As January wraps up, I am finally getting to the blog post I intended to make at the end of December for the same reason only it’s even more now.

December 2022 was my best month career-wise. In my personal life, not so much, I want to make that abundantly clear, but strictly speaking about publishing, December was awesome. I’d only come close to the same success in August when I figured out how to run ads. And then January happened.

This month alone has been half as lucrative as my entire 2022. Now, keep in mind, I was not banking anything like a livable wage in 2022, but I am poised to out earn the entirety of last year by February’s end if I have a repeat of this month. I am shocked.

Money is, of course, not the only way to measure success, but it is a pretty damn good way considering the point of what I’m trying to do is sell books. I mean, what I want is to bring joy to people, to give them something to read that makes them feel things, primarily happiness, but I also want to make a living on it. And now I know I might actually some day.

Which brings me to the big thank you.

THANK YOU.

That’s as big as WordPress lets me make it.

I know the only reason things have gone this direction is because of the support for Villains & Virtues from voracious and thoughtful readers, people who found the books via its ARC or stumbled upon it organically or were bombarded by my ads or my social media posts or were convinced by some other amazing reader to pick it up–however you guys got your hands on this thing and then decided to share your thoughts on it, you have made this series a success in my eyes. I never imagined anyone would like this thing let alone love it. I hoped, but I knew I was doing a lot of things “wrong” with the story and the tropes and the writing, but I did them mostly for me, and I’m thrilled there are other people who get what I was trying to do and who found joy in the books.

I am terrified of letting those people down with the final book. I constantly waffle between thinking it’s the perfect ending and thinking it’s terrible (which seems to be pretty much the universal human experience of creating anything), but in the very depths of my soul I am hoping this thing comes out right because these readers, you guys, my Dear Readers, deserve it.

Anyway, I can’t gush too much or I’ll start crying but also I need to edit this book like a thousand more times in the next ten days and do nothing else, so bye for now, but I’ll be back for the release of Eclipse of the Crown.