, and then there's a January and a February one I do, and a July one, too. These are not face-to-face. Years ago, I did a 50k challenge that was based in New Zealand. I am sure there are many similar online, although I couldn't tell you where to find them. Although I think SFWA does a Sunday late afternoon writing sprint Zoom.

"Write every day" is not necessary. I know writers who do not write on weekends, for instance; they have families and want to keep them, and they also want some time off. Similarly, writing all day long will burn some people out even while it makes others very happy.

On the other hand, writing only when you feel like it is not a plan. Put your writing on your engagement calendar. Making an appointment to write, putting your writing first at least sometimes in a busy life, is very important.   

[TimothyEllis]

"Write every day" is not necessary. I know writers who do not write on weekends, for instance; they have families and want to keep them, and they also want some time off. Similarly, writing all day long will burn some people out even while it makes others very happy.

Write every day is what happens when you deliberately establish that as a habit. The habit then keeps you writing.

Writing 5 days a week as a day job takes discipline and work ethic. The 7 day habit is easier, imo.

I don't write all day. I edit in the first hour, then keep writing when it's done. Then get in two good writing hours. When in the zone this can extend to 3 or 4, but that happens less often these days.

Those two point something hours of writing yield 2500-3000 words, which get edited the next day.

String that along every day, and it's not burnout level working, and still gets a novel length done in a rapid release time frame.

If I could do 8 hours a day 5 days a week as a day job, I'd be releasing every ten days, and probably burning out rapidly.

This is a marathon, not a sprint.

You just establish what you can do and keep it up, and just keep doing that. In my case, over the years I've sped up slowly.

Not working any harder or longer, just getting more words written in the same sessions.

Works for me, anyway.

[cecilia_writer]

After I retired from my day job (during Covid) I found writing was a good way of imposing a bit of structure on the day and doing something useful, though without the external pressures of my previous working day. And this past year, as I got less and less active and then had my heart surgery and started to get more active (this is still very much in progress!), going downstairs to the table in the conservatory where I do most of my writing was a way of making myself get out of bed or out of the reclining chair.

I didn't have huge ambitions in September when I started being able to sit at the computer again for a while, I just aimed to do something related to writing, and in fact I found myself making a chapter by chapter summary of the novel I'd been working on, which was about halfway through, and then doing some light editing, and eventually I got back into the actual writing and by November I could write 1,000 words every day. By Christmas I had only one chapter left to write in this novel and had also written around half of another one.

I suppose my point is that it was because I'd got into the habit of going downstairs at about 11 a.m. every day, switching on my computer and opening a document, that this had become just as normal as eating breakfast and even although I wasn't physically fit I still just did it anyway. In fact I recently said to my son that I thought writing every day had helped with my physical recovery too.

Thanks for this thread - it has reminded me that I often put a 'review of the year' on my blog about now, and also write a plan for next year in a notebook.

[TimothyEllis]

I suppose my point is that it was because I'd got into the habit of going downstairs at about 11 a.m. every day, switching on my computer and opening a document, that this had become just as normal as eating breakfast and even although I wasn't physically fit I still just did it anyway. In fact I recently said to my son that I thought writing every day had helped with my physical recovery too.

Back during my dark times, I used to get migraines every day.

The writing habit got me sitting at the computer at the same time every day. The migraine fell away, I got the words written, then the migraine would come back when I stopped.

The writing habit can be a really powerful thing when the body isn't up to doing anything.

That habit can get anything done, regardless of how you feel.

 

[Bill Hiatt]

Discipline is so important. You do need to work your writing schedule around real life to have time for family and friends, but without a plan and good work habits, it's too easy to put things off. I speak from experience.

I keep the money side of things always in sight, but in a realistic way. I have a sales goal (which I always meet or exceed) and a KU goal (which I used to meet, but now KU seems to be falling apart). But I also have goals I can fully control, like completing projects. The satisfaction of a job well done is important, and we can always have that, even if it isn't reflected in our royalty statements as much as we'd like.

This year, I only published one novel. Substack is a harsh mistress. But through it, I also published enough short stories for an anthology and completed seven serials, six of which are novellas and one of which is novel length. I also started work in two novels, which I'm doing concurrently for the first time, and that's actually working.

In the spirit of celebrating the small things (also important, since big things don't come along every day), I'm up to 547 subscribers on Substack (7 paid). I was a guest on someone else's podcast for the first time. I was asked for a quote someone could use in advertising for the first time. My income didn't increase, but it was interesting to see other writers look to me as an expert because my productivity and sales were greater than theirs. I've never thought of myself that way, so it was an interesting new feeling. I'm not an expert, but I do know more than some people and can be helpful to them.

[Hopscotch]

Writing/discipline = you guys are fabulous.  I'm a slacker by comparison.  Not even up to Hemingway's model:  he wrote 3 hours each morning (rewrote the last few pages of yesterday's work before going after the new) and spent the rest of the day being happily obnoxious.  Sounds like a fun work/life balance.

[Post-Doctorate D]

Rather than discipline or habits, I think the most important thing is to find what works for you.

When I did not write every day, when I did write, I ended up with many more usable words.  Most of what I wrote required minimal editing, if any, and a lot of that was stuff like misplaced commas.

