A Look Back at 2024
and announcing my first author event of 2025 at Fables Books in Goshen, IN
Despite how things ended up politically, I will look back at 2024 as a good year.
The last several years have been personally tumultuous. There’s no need to rehash that here, but suffice to say, I was glad to have a quieter, less eventful trip around the sun.
2024 was the year a lifelong dream came true: I published my first book.
The process of writing and publishing a book is very different than reading one. I started pitching this book in 2021; it took two more years for it to be completed and another nine months to reach the public. There’s a lot of inside-baseball details that, if you’re interested in hearing, I’d share over email, a call, or a drink, but here are some of my highlights:
getting a “manuscript accepted” notice from my editor
I am beyond grateful that Lauren O’Neal was the editor for my book. Her organizational skills, her familiarity with both the concept and content of the topic, and her overall abilities as an editor just astound me. I finally understood what Stephen King meant when he wrote “to write is human, to edit is divine,” in a compliment to his own editor.
getting a “copyedits completed” notice from my editor,
getting the endorsements for my book,
I was humbled by each and every person who endorsed my book: Reza Aslan, Diana Butler Bass, lenny duncan, David Gushee, Katherine Stewart, Chrissy Stroop, and Bradley Onishi.
receiving a starred Kirkus review,
getting to record the audiobook,
receiving my author copies and holding my book for the first time,
being featured in Salon and Teen Vogue,
holding my first author event,
celebrating in person with friends and family.
On the newsletter and podcast fronts, I was less productive.
I’ve only released 18 episodes of Exvangelical this year (and a few were re-releases).
On the newsletter side, I continue to gain subscribers but have lost 23% of paid subscriber revenue year over year between 2023 and 2024. This makes sense—I was less productive, and that leads to churn.
Over the last few years I have tried to be more forthright with both myself and my readers and listeners around my “creator output.” Throughout the past 8 years of building my public profile in this area I’ve always maintained full-time work; what I do here is in my “off-hours,” and as much as I would love to devote more time, energy, and resources, I must be selective about both the financial capital and time I can devote to this work. This year was focused on rest, the book, and little else.
Each person you follow has different capacities; I am working within mine. If you value the work I am able to produce, you can always subscribe:
Looking forward to 2025, I do have aspirations to be more productive, both in service of promoting my book (which I believe has greater relevance than when it was first published) as well as featuring the work of other writers and authors. I previewed some of that in this post:
I’ll be spending my Christmas break relaxing with family and thinking through what I will need to do to structure my days to focus on these endeavors.
I’ll be having my first event of 2025 at Fables Books in Goshen, IN on 1/16/2025 alongside Cait West and Sara Moselener (the graphics will be updated shortly, but the event registration is already live):
I’ll have other virtual events to announce in the coming weeks as well.
In the meantime, I hope that you are able to spend the next few weeks resting, planning for the year to come, and with people you love. I will be back to posting in January.
Thank you for being here, and for continuing to read my words. I am grateful, and I don’t take it for granted.