End of Year Wrap Up, and Next Year!

From my newsletter, which you can sign up for HERE.

I’m so Excited!

The year is almost over, and I have so much to show for it. It’s rather exciting. This year I published two novels (Witch’s Sacrifice and Witch’s Curse) and put out three audio books (Prophecy by Barlight, Footprints, and Small Bites Complete). I also wrote a great big huge chunk of Witch’s Stand, the final book in the Witch’s Trilogy, as well as 84k words in several other projects.

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That’s a lot of work, a lot more than I thought I’d done. Over the course of the year I have written 250,000 words. That’s a lot of words. Keep in mind I did this while working a full time job, and helping my boyfriend with his new leather crafting workshop. Plus kids, doctor appointments, orthodontists… you get the point. It’s been a busy year, and I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished so far.

~~BUT!~~

It’s not enough. A quarter million words a year is nowhere near where I want it to be for my full time carrier. So, this coming year I am stepping up my game another notch. I plan to keep stepping it up until I am working as an author full time.

On that note I have an exciting reveal for next year. I’m working on a project with Maya Goode and Gerald Hornsby that starts January 4th. I don’t know how much I can say, but it will involve a lot more content being produced. I can’t wait to share it with you!

~~Free gifts?~~

If you aren’t signed up for my email list now is a great time to do so. This year I’ll be sending out a new short story every week. Anyone subscribed to the email will get a copy of the new short story a month before any of them are released on any other platform, that is IF they are released on Amazon, or Wattpad. Some of them will be kept until the end of the year and released as a book. So if you want to get in on the ground floor and see what I’ve got up my sleeve then you’ll need to sign up for the email.

Secondly, I’ll be putting out “Witch’s Stand” sometime early 2016. I’m hoping by the beginning of February (because of editing) but I can’t promise. I have a final short story, “Witch’s Sight” which is a prequel to the Witch’s Trilogy, that should be out soon afterward. It will be sent through email first and released as a standalone free book on Amazon a month later.

Once those two projects are finished I will be done with the “Witch’s Trilogy”, but not with the world. There are so many stories that happen in the world of Peyllen, and I plan to tell a lot more of them, but for now I will be setting that series aside to go back to my “Eternal Tapestry” books.

“Eternal Tapestry” is an urban fantasy series based on gods and goddesses of the old world who are still living, working, and sometimes mucking up the modern world. It follows the adventures of the goddesses of fate in their current incarnation. I have six books planned for that series, all in various stages of completeness, and I want to work on getting some of them out once I’m done with the “Witch’s Trilogy.”

I’ve got my work cut out for me. 2-5000 words (maybe more) for a short story each week, plus another thousand a day for the Eternal Tapestry series. That’s a lot of words, and a lot of time sitting in front of a keyboard. But the outcome is going to be AMAZING!

My goal this coming year is to produce half a million words. DOUBLE what I’ve been able to produce in the years past. I think it’s doable. And I think in 2017 I may finally be able to get to the coveted ONE MILLION WORDS in a single year. (Even if they aren’t all published in the same year. There is nothing wrong with stockpiling some words for later projects, after all.)

Anyway, fair reader, it’s time for me to say adieu until the next year. Look forward to weekly emails starting on January 5th. Your first short story will be on January 11th, and continue for an entire year.

Crissy Moss

P.S. All of my books are currently available in Kindle Unlimited for your reading pleasure. I will also be putting up a free book each week. This week “Flight of the Griffins” and “The Camera” will be available for free on Dec 15-16.

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Around the Web

I’ve been busy writing and editing, and generally doing everything a writer should be doing, so I missed out on doing the “Around the Web” links. I have found a few interesting links the week.

One of these might be April fools jokes btw.

Jim Butcher to put Dresden books on Hiatus.

French newspaper still printing the newspaper with tech from a century ago.

This week I might be jailed for writing a book about human rights abuse.

Internet Archive adds 6000+ ebooks.

Douglas Adams made me a writer: by Neil Gaiman

Download 422 art books for free, from Metropolitan Museum of Art.

JK Rowling: Life after Harry Potter.

Time, Resolutions and Free Books

Why do we mark the perfect time to start things by calendar months? It isn’t as if the sacred sheet of paper with the squares and numbers determines when the best time to start doing X is. “I’m going to go to the gym because the sacred sheet of dates has declared it a new year, and I must make a resolution to do better this year!”

