looking back, looking ahead: 2022 in review, and what’s next in 2023

Each January, it’s always good, as an author, to reflect on what and how one did in the year that just ended, as well as anticipate and plan for the year to come. Because some of that might interest my readers (and other authors), I’ll share my experiences and expectations here.

2022: Getting Catty

Last June saw the release of my fourth novel, Stray Cats, a follow-up to 2014’s Lost Dogs. As soon as the latter had come out, people had been asking me for a sequel featuring cats, but for a long time, I had resisted. I prefer to write standalone books that tell a complete story, and I wasn’t interested in doing a retread using Find/Replace for “cats” instead of “dogs.”

But after publishing This Wasted Land in 2018, I was ready to do something different, something fun. I lighted on the idea that cats really do have nine lives, but rather than living them one after the other, as we usually think, they live them all at once, on different worlds. Stray Cats allowed me to introduce lots of new milieus and characters, as well as to revisit my other novels via crossovers.

Stray Cats is basically nine short stories in different genres: post-apocalyptic; dark fantasy/horror; traditional “swords & sorcery” fantasy; science fiction; space opera; “Weird Western;” modern-day magic realism; and even children’s picture books and superhero manga comics.

Instead of presenting the stories one after the other, I wove them together. Readers jumped from one episode in a story to an episode in another story, then to episodes in other stories, finally coming back to the first story, where it would pick up where it left off—and then would launch again into other stories.

So far, reviews for Stray Cats have been polarized: people either love it or hate it. At the time of this writing (January 4, 2023), it has a rating of 3.9 out of 5 on Amazon, with 16 favorable ratings (4- or 5-stars) and 5 unfavorable (1- or 2-stars). Over at Goodreads, it’s currently rated 3.27 out of 5, with 6 favorable and 5 unfavorable.

Which is okay by me: I knew it wasn’t going to be everyone’s bag of catnip. Some readers found the book challenging to follow (trust me, it was challenging to put it together), but most kept up. Lots of people may have been expecting it to be a straight-up sequel to Lost Dogs, despite my numerous social media posts to the contrary. Or maybe they felt it just doesn’t have the emotional weight, the gravitas, that Lost Dogs or This Wasted Land have. All fair criticisms.

Pimmi Makes a Friend, and Here Comes a Kangal

As I mentioned, one part of Stray Cats is done as a children’s picture book, complete with adorable black-and-white illustrations by Alyssa Scalia, an emerging artist in the same exurb town where I live. It was an easy lift to take that story, commission Alyssa to colorize the art, and release it as a standalone kids’ book.

Pimmi Makes a Friend is about a little cat with a big problem: she’s scared to go outside! Released in August 2022, Pimmi scratched the creative itch I sometimes get to do stories for children. In 2015, my friend Patrick Eibel and I published Our Wild Place, showing young kids—and reminding their parents of—the joys of playing outside.

The issue with me publishing children’s books is that I can’t draw worth beans (Our Wild Place uses photos run through filters to make them look like paintings). Alyssa knocked it out of the park with her art for Stray Cats and Pimmi, so I hired her for my next project, How the Kangal Got Her Mask.

I wanted to have Kangal out for the Christmas sales, and Alyssa rose to the challenge, doing all the art in about two months; we released it in mid-November. Alyssa’s gorgeous, full-color artwork is wholly different than what she had done before. Told in the style of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, the book concerns a naughty dog who gets into a literal sticky situation that gets the best of her—or does it?

Killing It at Christmas

As one might expect, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year for selling books in person, at craft fairs and vendor markets. This year was my best yet. Between November 1 and December 25, I participated in seven events in my semi-rural county, signing 145 books. Gross sales were $2,220, with a net of $1,245 after paying for book copies and vendor fees.

In-person sales can be a crapshoot. Two of the seven events were duds, and one underperformed because of poor weather. Nevertheless, I did much better than in 2021, where at six events, I sold 88 books, with gross sales of $1,595 and net sales of $860.