Whereas now that I write every day, more stuff needs to be edited.  A lot more words need to be simply tossed.

The belief is that if you write every day, that makes you more productive but I think it's actually making me less productive.  If more time is spent editing, that makes you less productive.  If much of what you write ends up being thrown out, you're not being productive at all.  It just seems like you're being productive because word counts are going up every day.

[PJ Post]

Productivity is also a subjective metric.

Some measure productivity by words published, others by profit and still others by getting better at their Art.

[Bill Hiatt]

Some measure productivity by words published, others by profit and still others by getting better at their Art.

As you say, the determination is subjective. All three of those standards have validity. The third would be my choice, but it's certainly subjective.

The amount published is one metric we can control, so that has the advantage of being a goal we can succeed at. Profit is harder to control. It's not that we can't adapt better business strategies, but even with a lot of focus, there are variables we can't control.

The belief is that if you write every day, that makes you more productive but I think it's actually making me less productive.  If more time is spent editing, that makes you less productive.  If much of what you write ends up being thrown out, you're not being productive at all.  It just seems like you're being productive because word counts are going up every day.

I try to write every day, but if I get tired, I stop. If I feel uninspired, I stop. Usually, when I return to the writing, I'm much more productive, and my subconscious has worked its way around the blocks.

[R. C.]

... Not even up to Hemingway's model:  he wrote 3 hours each morning (rewrote the last few pages of yesterday's work before going after the new) and spent the rest of the day being happily obnoxious....

This is my aspiration. If I'm not at the keyboard by 06:00, half the day is gone!  Now, where's that gin?

R.C.

[cecilia_writer]

Rather than discipline or habits, I think the most important thing is to find what works for you. [Post-Doctorate D]

This is very true. In my case the key was to find the gap in the day where writing fits in more or less seamlessly. I've managed to do that again but I've had more of a struggle finding a place for walking, which I'm supposed to build up in a similar way post-op. I can't bring myself just to do the basic walk round the block that I should ideally start with, because it seems pointless. I will only walk if there's something to look forward to, even something small like a nice view or a cup of coffee (I am easily pleased!).

[Vijaya]

RC, I loved the way you reviewed your year. Great thread to read. Thank you.

It's been a good year for me. I started submitting some of my poetry and short stories again. Got some rejections. Waiting on others. But I'm feeling much more hopeful. I'll have a new picture book out. I'm offering a workshop--and I find it's been the best ROI for selling books (win-win). I'm disappointed that I didn't make progress on a new novel, but I will try again in the New Year. I still haven't really figured out how to keep the momentum going on a novel.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

Wow, I'm impressed by the dedication and discipline of everyone doing their daily word-counts, and dismayed by my lack of the same. I used to be like that - years back I was occasionally writing 5K words to satisfy a deadline - but nowadays motivation is the issue. Mind you, I'm writing and editing all day, and flipping to my own universe of writing isn't easy. Excessive screen time can be fatiguing.

For the record, I've spent 2025 consolidating my existing works, republishing existing books that I've regained the rights to ... and I started writing something new that would fit with my best-performing novels, but I found myself writing to (my own) market and the spark of excitement didn't carry through. It's been shelved for a while. I have plenty of plans and ambitions, some I've mentioned here, it's just hard to get enthusiastic with the obstacles we face for gaining visibility and an audience.

A serious issue for me, and for others I expect, is the ability to check sales and "success" on a daily basis - and even multiple times in a day. It gets discouraging to see results that aren't encouraging, if that makes sense. Sure, I advertise and make sales and KU reads, however it can feel like a hamster wheel of effort that isn't really getting traction. In the past, when I was trad-published (midlist, remember) you often didn't get real sales figures for something like 12 months. You might see an initial print-run on 10,000 books sell out ... awesome! Then the sales-or-return system might kick in and half of those would be remaindered, with allowances for promotions and stuff on top. Not so awesome. But the point is, you'd be living the dream and blissfully writing the next book for a year or so, unaware of whether or not anyone was actually reading your novel.

Now, we can analyse daily sales and even page-counts to the nth degree. And it can take the wind out of your creative sails very easily. It's often a necessary evil if you're running promos and ads, trying to assess if these are effective, so you can't be proactive in promotions and ignore the sales figures.

I know we're not supposed to be writing for "sales" or "success", and it's all about the love of writing regardless. But KDP and self-publishing has opened a Pandora's Box of judgement on our worth and appeal as writers. It's in the graphs, and the figures, and the reviews and ratings.

2025 for me was about trying assess what can and can't be done realistically. 2026 will be about finding some balance between enjoying the creative processes and finding an audience, however large or small, that makes it feel I'm not writing and sending my books into a vacuum.

[PJ Post]

I think my word for 2026 is intentionality.

Writing thousands of words into the void doesn't necessarily help anything. Advertising willy-nilly doesn't always help either. Same goes for a lickety-split publishing schedule.

I'm working on a 'bigger picture' and then making sure that all of my efforts have purpose within that context, including having fun and not burning out.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

"Having fun" is a key component... good point. More important than anything, probably.

[Bill Hiatt]

At the very least, if you're not having fun, you're probably not producing your best work. Any time something feels like a chore, people tend not to do it as well, even if the effect is largely driven by the subconscious, and we really don't notice it.