This morning I got out of bed and thought about my vlog. I didn’t do a great job of Vloging every day. More like 4 times a week. More then I ever did before that, but still. And the thought came “Well, tomorrow is a new year, I could start again. Right?”

I could. Definitely. But why not start today? Why not start last week? Why not realize the fundamental futility of the calendar and just DO IT!

And I think I know why… We, as humans, need validation. We need that demarcation of time so that we can say “I accomplished X in this amount of time.”

Last year was a fantastic year for me to write. I wrote almost a quarter of a million words, nearly completed three novel length books, and am planning to publish. It was a TERRIBLE year of my publishing. I only published one short story. So here I am demarcating a length of time and saying last year wasn’t so great, so lets make this year better. Even so, NaNoWriMo went amazingly and I know I can do it. I just need to DO IT!

On the personal side, the last three months of 2014 were FANTASTIC. My boyfriend finally figured out what he wanted and moved in with me. My children have started to leave the nest and make lives of their own. My job is still not fantastic, but I feel like I’m getting closer to the writing career I want all the time, even if I didn’t publish much in 2014. So there’s hope.

For the free books!

footprintsminiFootprints will be free on January 2-4th and the 17th and 18th (B00JT3889Y)

Jake is on a journey to reunite the shattered past with the present. Faced with his fathers death, he goes to the family cabin one last time to say good bye. But he isn’t alone.

Potion Shop will be free on January 9-11, and the 24th and 25th (B00FUYS6BG)potionshop

Curiosity, desire, and magic.
When little mousy Marcy get’s pulled into a potion shop she finds more magic then just what’s inside the bottles.

 

One, Two, THREE!

Just to let everyone know, Amazon has finally helped by making three of my books perma-free.

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Small Bites contains three flash fiction about some interesting fantasy creatures.

The Ring is a short story that begins a series. It is reminiscent of “Twilight Zone” or “Friday the 13th: the Series”.

Prophecy by Barlight is a comedic short story about a barkeep that goes a little over the top to rid himself of a prophecy.

Pick one, or all of them up. Enjoy them. If you’re really lovely leave a review for me. That would be amazing.

Thank you!

Freebie Weekend Aftermath

Twilight TalesThis weekend I did a freebie giveaway using the KDP select program for Twilight Tales. It went amazing!

It is still free for a few more hours but I thought I’d give a run down of how it went.

I tried KDP a shortly after I started to publish. I had several books up at the tigraphme, but very few reviews, and only managed to get 200 downloads for the entire weekend. No reviews. No extra sales that I know of.

This time I managed to use Author Marketing Club to my advantage
and posted Twilight Tales to every freebie site I could. Well, I at least submitted it. I know at least one of them actually ran it, no idea if others did. Most of them do not tell you whether or not they run your book. I had to go snoop in order to find the one that did. I do not think anyone ran an advert for my book the first time.

This time I gave away more than 1000 books.

The results of all the give always: ranking #1 in two categories. I managed a screen capture of the two. In the third category it ranked as high as #2, but I did not manage to get a screen shot of that.

Only time will tell if this gives me any actual sales to books, or reviews. Right now all I got was a little visibility in a couple sub genre charts. The nicest one I saw was #10 on the Horror page. Very visible for anyone looking for Horror. Did it make a difference? Not sure yet, but I will definitely let you know in a few weeks.

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Also, if you’d like to get Twilight Tales it is still free until midnight.

Small Bites 1 cover

Three flash fiction stories. “Beware the Werewolf”, “Chimera” and “Griffins Flight”

Three flash fiction stories. “Beware the Werewolf”, “Chimera” and “Griffins Flight”

I just finished “Chimera”, the third story in Small Bites.

Now it’s off to be edited so that I can put the first of the books up.

There will be four of them, each for .99 cents, each with three really short stories. Then I will do the full “Small Bites” with all twelves stories as one $3.99 offering, and raise the singles to $2.99.

In other news, “Osiren’s Tears” is well on it’s way to completion. I am in the process of finding an editor. It is almost 30,000 words long and definitely needs an edit before I put it out.

This will be my first full length book out. It will be at $3.99 I think. But once I have it up I will also start offering some KDP select free books, so look for that soon as well.