2025: Year in Review
Introduction
What a year it has been. I thought I would do a breakdown of what I’ve written and published in this time, my highlights, and anything I’m carrying over into 2026.
First up – my goals for the year. I genuinely can’t recall what goals I set myself at the start of the year, but I always go off piste with those anyway. Much better to set none at the start, look back at the year, and retrospectively tick off all the things I’ve actually done and call it a day. I did have a lot of intentions that I developed over the course of the whole year, or at some point thought “ooh, it would be cool if…”, so I’m going to use those as my ‘2025 goals’ for the purpose of this post.
I wanted to publish my Gothicka Fantasia novel, and I also wanted to increase my earnings, and get more website traffic. I really wanted to join the Horror Writers’ Association (HWA), finally, as I’ve been putting that off for ages and I finally qualify as an Affiliate Writer.
I also wanted to sell a short story to a magazine or anthology, build a presence on Mastodon and Pillowfort, buy a bundle of ISBNs at last, and attend an in-person con.
I haven’t bought the ISBNs, I haven’t properly started engaging on Mastodon/Pillowfort, (I also have a Lemon8 account but I don’t have a consistent brand to build there), and I didn’t attend a con, but I have ticked off everything else.
I did achieve a bonus one, though: I also joined Diviniation Hollow as a monthly contributor, so expect more TV/Film/Book/Podcast content from me in the future. I can’t wait to share my faves with you all. So that’s a bonus that I didn’t expect to come out of this year!
Published Work
I’ve put out a lot this year, I would say! My 12 months of rewards for my Ko-Fi members can be downloaded in one handy eBook, so all the story arcs and individual extracts, standalones, etc, can be read in order and kept forever.
2025 Ko-Fi Letters – free to Seekers and Family members, £1.50 to Tip Jar members. ~29K words. That’s a lot! You can download this as either an ePub or a PDF, both files are included in the download.
You can keep updated with all my bonus content and Ko-Fi posts here.
As for other work, here it is in chronological order:
Feb 2025: I published my Dark Gothic Fantasy, Yelen & Yelena. This is a ~98K novel that was voted a 5* read for the Romancing the Gothic book club, and reached 1000 downloads on Bookfunnel.
She’s up for the Indie Ink Awards this year! Voting open until 31st Dec for:
Aromantic rep, LGBTQ rep, Best setting, Best friendship, Best audio narration.
Mar 2025: I edited and collated the Ricky Porter stories written for Ko-Fi members, and released a collection of them with The Sussex Fretsaw Massacre as an eBook. This new collection is called The Sussex Fretsaw Massacre & Other Stories.
Sep 2025: I entered a 200 word flash fic (Katy Porter themed) into a prompt competiton by Black Hare Press, and it was accepted. It is now in the flash fic anthology, Alone, entitled, “The Lonely Girl Dreams of the Dead”.
Oct 2025: my short story, “Along the Xylophone Road”, was accepted into the Black Hare Press body horror anthology, Occupying Bodies.
My story is a standalone short in 1st person POV, about a revenant dragging its rotting body along train tracks in the desert, seeking a long-distance lover whom they only knew online before they died, and never got to meet in person.
Nov 2025: I edited the 4-part dark fantasy short written for October’s #AScareADay, and turned it into a coherent dark fantasy short story, called Bone Puppets.
It is currently only available to buy as an eBook on my 3 personal shop platforms:
Ko-Fi, cmrosens.com/shop and Itch.io.
Writing Progress
Abysmal. Well – to me, anyway. But that’s not really true. I wrote aout 29K words for my Ko-Fi members, which is the length of a decent novella. Some of this was extracts from WIPs and so on, but that’s all fine, it counts.
Let’s look at my WIPs… you will notice that most were paused in June 2025, which correlates with the work issues escalating. I’ve spent the rest of the year in a state of burn out.
Pagham-on-Sea
Feed is still in progress, but I’ve cracked the midpoint now. I want to ensure that this one can be read as an entry point to the series, so I’m spending a lot of time going over the opening chapters. It’s currently at 57.9K words. These novels tend to be ~99K words. I don’t really want this one to be longer, so we’ll see what happens in edits and revisions. This is the only WIP I’ve picked back up after the long hiatus, and the one that is currently an active draft.
