Welcome to the third and (probably) final part of my Yearly Roundup for 2019. After covering 2019 in Numbers and my 2019 Highlights, this time I’m flipping things around and looking ahead to the rest of 2020 to talk a bit about what I’m hoping to achieve this year with Track of Words. I’m not planning on drastically changing anything – it’s still going to be the usual mix of spoiler-free and relatively short reviews, author interviews and occasional blog posts/other articles. I don’t just want to deliver more of (exactly) the same, however, so the idea is to pick up where I left off in 2019 and continue to branch out a little, covering a wider range of authors and stories in terms of both reviews and interviews.
I’ve talked before about how 2018 got a bit crazy and how I deliberately pulled things back in 2019 to slow down a bit and retain my sanity; the ideas for 2020 is to continue in that vein, aiming for around four or five posts a week. That should keep me interested with a decent bit of variety, and hopefully appeal to you folks as readers of Track of Words. In my 2019 in Numbers article I talked about viewing figures growing by about 25% from 2018 to 2019, and anything approaching the same sort of growth would be fantastic – so that’s my relatively modest objective for 2020.
In order to reach that objective, here are a few of my goals for the year…
If you like 40k, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this.
Read and review a wider range of SFF stories
I’m still going to be tackling plenty of Black Library, but there’s a whole world of reading out there too! I’ve got my eye on a range of awesome-looking novels, novellas and short stories, and I can’t wait to get stuck in. I know that a lot of my readership is here specifically for Black Library and Warhammer stories, but my feeling is that if I – as a huge Warhammer fan – enjoy something, I’m pretty sure a fair few other Warhammer fans will do too! Likewise, hopefully a few people will see my non-Warhammer reviews and fancy giving some Black Library stories a go.
Expand my interviews
I feel like my author interviews are a real strength of Track of Words, and I really love organising them, so I’m keen to not just keep doing what I’m doing but try different things as well. I’m planning on doing this in two directions – covering a wider range of books and authors in things like my Rapid Fire and Author Spotlight interviews, and also tackling some different types of interviews. I already have a couple of non-BL interviews planned in which I’m really looking forward to, and hopefully there will be many more to come as well.
More like this, I hope.
Read more stories written by women
Of the 90 books I read in 2019 only 14 were written by women, which is a shocking statistic; even when you include anthologies featuring one or more women that only adds another four titles. 18 out of 90! In Black Library terms it’s a problem I really hope they’re working on fixing, with so few female authors currently writing Warhammer fiction (I can only think of half a dozen off the top of my head), but luckily there are a great many fantastic women writers out there in the rest of SFF. I’ve made a pretty good start I think, with my first two books of 2019 coming from Danie Ware (Wreck and Ruin) and Jamie Crisalli (The Measure of Iron)!
More like this, too!
Write more reviews elsewhere
I write the occasional review for the British Fantasy Society and Grimdark Magazine, and I’d like to do more of that – complete with accompanying articles here on Track of Words, a bit like I did for Gideon the Ninth and The Spider Dance. It’s a good way of reading books I might not otherwise have got to, it’s nice to get my name out there a little more widely and spread the good work about great books in a few more places, and if it results in the occasional new Track of Words reader, all the better.
Listen to more audio dramas
This one is more about my personal satisfaction than anything else, as I absolutely love audio dramas but somehow didn’t manage to listen to as many in 2019 as I’d have liked. I’m a firm advocate for the medium, so I’m keen to keep covering them on Track of Words, and if I can arrange not just reviews but interviews as well, I absolutely will.
I MUST listen to this soon!
Work on the design of the site
I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t put a whole lot of effort into the visual design of Track of Words, and it could definitely do with a bit of a refresh in that respect. I have a bunch of half-formed ideas for what I’d like to do and how I’d like things to look, so I’m going to try and find the time to properly develop those ideas and get at least some of them implemented. If nothing else, I think it’s about time Track of Words got a proper logo!
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Hopefully you can see why I’ve set those as goals for 2020, and fingers crossed they (mostly, at least) sound interesting. I’ve got a few other plans as well, but they need a bit more development before I start properly talking about them! As always my main limitation is going to be time, as with a day job and at least a bit of a life away from Track of Words (not much, but a bit) I might be hard pushed to get absolutely everything organised and written that I would like to. Still, I’m hoping that these are the sort of goals that I can keep chipping away at over the year – fingers crossed, anyway!
As one last point, if you haven’t already read my What Do You Want to See on Track of Words? article then I’d urge you to take a look, and let me know what you think. Any and all feedback is much appreciated! Let me know in the comments below or get in touch on Twitter, and thank you once again for checking out Track of Words – here’s to a fantastic 2020!