That "New Year" Smell

Here we are again. Another new year.

I know, we're a few weeks in already, but I had to give it time to settle in. Plus we've been cold and snowy and I haven't been the most motivated person ever.

Even though I'm not a fan of resolutions, per se, January is exciting in the way that a new school year was always exciting (except now that I'm grown I can buy new school supplies whenever I please).

New beginnings. New plans. All that.

Main plans this year are for the business, of course. (The other kind fluctuate and, since they generally involve other people, I don't share as much of them here). 

2025 was a landmark year, though. For the first time, I matched my old law firm salary with book sales. That total doesn't count what went back out in expenses: ads, conferences, apps, supplies, etc., but even so, my long-range goal when I started self-publishing was to make as much money from the squirrelly contents of my brain as I did when sitting and mindlessly typing for lawyers. And I did it.

Next year (this year) will be expanding the empire. I've acquired an agent to help me with foreign rights / translations, because I don't have the bandwidth to deal with that and if she can sell them, she's welcome to her 15%. It's money from something I've already created.

I'm also trying to sell audio rights to the Tudor books. I sold audio rights to Tantor Audio for the first Ava & Claire trilogy and they're coming out December-February. I'd love to get proper British accents for the Tudor books - and to not be personally involved in the editing and mastering process. Doing the Christmas novella as an audio reminded me just how much I don't love that process.

One of my goals for this year is to get my books into more libraries. Amazon KDP has now permitted authors with ebooks in Kindle Unlimited to also offer their ebooks to libraries, and I've always had my print books (paperbacks) available for order. Now I'll be able to offer audio, as well, and the very next project up is to start rendering the Tudor books into large print. Libraries love large print, and as a person with Very Bad Vision myself, if I can't have it in digital format, I'd love a large print.

I haven't made a financial goal for this year. This year it's really about expanding what I already have into new and different places, and growth takes time and doesn't always bring in results right away. But  like the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next-best time is today. I'm using the same theory with my business.

What about you? Are you a library person? What are your feelings about audiobooks and large print? Worthwhile? Would you ask your library to order them?

The Wall

The final hang

We have a gallery in town that has a new show every month. A lot of it is glass, as the gallery owner is a stained glass artist. 

In november, he had a show with an artist, Trebs Thompson, who worked with glass, but also with all sorts of found objects. I really loved her work, but the piece that my husband and I liked best got sold at the opening before we could make an offer on it.

At the opening, the artist asked for us to bring odds and ends to contribute to the making of a new piece, which would be raffled off to make money for the local glass guild. Everybody brought goodies - bottles and jewelry and little plastic things and Christmas ornaments - and she took them with her until the second reception, where the peace was unveiled. 

I really liked it, although not as much as the first piece. I had a vision of where the first piece would go, you see; it was also portrait and not landscape, so I know exactly where it would fit. Something horizontal would require an entire rehang of the living room wall and I wasn't up for that. 

Wall designed in photo editor

I tried to buy raffle tickets that night, but they didn't take credit or venmo and I didn't have cash. I popped back in the day of the raffle pick, bought a ticket, and watched as the gallery owner dumped all the tickets out and put them in a big bowl for later. 

I might have been the last ticket, but I won. 

Thus necessitating an entire rehang of the living room wall. I took everything down at the beginning of the holiday break, because my husband is home for 2 weeks and would have time to put in the bolts required to hang the piece (the art wall is also the brick firewall, and almost impermeable). 

He went back to work on January 5th, and the wall was still untouched. He continued that way until I threatened to bring a friend over with a bigger drill, and then it happened. 

After that piece went up, I was able to rehang everything else I wanted to add to the wall, because in those two weeks of impatience, I photographed everything, including the bare wall, and put it all together in my photo editing program so that I knew where everything was going to go. 

Obviously I love a busy wall. I'm really happy with this, and the pops of red are much more consistently colored in person, rather than in the photo.

I won!

I leave you with a close up of the raffle piece. The vintage jewelry flowers at the bottom make me so happy. The sun at the top is an exploded glass Christmas ornament. 

We know I like to upcycle, but this is extreme even for me. I love it.

Songbird and Silence

Two things can be true: Songbird has a Bookbub Featured Deal, which means that the ebook is free on Amazon on Thursday, January 8, and I am currently silent because I have had the world's weirdest cold, with one symptom per day. 

Last Friday, I had a scratchy throat. On Saturday, my ears hurt. By Sunday I was sneezing. Monday I coughed. Tuesday, I woke up with no voice at all. By noon, I could squeak. By dinnertime, I was Kathleen Turner.

I do not naturally sound like Kathleen Turner.

But anyway, I'm improving and by not talking I have a lot more time to spend at my desk and the new book is coming along and also

Songbird is free, if you haven't read it. If you have, recommend it to a friend.

Happy new year, all. May it be better than the last one.

Story, Told

Well, that was a fun little task I set myself.

All 9 episodes of Home for Christmas are not only on Facebook, but on my YouTube channel, as well, should you care to indulge.

I wish I had more to say, but the holidays have sucked the life out of me (in a mostly good way). Back soon.

In the meantime, Happy New Year.

O Christmas Tree

So my office decided on a team-building exercise for the holidays this year. Which was kind of annoying, because we like each other, and people who like each other generally don't need team-building exercises.

But whatever. 

It was Christmas-themed. 

It was a contest.

It was a tree decorating contest. 

And it got serious.

Each department got to decorate a tree with items that "meant" their department. Admin, Codes, Library, Parks, Public Works. 

There was some interesting creativity there.

I'm also sharing the vote link, because hey, if voting for one of our trees makes your holiday brighter, have at it. (I'm admin, but I won't hold it against you if you vote for some other department - though I also helped with the tiny, Charlie Brown tree from Parks. At least it's a live tree; the rest are plastic).

Parks & Recreation

Administration

Codes & Permits

Library

Public Works/Sanitation

Let me tell you a story

You are cordially invited to a reading

of Home for Christmas.

Posted to my author Facebook page, 

every day from December 18

to December 26, at 7:00 p.m.

 

One last order

I was almost done. One final custom order and then I could stop for the season. 

Except I kept putting it off. The customer came to my office to drop off the clothes she wanted me to use for the bears - some shirts and pajama pants that belonged to her father - and it was an entire trash bag full.

I put off looking until Friday and then I realized that there were only a few usable items in the whole lot and whizzed through and picked them out - three shirts and two pair of pajama pants. The man in question was a sizable gentleman (6XL) and the images on all the shirts were scaled up, so the only ones I could actually use on a bear body were the fire department embroideries from two shirts.

Hi-viz yellow and orange wouldn't have been my first choice, but they worked, and they'll certainly be recognizable to the family members. 

Once I decided on the fabrics, I contacted the customer and made arrangements for her to pick up yesterday, which gave me Friday night to cut and Saturday - Monday to assemble, stuff and do the finish work. I actually finished Sunday evening and took them to work on Monday, to get ahead of myself.

NOW I can relax.