Gothick Fantasia
As Below, So Above is my Phantom of the Opera (but alchemists) X m/m Rapunzel, in an alchemist tower, structured along alchemical process lines. I’m a bit worried it’s nudging into the realms of Eggers’ The Lighthouse as well. I seem to have abandoned a draft at 9.3K words in June 2025, but I have worked out how to make this work better. It now has a lot of random experimental writing, and different ideas, and I think feels stronger to me as a piece. The worldbuilding is working very well. I’m tempted to remove the framed narrative and just write the initial idea.
Cold as Snow, White as Bone is the Wild Hunt X Snow White X Fall of the House of Usher, and another one I abandoned, this time in April 2025. I have a few different documents of experimental writing and potential outlines, and 2.2K words of a dedicated draft that I want to return to.
Contemporary Cosy Suspense
Best Friends Bury Bodies took up most of my year. I now have a complete draft of this novel, and it went through an alpha/early beta reader stage, which has convinced me to make some more major changes. I abandoned this project in 2023, and picked it back up in February 2025. It’s now on version 7.0, and the latest complete version (6.0) is 80K words. I last opened version 7.0 (the post-beta rewrite) in June 2025. I want the rewrite to be more in the region of 70K words, and to lean into the recovery journey of my MMC more, and also to strike a better balance with the Midsomer Murders influences.
Three for a Girl is the sequel to Birds of a Feather that will introduce the ‘Katy’ character to the AU, and I worked on this a little bit in March 2025. It’s still percolating. It’s also a bit of a murder thriller, with AU Carrie & Ricky taking a holiday in Scotland only to discover a murder on their campsite, and a missing teen girl. Katy in the AU will not be related to Ricky or Wes, and spells her name Katie, and will get very annoyed when people get the spelling wrong. There is no active draft for this, but there are mutiple documents of experimental writing.
Historical Fiction – Supernatural
Untitled WIP – 2.1K words of an occult adventure in Victorian London. Inspired by Arthur Machen’s The Three Imposters and Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence stories. The idea is a trio of misfits, each with their own backstory and lowkey psychic ability, are hired by shadowy clients to steal/retrieve/acquire various items of interest. They have just completed one such heist, and are having supper together in private. They each regale the others with their own tales, as each one has done a different thing, and spun their victim(s) various ghostly yarns to get them to hand over the item, or to gain their trust long enough to access what they’re after. So it’s a series of nested stories, with the supper as a framing narrative. I don’t know if I’ll finish this.
I haven’t worked on anything else this year, but see above for what I published!
Indie Author Earnings
I haven’t done a round-up of earnings before, but I’m seeing so many people in my timelines right now saying they want to take the self-publishing plunge, so I thought this might be of interest. If not, I’ve got some website stats further on, so just scroll on down!
This year is the first year I have earned, in total over 12 months, just under one month’s salary at my day job.
This is my first year of publishing for comparison, where the only book I had was THE CROWS (first edition). That Ko-Fi income in October probably came from a workshop or talk I did, not from selling the book. I hadn’t set up a Ko-Fi shop at that point.
2020AmazonDraft2DigitalSmashwordsOtherAdsProfitKo-Fi TipsRelease-January£33.89£3.86£12.07£25.68February£11.32£2.31£1.92£1.04£14.51March£12.83£3.03£32.00-£16.14April£3.55£5.44£14.00-£5.01May£11.56£5.83£17.39June£25.46£2.31£27.77July£14.30£1.44£1.73£22.00-£4.53August£13.29£1.33£14.62Sept£14.79£1.69£13.10Oct£12.77£104.77£92.00Nov£0.00Dec£11.78£11.78Totals£257.54£7.39£17.95£3.86
-£ 82.80£203.94£92.00[Totals]
£282.88That whole year, minus the ad costs, and including the workshop/talk I did, my profit was £203.94.
Note that in that first year I spent £82.80 on ads (Facebook and Instagram), which came out of my total profit, and some months I made a loss rather than a profit.
Was it worth it? I think so. People started to recognise the cover and the book, and in 2021 when Thirteenth was released, I made over £150 in that one month (April). With 2 books out in 2021, and with plugging them consistently and building my social media platforms, sending out review copies, and pitching them to book clubs, I jumped from making £203 in one year to making just over £760 in one year.
Amazon was my primary market, where I earned the most money each month, despite being wide distribution. Draft2Digital covers all other eBook platforms, except Amazon and Smashwords. Nov 2020 I made absolutely no sales at all, not anywhere.
