A Retrospective on 2018
2018 was a mixed year for me.
Unlike 2016 and 2017–which were both great years for my career–2018 was much more of a mixed bag. Lots of good things happened to me this year, but I can’t deny the bad parts happened as well.
In terms of good things, I released the Dimension Heroes trilogy back in the summer, crossing over two of my most popular series, The Superhero’s Son and Minimum Wage Sidekick, to great reception, giving me my best months (July and August) of the year in terms of sales, Kindle Unlimited page reads, and income.
I’ve engaged with my newsletter more and feel like I have a better understanding who my audience is and what they like than I did in prior years, which will definitely help me going into 2019 and beyond.
In terms of bad things, though, 2018 was the first year where I am on track to make less than I did in the previous year. Every year since I started publishing, I’ve made more than the year before. 2018 is the first year to break that trend. Not a major downward spiral–I’m still making more money than many writers–but it is noticeable and worrisome.
As for why that happened, there are probably a variety of reasons. I could blame it on Amazon making some changes to their algorithms back in September, which caused my sales to tank that even new releases haven’t been able to fix. Or I could blame how paid Amazon ads appear to matter more and more than the alsoboughts and other forms of free advertising on the store, ads that are becoming increasingly more expensive to pay for.
All of that affected me, sure (and other writers I know), but frankly I think most of the reasons why 2018 was worse than 2017 is due to my own mistakes. In particular, I did not ‘stay in my line,’ that is to say, I divided my attention between two genres and series, which seriously hurt my income this year.
In 2018, I experimented with writing urban fantasy under a pen name. I did this because I wanted to try to diversify my income somewhat so I wouldn’t become too reliant on my superhero books, but I didn’t want to drop my superhero books entirely, so I decided to alternate between writing one superhero novel and one urban fantasy novel.
That didn’t work. I discovered that I can’t alternate between different series in different genres like that without hurting both series. I discovered that by jumping between series, it made it harder for me to keep both of them straight and I felt like I had to rush a lot. I suspect this hurt the quality of both series, making them not nearly as good as they could have been if I had focused on one series alone.
So I’m dropping the urban fantasy in order to focus exclusively on my superhero books going into 2019. I am planning to do other things, but this is my main focus in the New Year, to stay in my lane (as we writers call it) and build up my superhero audience even further than I already have.
As well, I am going to start branching out to other non-Amazon retailers starting in February with The Superhero’s Test. This might explode in my face, but it’s worth doing, because Amazon’s recent algo changes just confirmed to me why having all your eggs in one basket isn’t usually a good thing.
Overall, as I said, 2018 was a mixed bag. Some good stuff happened, but some bad stuff happened as well, and some of that bad stuff nonetheless taught me some important lessons that I think will help me to build a stronger career that will last well into the future. And I hope you can join me as I do it.
Thanks,
Lucas Flint
