2022: Experiment

Happy New Year’s Eve! As you might know, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. Instead, I have a word of the year. This year started with “Discover” as my word but as. I reflect on the year, I think Experiment is a much more apt term.

When I say “Experiment”, what I mean is try a lot of things and see what happens. This year I tried a lot of things. A LOT of things and some worked, some didn’t. But I’m here to report on what I learned as I have each year.

I have an info graphic that shows all the metrics and fun stuff there at the end of this post. For now, I’m going to jump right into what didn’t work and then we’ll go to what worked.

What didn’t work?

I had VERY high expectations coming into this year. Those expectations really led to some disappointments that landed on me in October. The pressure to accomplish was so overwhelming that I didn’t even have my big Halloween game this year and I really missed that.

The covers on the business of publishing were pulled back further for me this year as I dove into advertising and marketing BLOTS, [dis]connection and The Light of Enki (I didn’t do much with Monsters Dance to Twilight). This learning was expensive in both time and money but necessary. Now I feel much more equipped to get the word out about my stories (yes, stories not just books - more to come on that). I took a bunch of courses, listened to a bunch of podcasts, read a few books and found that experience was the best teacher (no surprise there). Everything helped me speed along the learning but I don’t think I would have really learned without the “doing” part of the journey.

Originally, I planned to release Library of Lessons & Lies this year as well as the sequel to [dis]connection. Over the summer, these plans really fell apart as [dis]connection’s sequel started to unravel and I discovered I wasn’t nearly as far in the story as I thought. Also, with the tech world’s melt down of morality being so heavily in the news, I thought the topics of [dis]connection were a little too close to reality. So, I stepped away. Library of Lessons & Lies was ready to go in October but I put on the breaks feeling very burned out. Instead, I put the release date to February and went back to basics to ensure I have a successful launch. Library of Lessons & Lies is available for pre-order now at $.99 so get it while you can at that price.

I wanted to build a story for Kindle Vella but found that format doesn’t really jive for me at the moment. I might try something experimental with the Cy Borgmyn brand but that’s not a priority right now.

Above all, what didn’t work this year was the pressure to drive revenue. That was totally the wrong focus for me and now I realize that. I was trying to push sales hard when I should have been pushing newsletter signups. Audience building is where I should have been focusing and that’s my core focus for 2023.

What did work?

I learned a lot about who I want to be as a creative this year. I’m a storyteller and I love using all kinds of mediums to tell stories. I’ve really enjoyed podcast stories, audio books, movies, series, reading, and I really enjoy the collision of different mediums to create a single story.

One of the most creatively impactful things for me in 2022 was finding the podcast Video Palace. It was a serialized horror podcast that was excellently done. There was also a book that extended the story. There were also Creepy Pasta stories to extend the characters in the podcast and book. This multi-media approach was fascinating to me. How the audio drama flowed into the book and the book into these communal stories was amazing to me.

I worked a lot with Artificial Intelligence as a creative medium this year and can’t wait to share what I’ve been working on. From writing to drawing to voice and video, using AI has been revitalizing to my creative process in ways that I never saw coming. The term “Synthography” has come up as the term to describe what’s commonly called “AI Art”. I love the term and see it in writing as well. Combining human and machine intelligence throws rocket fuel on the fire of creativity. And just like any fire, if not careful, it can burn you.

There is a lot of emotion around “AI Art” and how the data sets were built. I think we’ll see a trajectory like Napster. The genie is out of the bottle and people want to do what tools like Dall-E and Midjourney are offering but when a company like Apple comes along and offers iTunes, a tool that is tolerable by all sides of the market, then I think we’ll see the future of Synthography just as Apple helped make the future of the music industry (if not directly make it). In the end, I see these tools (Midjourney, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, Jasper, GPT-N, ChatGPT, etc…) the same way I see automation in business. As a business, you can choose not to use these tools and many businesses do, but you do need to recognize that others are using these tools and craft your value proposition accordingly. I don’t think every creative will “need to use AI” but every creative will need to know their value proposition and communicate it their story.

I setup the Cy Borgmyn pen name to encapsulate my AI creative work. The pen name is a brand and a brand is a promise. For Cy, the promise is to experiment and push the boundaries of what these technologies can do as well as to inspire kids to explore AI as a creative medium. Cy’s content targets middle-grade students for a reason. Kids this age start to lose interest in technology and science. I’m hoping Cy can show them that this stuff, AI, is for everyone no matter what you are doing.

One phrase I heard this year that really resonated with me was: “Don’t give others your power.” I needed to hear that when it was said. It means, don’t assume everyone can do things better than you when you’re really good at it already. For me, this was numerous topics. I was good at writing ads. I was good at designing covers. I was good at telling cohesive and coherent stories (I thought so anyway) but looked for anyone to take that from me so it could be “good”. My covers are good. My ads are good. My stories are good and I don’t need to pay others to do it for me or confirm what I already know. Maybe you’re in the same place so I wanted to say this so you can take back your power if you’ve given it away.

There are also things I’m not good at and that’s where I built my team to help this year. I was very excited to find editors I loved working with. I’ll be looking for other ways to grow my support team in 2023 as I collaborate more with other authors and creatives.

By the Numbers

Okay, let’s get into the numbers for this year. I made this info graphic to share because I thought that would be fun. Enjoy!

Well, that’s everything. I hope you have a wonderful New Year. I’ll post again next week with my word for 2023. For now, I hope your 2022 was full of experimentation and learning. See you soon!