I have steadily increased this annual total each year, and this now includes royalties from Canelo, which I receive twice yearly.
Amazon has now been completely outstripped by my own Ko-Fi shop, with the new king of income being my monthly subscriptions, followed by my own shops – Ko-Fi, Itch, and my website here. Until the whole Itch debacle, I was earning a decent amount from bundles there.
This year, I’ve noticed an interesting trend across the other eBook platforms. Amazon was only biggest income in February (Yelen & Yelena‘s release month). This was the only month I earned over £50 there. May was the second biggest Amazon month, earning £21.71 (with currency conversion). All other months I have earned £12 or less, and usually a lot less. Still, I haven’t had a month on there where I’ve sold nothing.
Draft2Digital, on the other hand, encompasses all the library subs like Hoopla, OneDrive, and so on, and all the alternative eBook sites, like Kobo, Thalia, Smashwords (since they merged with D2D), etc. I’ve also gone wide with their print option, so there’s an alternative to Amazon for print as well, but this is more expensive and D2D take more of a fee. I also can’t edit my printed book very often, and they charge for changes once your free tokens are used up.
While you can see I didn’t even crack £30 all year in 2020 with D2D, Smashwords, and being hosted on a friend’s shop combined, this year I made £82.46 there, vs Amazon’s £156.69. So it’s catching up, but Amazon remains consistently more.
In the chart below, there has never been a month that has hit $25USD. In October, I earned nothing.
Draft2Digital Royalties 2025 – Screencap taken at 20 units sold
Amazon earned me £156.69 in total this year, which I think is also due to Amazon boycotts. I sold 74 books with them this year. You can see the dips, and that from July, where I sold 4 books and hit a peak of £12.29 in royalties, my royalties then declined with the sales, so that I never earned over £10 after September, and had a few months of earning £2-3, and December it’s now £1.72 for the month, for the sale of 1 book.
Amazon chart showing units sold per month
In terms of selling units, Draft2Digital is benefitting from the Smashwords End of Year Sale right now, where my books are 50% off, and one is free. I’ve sold 21 books there this month, but as you see from the royalties chart above, I’ve earned about £5.33 after currency conversion.
Sales figures aren’t useful for judging income if what’s selling is free, or you are only getting a few pennies for each unit from a library subscription. What you’re hoping for here is that people will actually read it, like it, and come back for more later. Perhaps mention you to someone else, who will try your stuff out, and tell another friend. It’s all about word of mouth as much as it’s about your own marketing! But there are no guarantees.
What’s fascinating is that as Amazon and D2D combined are not making me a lot of money, my own shops are.
People prefer to support me directly, where I get all of the royalties minus the PayPal/Stripe fee only, rather than 10-70% of the royalties depending on if it’s print or eBook, and then minus the fee of sending that money on to me.
In fact, I earned over £620 more in my shops and Ko-Fi membership income combined, than I did with Amazon and D2D combined. If I had just stuck with those major platforms, I would still be earning about £200 a year.
Takeaways for Indies
So, if there’s a takeaway from these figures and stats, or anything to be gleaned, I’d say it’s this:
Monthly memberships will provide a more regular income stream, so seriously think about what you can offer – make it work for you. Don’t try and set this up in your first year unless you’ve had a lot of success; float the idea early on, push it and gauge interest, research platforms, and launch it like you would another project. If it’s a slow build, so be it. A regular £10-20 a month is still money you didn’t have before, and it adds up over time.
Some ideas:
– Serialised first drafts, followed by ARCs of the edited final copy
– Monthly flash fiction/micro-fiction (this can also be a good monthly writing exercise for you!)
– Extracts from your WIPs and a group to discuss them, hype them up, etc.
– Guaranteed ARC acceptance where you send author proof copies directly to the readers in exchange for hype and reviews
– Member-only giveaways of signed copies/book boxes
– Free downloads of all your eBooks/massive discounts
– Access to your private Discord
– Exclusive Q&A sessions
– Live streams/recordings of your work, read by the author
– Post/mail out things; postcards, character art prints (crediting the artist), birthday cards, holiday cards, handwritten notes, printed copies of your micro fiction.
~Be prepared to be in the marketing game for the long haul. Don’t give up on a book because you don’t sell much in the first few months or first year. Send out review copies, spend money on ad campaigns if you have the money to spend (I capped mine at £10 per campaign). Pitch the book to book clubs. Offer discounts and free copies for book clubs and reviewers. Keep doing that. It can really help in the longrun.
