End of the Year Review: Professional

A good New Year's Eve morn to the readers of Stroock's Books, such as they are. 

With the furnace down last night we kept a fire going till 10 PM or so. Ha-ha again. We broke out a small space heater which eventually blew out a GFI outlet when one of the girls started the microwave. Fortunately, we know a guy. Also fortunately temps stayed in the mid 20s last night so it wasn't really that cold. Extra blankets, everyone. 

We were up at 0530 hours this morning to get a fire going. Ever since Hurricane Sandy in 2012 we've been stocking firewood. Our garage wall is lined with those bundles of firewood one can get at the hardware or grocery store. Some of the bundles are over a decade old. Burn, baby burn. One bundle lasts two, maybe two and a half hours.

The new furnace installation is supposed to begin at 8 sharp they say. 

Let's get on with the professional review, shall we? 

Here's what we wrote one year ago today.

In 2025 we got out one novel, War Night: Stories of the Great Nuclear War of 1975, and one short story in Arc of Ares: Thin Red Line. The output is disappointing. We have two half-finished novels that will be released next year along with World War 1990: Ireland, and one short story to boot. Nevertheless we wanted two novels out in 2025. It was not to be. Why? Well, we got embroiled in Ireland and The Troubles. 

Here's our 2025 digital and paperback orders:

And here's KU streaming:

Those are our top ten books. The light blue line is War Night, ruthlessly following book sales rules peaking after 6-8 weeks and declining about 20 percent per month till it joins the backlist. The backlist is about 70 percent of yearly book sales. God bless the backlist. 

The Great Nuclear War of 1975 series occupies the first four sales slots, followed by the World War 1990 series. 

We raised prices on most books from the standard $4.99 to $6.99. We are an established author and people will pay for that. We don't believe the increase affected raw sales numbers. Royalties are down about 25 percent from 2024. But that's because we released World War 1990: The Final Storm late in 2023 and that drove sales the first half of 2024. As previously noted, we only published one novel this year.

The top three sellers in the World War 1990 series are, in order, Norway, The Final Storm (these are the two most recent releases) and Arctic Storm. This is good. People will read Arctic Storm and then keep right on going through the series. 

We put both series on audiobook this year and a trickle of sales resulted. 

As always sales by nation look like Operation Overlord + Australia. Note we didn't say the Normandy invasion. Germany came in #3 this year ahead of the Aussies and the Canucks. 

We remain in the top 10-15 percent of authors in the English speaking world. 

We did a lot of posting in Substack notes this year in which we built a following. 'Good morning, Substack. This is your daily reminder that Israel is great'. In the process we sold a few books here and there. Honestly, Substack has become a good place for us to vent. Mostly we just post about Israel. When the Jew haters show up in our notes we enjoy telling them their gay and retarded and ask if their mom brought home a Jew from the bar the previous night. We stopped cross posting this blog on Substack. There's enough crap on Substack. We've about 1500 followers there. Honestly we wonder if we should pack it in. 

After ten years and 6244 posts, this blog chugs along. Why? But also why not? Traffic is up this year. It's hard to tell how or who, as a lot of that traffic is bots. But we've definitely a few more readers. In olden times writers kept diaries. We keep a blog, which is in many ways a daily diary for us now.