My first year of trying to become an author. It wasn’t a full year but I started around April this year to put some effort into finding readers and growing my platform. For the most part, I wasn’t successful.

Growing from nothing online isn’t what it used to 20 or even 10 years ago. There is censorship and shadow-banning everywhere, people are mostly on social media these days, and search engines are on the way out due to AI. Hard to tell where all that develops into.

What I do know: I enjoy writing and I’ve got lots of stories to tell. Would be great to find readers for these stories but even if I don’t it’s still fulfilling to release a new novel – which I’ve done three times this year.

Annual Reviews

I intent on writing till I die – hopefully half a century in the future, but you’ll never know. Having these annual reviews as a big progress report is a fun thing to do. I already publish monthly reports with detailed numbers which are the articles that run best on my blog, so annual reviews might be interesting for readers as well.

The idea for such post; I’ve gotten primarily from these two sites:

• James Clear Annual Review
• Chris Guillebeau Annual Review

Both guys are way bigger than I’ll ever be, but just in case you haven’t heard about them, check them out – both are great reads.

Writing

I lot of wins. My output has increased massively because of three main projects:

1. Daily blogging | At first, I just wanted to write whenever I felt like it and a new book was ready to be announced, but in September I started writing daily and it turned into a habit of 10-15K words monthly. That workload would be around 3 more books each year published in articles.
2. STORY52 | My short story project. I’ve published 10 stories so far, but written all 52 already. I would estimate the total word count to be something like 200K, maybe more. The final edits will be collected into a compilation at some point, then I’ll know for sure about the word count. But it’s at least 3 more full novels of writing that I’ve finished this year with this project.
3. 1K a day | I write daily on my novels, at least 1,000 words. It resulted in three novels being published and four more first drafts finished this year.

Putting it all together, I think that I can actually write a full novel in 30 days volume-wise. A project that I’m tackling in 2026.

What didn’t go well in writing?

I threw away an idea I already fleshed out for more than 20K words. I also abandoned, re-started, and re-abandoned another one with 50K words. After deleting it all, I felt bad about it and wished I would still have the files to continue working on it.

This made me develop a couple of iron rules for writing:

1. Collect All Story Ideas – Especially the Bad Ones
2. Finish What You’ve Started Writing. Always.
3. Publish Everything That You’ve Finished Writing

For next year, I need to stick with these rules no matter what. I’ll also expand these rules whenever I feel like something should be set in stone.

Published Writing

My goal was to publish 4 books, I managed to get out 3:

Dec 25 | 17 Part 1: Like A Rolling Stone (US – DE)
Sep 25 | Endless (free novel for my mailing list subscribers – you can get it here)
Jul 25 | Forever (US – DE)

Additionally I published 10 short stories in my STORY52 project:

1. Black Market Dreams (US – DE)
2. The Last Portrait (US – DE)
3. The Companion (US – DE)
4. Statues (US – DE)
5. Those who go to war (US – DE)
6. The Red Button (US – DE)
7. The Asylum (US – DE)
8. Protocol Twilight (US – DE)
9. Killtime (US – DE)
10. The Last President (US – DE)

My blog developed well artistically. I’m happy with my body of work. The Archives presents it all and the Resources showcase the best stuff and links to other sites/books/videos.

What didn’t go well in publishing?

If I had started earlier, I would have managed to publish 4 novels this year which was my initial goal. I also didn’t put out as many short stories as I wanted. First, my idea was to write/edit/translate/publish them one at a time to have a weekly new release. But around October I decided to write the first draft for all 52 stories first and then gradually edit/translate/publish them.

Finding Readers

I think I failed at this much more than I succeeded.

Blogging

My blog attracted some scammers who send me mails about BS they want to sell, but real reader interaction is rare to non-existent. I have around 200 readers per month. Hard to tell how many are real readers and how many are just bots and scammers.

Short Stories

The STORY52 project brings me around 30-50 readers per published story. How many of these become regular blog or novel readers? The future will tell.

Novels

My first novel Forever got around 700 free downloads, collected 30 reviews, and had less than 100 sales in total this year including KENP reads.

My second novel Endless is the book that I give away for free if people sign up for my newsletter. I currently have less subscribers than fingers on one hand.

My third novel Like A Rolling Stone was released in December and had 90 free downloads.

What definitely didn’t go well in finding readers?

My Substack: I wanted to write a fun weekly satire series called Clownworld Chronicles. The idea was to take a socio-political take of the weekly news cycle and poke fun at it. I liked writing it but literally nobody was reading it.

Substack doesn’t seem to have an internal traffic system that allows writers without an audience to find readers organically. And as I don’t have readers, I couldn’t show these stories to anyone.

I curbed the idea for now.

YouTube

My tutorial channel developed nicely by the end of the year. I’ve got more than 12,000 subscribers now. I also finished two big 12-hour courses that I gave away for free (about Inkscape and Gimp).

What didn’t go well on YouTube?

My other YouTube channels flopped. I’m very certain that YouTube shadow-bans my entire profile so that I get 0 views for new uploads. On my tutorial channel I just hustled my way through it with making daily videos for years. But I don’t have the time to do daily videos on a second channel as well, so there wasn’t much motivation to make any videos at all additionally to the tutorials.

It is what it is. I decided to only make videos for fun on one channel called StoryLines (a single video every week) and daily tutorials for now.

X

Censorship in Germany has become crazy. The state is arresting people for criticizing politicians in masses now. I decided to only write about movies and other things no one could get offended by.

Reading

I read much less than I used to. In total I might have read 10 books this year – way to down from my usual yearly average of 60-80 books.

Fitness/Health

My health got a bigger hit that I have to deal with next year. I couldn’t work out as I wanted to, but I managed to at least keep my ideal weight of around 73 kg (at 1,81m).

Personal

Moving. I felt like I needed a change. So I’m started moving in December which should completed in February 2026. For now I’m staying in Germany, but the mid-term goal is to leave the country entirely.

To Conclude

I’ve learned a lot. But there is still so much more to learn. The writing part is almost where I want it to be, but the marketing and finding readers part is way behind what I had hoped for.

Good news is that I’m in it out of passion. Giving my mom my first printed book and seeing her being happy when she read it was already worth it. I’m generally proud of every book I put out and there are so many ideas in my swipe file that I just feel the need to work on even if that never leads to fame and riches – but I’d prefer the version where I could also get the fame and riches on top.

I’ve got a lot of plans for next year, which will be my first full year of trying to become an author. You can follow along on X or this blog. Would be great to have you.

Goodbye to you, goodbye to 2025!