~Set up ways for your audience to directly support you, where you can control the prices, and you can bundle items together for sales. Use something like Universal Book Link or Bookfunnel landing pages to aggregate all the links, allowing your customers to choose where to buy. Highlight your own shops each time.
~Don’t be afraid to hybridise. Self-publishing is not a barrier to traditional publishing, and you can approach small presses as well with a portfolio of work and a current audience ready-made. If you can get royalties coming in, that will help your income. Equally, unless you have a specific contract clause with your agent or publisher telling you otherwise, there’s no reason not to self-publish something, and see how that goes, if you can’t sell it. There are places that do take reprints, so you can get it out another way and at another time. Future Goals
My twice annual Canelo royalties have come in very handy as well. These are pretty modest, low 3-figures, and fluctuate, but they’re a nice little bonus. I’ve been giving these to charity for the past 2 royalty periods, but what I will do with the next one is put it towards buying a batch of ISBNs so that I can release print books via IngramSpark.
In the UK, you can only buy ISBNs from Nielsen’s, and it’s £387 for a bundle of 100 ISBNs. Once I have my own, rather than the free ones from D2D/Amazon, and release via Ingram, my books will no longer be “firm sale” (no returns) and bookshops will be able to buy stock more easily.
I will then keep back my next royalty payment to cover the cost of any stock returns, as the author covers the cost of this if books are returned by the vendor.
It’s looking possible that I’ll make a full month’s salary across a whole year next year, but it doesn’t matter if I don’t, as I have a day-job that pays enough to cover my bills and some of my author expenses, and I’m not doing this for the income stream.
Website Stats: 2025 in Review
I imagine, if I had been thinking strategically, that gaining more website traffic and boosting my profile would have been a goal. I think we can tick this off.
Including all the author spotlight interviews and podcast transcripts I’ve edited and posted for 2025, I posted a total of 144 posts, not including this one, and 233.5K words – two chunky epic fantasy novels worth of writing.
My most popular months were January, September, October and November. October was the best month for views this year, most likely because I posted #AScareADay posts every day!
This year, my website had 29.9K visitors, and 39.2K views.
My most-read article was Rapunzel in Cinema 1897-2024, with 6.6K views, followed by Red Riding Hood in Films 1901-2024, with 3.1K views, and Werewolf Films 1910-1949, with 1.9K views.
Last year, my site had 17.6K visitors, and 23.4K views, so you can see that’s a massive jump this year! I’ve been making more effort with SEO metrics, but I think my some of my articles have been linked as sources in Reddit threads, Wikipedia articles, and elsewhere, and that has really helped to drive traffic back to me.
My top-read podcast interview transcripts were:
Caitlin Starling – The Death of Jane Lawrence, Starving Saints
S.T. Gibson – Dowry of Blood
Jackson P. Brown – The Reaper
My top-read author spotlights were:
Nat Weaver – Mercedes Masterson series (modern noir)
Arden Powell – Flesh & Bone (m/m Canadian Western novella)
Lem McMillan – multi-genre Wattpad author of free-to-read SFF
This year, my author spotlight series was a very popular one – I need to work on the SEO scores of these posts to try and drive more traffic to each one, but it would also help for readers to reblog, like, share, comment, and boost these authors any way you can. If you’ve been a contributor to the series, I would encourage you to boost your own interview, but also to boost your colleagues as well!
Let me know if there is any content you would like to see more of, and I’ll give that a go for 2026!
CONTENT TO COME:
2026 Author Spotlights – posted on Wednesdays each month, giving authors of all genres a boost by spotlighting their work in a short interview. A spotlight is not a recommendation, endorsement, or a review.
General Updates – posted as and when I have any updates, but always on Mondays/Fridays. These will also go in my Monthly Newsletter.
Reviews of TV/Film/Books – posted Mondays/Fridays, which may be cross-posted from Divination Hollow Reviews, where I’m now a monthly contributor.
Monthly Media Round-Up – does what it says on the tin; every month, I’ll post a round-up of the media I’ve consumed, with some brief thoughts. I may end up just posting my personal highlights of the month, as I get through A LOT of films sometimes. I don’t want these posts to get too long!
See you all next year!
#AScareADay #authorUpdate #indieAuthorLife #yearInReview
Patrick W. Marsh
cmrosens
Ryder Tombs
vagabond
Michael Shotter
C. M. Rosens