Hello fantails! I hope your late-fall season is going well. Happy Holidays!
Upcoming Events
We got accepted into AnthroExpo on a cancellation, so you’ll see Glenn out in OKC January 27 – 29, 2023 at the Sheraton OKC Downtown Hotel. Huzzah! We’re going to bring some of our limited edition figurines to the show.
Book Updates
Vale is hard at work on Pridelord. If you want to keep abreast of his updates, you have a few options:
- Join his newsletter
- Support him on Patreon
- Join his super-secret-not-yet-public Discord! (You’ll have to email him for an invitation)
We picked up the originals for the interior art of Pridelord from Brenda Lyons this week. They look amazing, as ever. One of the pieces is a secret, though, that Vale won’t let anyone see, yet.
We were hoping to get both Pridelord and Reunification Book 3 finished by the end of the year. We didn’t count on Glenn’s job continuing to torture him and run trains through our lives.
Glenn quit his torture job at the beginning of December, though, so we’re expecting Reunification 3 to get out to beta readers in the next few weeks. He still has one major scene to write:
One of the difficulties Glenn runs into is that books 1-6 of Reunification were all written as one long, rambling story in the first draft. Written by hand. So Glenn has actually written this fight scene, but it’s still on paper and needs to be typed up. Because it’s “done” in his head, he didn’t realize it wasn’t in the story until his alpha reader pointed it out!
2022 In Review
This year was our first year doing conventions as a way to connect with readers. It was a whirlwind of fun and stress as we figured it all out on the fly. We’ll probably be doing fewer conventions in 2023, for a few reasons, namely: cost. These conventions get expensive quickly! At the beginning of the year, we were selling a number of series and audiobooks at the conventions, which helped defray our costs, but as the year progressed we started selling more single physical books and struggled to pay for the cost of the tables.
We have branched into some merchandise, to help us afford the convention costs. We turned the chibi hearts by Kittrel, from Crafty as a Coyote, into stickers, as well as the Gryphon Insurrection chapter headers. We did a limited run of screen printed shirts using the Pride Gryphon design by Fleeks. Brenda Lyons’s interior art has been turned into postcards. And, most recently, we commissioned some limited edition figurines of characters in the Gryphon Insurrection series.
Vale released The Crackling Sea in January, and Opinicus in July. We set up a Discord server for him to talk to his fantails and engage more directly.
We got our website and web shop up and running so you can buy directly more easily, Vale isn’t juggling orders and payments, and we’re not interrupting Vale’s writing time to ask about order status. All of the merchandise is in the shop at the moment, but the website still needs some work to make it look good and optimize the user experience.
Vale had a few big events this year for his series: he secured a BookBub promotion as well as a Chirp deal. The BookBub promotion moved the first boxed set for Gryphon Insurrection (e-book) into #1 on Amazon (for an admittedly strange category). We’ve also almost caught up on the audiobooks for his series!
Overall, STET is still in the red, but this year did see the Reunification series pay itself off. We took on more debt this year to produce the audiobooks and attend conventions, with the expectation that those are investments in our readers that will pay off longer term.
Thank you!
This year we started beginning to feel connected to our readers. Thank you to everyone who met Glenn in person and spent some time talking to him. Thank you to our new readers who took a chance on us this year. And thank you to our long-time fantails who have continued to support us (especially those supporting us on Patreon!).
We, as always, try to be accessible to you. Right now, we’re formulating our plan for 2023. What would you like to see? (Other than the next book, which, I promise, we’re working on!) We made a lot of assumptions about how you would like to engage with us, and what kinds of products you’d like to see. What did you like, what did we miss? Help us improve your reading experience! Email us at sales+blog@stetpublishing.com.