What in 2025 are you looking forward to?

And this year - it's not having a book out!

Jan 06, 2025

New year is a time for looking forward, but it can help to also look backwards to see where you started from and how far you might have come.

So I’m busy celebrating that exactly a year ago, at this time I was celebrating publication of my sixth book The Floating Witch Mystery.

Looking back on that makes me feel very proud. But 2025 will be the first year since 2018 when I will not have a book out. I’m starting this new year with a feeling of not so much at looking how far I’ve come, but that I seem to slipped backwards?!

Not great!! But I always find a way to be positive! So I’d like to share some thoughts today on how I’m spinning what looks like a bad position and a setback for 2025 into hopefully being quite the opposite!

Seeing my books in bookshops and being asked to sign them has been one of the real delights I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy since first getting published in 2018.

The truth is that my writing journey story happens to many authors as it’s a well-trodden path. The reception for my first book was great, everyone was excited by my debut. I felt like a huge success and that I had something to build a writing career on.

By Book Six sales (by way of books 3, 4 and 5 coming out at various stages of a pandemic) have not been great. I see myself as an experienced writer who gets better with each book, but I am a long way from my debut and not an author people get excited about any more. I love my books. But this is what happens to most writers.

Should I keep going? How would I keep going?

What would my life look like without writing in it?

I’d had a ball, but was my writing life over? Should I give up and try something different?

Or . . . try a different approach?

Carrying on the same was simply not working.

Last year I started to move my writing so it wasn’t so central to my life, taking on extra, different work and breaking out of the routine.

I have also been questioning everything and trying lots of new things and asking myself searching questions, which has led to one answer: I love writing and I want to find a way to carry on. So I need to rethink how I can possibly make this work now my shiny debut days are long behind me.

This last year I haven’t had a new publishing contract, but I’ve proven to myself that I can make other work fit in and it does take the pressure off the worrying many writers do around earning so little from all the hours spent writing.

One thing I am looking forward to in 2025

So I start 2025 with no book deal, not even a publisher and no agent, which should be very scary.

But strangely, I don’t feel doomed! I do feel like it is just a new chapter and a fresh start. I want to move forward, and I may not be a fresh and exciting debut, but I am equipped with everything I’ve learned about publishing in the last ten years. A few more grey hairs and hopefully a bit more wisdom.

I’m in a very different place to when, back in 2015, I wrote the book that eventually got me a publisher and agent. It feels a crazy long time ago. I have changed so much, from an inexperienced writer who was terrified at the thought of doing publicity or public speaking, or going into shops and signing copies of my books or even meeting readers.

Now I’m more confident in everything: my writing, I’m invited to speak regularly, I’ve talked to some huge audiences. These things, along with every getting published in the first place, have been great achievements for me. Taking it all together - have I got something I can build on?

Publishing looks very different

When I was first published in 2018 I was glad to get a trad deal where I could concentrate on writing the books, and my publisher was responsible for the jacket design, distribution etc.

I dreaded the thought of doing too much myself. I did not feel I had or could acquire the skills, but looking back actually, I think I have done better than I thought along the way.

Instead I spent a lot of time (too long) waiting . . . on everything. I didn’t feel an intrinsic part of that publishing process. I don’t necessarily feel decisions made were the best for me, but I felt I had no power and no real say. I felt publishing ‘happened’ to me.

Maybe it is time for a change that maybe I should have made a while ago.

There is a whole new world out there

Just look at what’s happened to the people who have gone down non-trad paths, the rise of the many digital-first and self-published authors, in the last ten years.

Take the fact that the whole romantasy genre wasn’t born out of publishing, but of writers speaking directly to readers - and trad publishing has been running to catch up. New routes to market mean new ways of finding readers other than the well-trodden trad routes. It is all competitive, but sometimes you realise you haven’t given a whole new different approach a try. And some avenues do perhaps give you just a little more choice, even if there’s more risk. And there are always a few authors who manage to have a great year. I still feel that could still be me. Why not?

New approaches and opportunities

I think what has most surprised me about myself is that I feel confident enough that I am excited to try new approaches and see what other opportunities are out there.

This next step of my journey will be that I want to write new things, reach new readers in new ways, find new routes to publication and to try to have more fun doing it.

I am loving thinking about all these fresh challenges

Sometimes it really does help, even to be forced to a fearful and unwelcome break out of a routine. Sometimes it needs a shake up to not do more of the same. It makes you look at the world differently, you have to be brave rather than simply hoping that what you are doing is going to lead to where you want to be.

A change should make the world more exciting and make new opportunities less terrifying if you look at it the right way, because at least it’s a chance to do things differently and to grow. Who wants more of the same? This year I’m going to do things differently.

I will be keeping my newsletter posted about how I go!

One thing that will never change

One of the things I am definitely most looking forward to this year is reading. I always do! I think it is how much joy I get from books and reading that has always been the biggest inspiration for me to try to write my own.

One of the best bits of being an author is when a reader takes the trouble to contact you to tell you how much they love a book of yours they’ve read.

So what also will not change will be my shouting out about other wonderful books and authors I have enjoyed, because I know how much it means.

I promise I will share all those wonderful books yet to be discovered

In particular I am looking forward to the second in a brilliant new series by CL Miller.

Death on the Red Sea is at the very top of my pile of new year proofs I have been lucky enough to be sent and I cannot wait to get stuck into

With the first of her ‘Antique Hunters’ series Cara Miller nailed the cosy crime genre in an original way I really admire (and would love to do the same!). Freya Lockwood uses her antiques knowledge to solve crimes that involve great puzzles and intriguing suspects. Antiques-world skulduggery takes central place rather than a traditional murder. It’s very clever, so enjoyable and perfect to cosy up to in a chilly new year.

Looking back 2024 was a great year for me

Here is a round up of some of the wonderful book launches, festivals and events of last year. There are far too many books I enjoyed too and all my favourites I write about here.