Hello Everyone!

I’ve gotten out of the habit of doing status updates. At one point I tried to do a mini update at the end of each mailing list email, but that led to the emails getting awfully cluttered, so I’m going to try and revert back to doing semi-regular updates on my website and then I’ll just link to them from my mailing list emails for those who might have missed the update on my site.

After spending most of the summer editing and working on various marketing initiatives, it feels good to be writing again. I resumed work on The Warlord (the third A Broken World novel) (which saw 50k words written in April before I had to set it to one side) in October, and finished it up in the first week of November. It weighed in at more than 95k words so it was quite the undertaking.

November (and nearly the first 2/3rds of December) was spent working on The Founder, which ended up at more than 118k words. It’s ironic that I wondered at one point in November if there was enough material in this section of the story to justify its own book. It turns out there was a ton more taking place in this section of the saga than I’d realized.

For those of you who have been paying especially close attention, you’ll notice that I didn’t originally list The Warlord as being one of the titles for the A Broken World books. It turns out that the story ended up growing somewhere between the start and the end of Book 3, so I ended up splitting The Founder into two books, and now A Broken World will end up being 5 books rather than 4.

On the writing front, the plan is to write The Desolation (A Broken World book 5) in January so that I can conclude Skye’s story, and then I’ll go back to The Compelled Chronicles and write the final two books in that trilogy. At least I hope it’s a trilogy—I haven’t really figured out what happens after Stone Heart other than some really broad sweeping plot points.

If I’m right and there are only two more books left, then I should finish working on the rough drafts sometime in April, at which point I’m planning on picking the Reflections and Dark Reflections books back up. I suspect that I’ll end up spending the better part of a month reviewing everything that’s happened in the story so far and then get started writing with the intent of finishing up the series—however many books that ends up being.

On the book release front, Stone Heart will come out the day after Christmas, and will be followed by Left (Jess and Wyatt’s book) sometime in late January or early February. The Warlord should then come out in July/August of 2016, after which new books should roll out every month or two.

I’ve talked a bit about marketing this year. I don’t want to get into all of the gory details and numbers, but I’m happy to announce that 2016 was our best year yet in terms of both books sold and income. We’re still going to end up a long ways off from what I was making as an accountant, but for the first time in 3 years it’s looking like our savings account will go up a little rather than going down every month…which is a good thing because we’re expecting a new arrival in Jun!

For the first time, Katie and I will be outnumbered even when we’re both around, and a new arrival always seems to throw some wrenches in the works. It’s entirely possible that will have a knock on impact on my renewed work on the Reflections books, but maybe we’ll luck out and get a really good sleeper (or at least a baby that likes to sleep on my chest while I’m typing like Daughter #1 did.

So in short, 2015 was a somewhat disappointing year on the writing front, but a big step forward when it comes to pushing our book sales up to the point where I should be able to continue to write full time, and I want to thank each of you for your help getting us there.

The marketing had an impact (or I wouldn’t have kept doing it), but all the marketing in the world wouldn’t have gotten us there without the word of mouth from so many awesome readers. Hopefully 2016 will be so amazing that I can forgo the marketing altogether and just focus on getting new books completed and ready for all of you!

Wishing each of you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

-Dean