A huge part of Xmas 2022’s success was that I had three new titles. I could have sold even more books if it had not been for two factors. One was that I didn’t do any in-person selling on Black Friday weekend, because I was out of town, with family.

The other factor was that I didn’t sign up for bigger events with more potential attendance, in Annapolis, Washington DC, or Baltimore, near where I live. A lot of those events were either on the same day as events I had already signed up and paid for, or had high vendor fees, or both.

Though I did not do any advertising in November and December, I nevertheless sold 70 books online (52 of them print versions), and accumulated 9,305 reads through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service, bringing in another $320 with zero effort on my part.

2022 Sales: Lost Dogs Still the Big Dog

As has been the case for many years, Lost Dogs continued to be my strongest seller, though Stray Cats did well, too. Earlier in 2022, I attended Awesome Con in Washington DC, and had great sales there. All told in 2022, I sold 1,185 copies (print and e-versions), and had 391,289 KU reads, with gross receipts of about $9,660.

If you think that those numbers are unimpressive, well…you’re not wrong. But bear in mind that I’m a no-name part-time author, and that most of my in-person sales were made on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a rural area with fewer venues and opportunities to sell.

For the past few years, I had been successfully advertising on Facebook, but as 2022 went on, my ads became less and less effective, despite my efforts to change things up and expand my target audiences. Nothing was working, even my ads for Lost Dogs, which used to just print money. Midway through October, I stopped advertising on Facebook, and I’m unlikely to start again. 

2023: What’s Coming

Instead of Facebook, I’m moving to TikTok, which hasn’t generated a lot of interest, but at least it’s free. Other authors have had great success using TikTok, so I’ll stick with it. Come follow me there, but the chances of you catching me lip-syncing or dancing are lower than the chances of the Houston Texans winning Super Bowl LVII. Just so we’re clear on that.

Early in March, I’ll be releasing the second edition of my nonfiction guide for writers, Hand-Selling Books: Making Money and Winning Fans. It’ll have more info, particularly about selling books at large events, and it will have a new, more appealing cover (because people really do judge books by their covers). Also in March, I’ll be teaching a seminar on hand-selling books at the Bay To Ocean Writers Conference, held by the Eastern Shore Writers Association.

(If you’re a writer who’s interested in attending any of the great seminars that BTO offers, follow this link to learn more)

While I’ll still do some local events (notably a cat-rescue fundraiser in February), I’m going to travel for most of my in-person sales. Galactic Con has two events, one in Delaware in April, one in central Maryland in June. Fright Reads, in September, is also across the Bay Bridge. I hope to get back to Awesome Con in DC, and to Galaxy Con in Richmond, Virginia.

As for writing…. I busted my hump to get Stray Cats done by June of last year, and other than blog pieces, I haven’t done anything since (I had already written the text for the Pimmi and Kangal picture books long before they came out).

I kicked around the idea of doing a time-travel novel set in the early 1980’s (working title: Ben There, Dunn That), but everything I’ve come up with so far sounds too much like Stranger Things. I’m still going to do the book, but I’m not ready yet to tackle it. Some books take time before everything comes together: it was 30 years between when I first started on a certain story, and when I published it as This Wasted Land.

For 2023, I’m going to go back to Stray Cats and pick up where the fantasy story “An Ancient World” left off, with two young adventurers, nicknamed “the Scorpion” and “the Wolf,” determined to make their fortunes amidst the dangerous warrens of the squalid city of Northarbor.

I don’t have a title for the book yet, but I have plenty of ideas on what’s going to happen. If you like old-school heroic fantasy, you’ll definitely love this novel. I hope it have it out by the end of the year.

That’s All For Now

If you bought any of my books in 2022, or even if this post is the first thing of mine you’ve ever read, I thank you very much. I’ll post updates on what I’m doing in 2023 here on this blog and on my Facebook page. Follow me there and check back here often. 2022 was a great year, and I expect 2023 to be even better!      

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Kenton Kilgore writes killer SF/F for young adults and adults who are still young. Follow Kenton on Facebook for frequent posts on sci-fi, fantasy, and other speculative fiction. You can also catch him on Instagram.