From Strength to Strength: An Epic 2018 in Review


Hi everyone – Claire here, taking up the end-of-year review mantle for the first time from our wonderful Founding Editor, Helen Scheuerer!

I seem to say this every year, and I’m sure you do too, but truly… Can you believe another 12 months have come and gone?!

2018 was another massive year for Writer’s Edit, with plenty of exciting developments and achievements. Let’s take a look at a few…

Writer’s Edit turns five

2018 marked Writer’s Edit’s fifth birthday. Yep, it’s been five whole years since this platform’s humble beginnings as a Tumblr-blog-turned-one-woman-show run by Helen.

We think it’s safe to say W.E. has come a long, long way in that time! We have…

    • Published hundreds upon hundreds of articles
    • Published five books through two imprints
    • Expanded our offerings to include a range of courses
    • Worked with dozens of talented writers and editors

But most of all, we’ve created a platform of which we’re all really proud.

Here’s to five wonderful years gone by, and many, many more to come.

Talem Press success

What a year it was for our fantasy publishing imprint, Talem Press! Since Talem’s launch in 2017, we’ve achieved fantastic success, with our first two books both becoming bestsellers.

The second of these was Reign of Mist, book two in Helen Scheuerer’s YA fantasy series, The Oremere Chronicles. Released in September 2018, Reign of Mist quickly followed in the footsteps of Heart of Mist, shooting to bestseller status even before its official release date.

Both books in The Oremere Chronicles were also released as audiobooks in 2018: Heart of Mist in April and Reign of Mist in November. We’re stoked to be reaching a whole new range of readers through Audible.

In other exciting Talem Press developments, we recently opened our doors to general submissions! We’ll be keeping tight-lipped about the results of this for now, but stay tuned for an exciting announcement very soon…

HoM+RoM
Isn’t the Talem Press family looking lovely so far?

Social media milestones

Our bookish and writerly communities across social media continued to grow throughout 2018, with Twitter in particular seeing fantastic growth thanks to our Head of Tech, Dave Hickman. We had almost 13,000 new followers join us across the year, meaning we’re now tweeting to more than 90,000 people! Think we can crack the 100K mark in 2019? 😉

We also surpassed 6,000 likes on Facebook, and had some great engagement from our 16,300+ Instagram followers throughout the year.

Courses success

After launching our first course in 2017, Plan & Write A Novel In 90 Days (Or Less), we added two brand-new courses to our offering in 2018:

We also created an awesome-value two-course bundle especially for budding indie authors: Write A Novel In 90 Days & Self-Publish It To Amazon.

Favourite articles

I thoroughly enjoyed being our primary article writer throughout 2018, and had fun bringing you plenty of pieces on fiction writing, freelancing and self-publishing. A few of my favourites were:

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Image via Pexels

We also had some firsthand insight from our very own bestselling author, Helen, in her in-depth publishing advice pieces. If you’re an aspiring indie author, be sure to check out:

Staff thanks

It’s usually our Founding Editor, Helen Scheuerer, doling out thanks to the Writer’s Edit team at the end of each year. But this time, I want to take a moment to thank Helen.

Her tireless work ethic, incredible talent, and unwavering dedication to what she does have made Writer’s Edit the platform it is today. We really are fortunate to have such a go-getting, inspiring woman at our helm.

A special shout-out to Head of Tech Dave Hickman, too, for keeping everything running smoothly behind the scenes, always helping Writer’s Edit move forward, and saving the day when things out of our control go awry. (Case in point: Dave miraculously recovered this very post after it spontaneously removed itself from existence right before Christmas…!).

What’s in store for 2019?

There’s so much in the works for this year, and myself and the rest of the team are already very excited to get stuck in!

Helen’s Oremere Chronicles trilogy will come to an explosive conclusion, with the final book set to be released in the first half of the year. Oh, and we just might find out a little more about what Helen will be working on next… 😉

As we mentioned above, you’ll also want to stay tuned for further exciting Talem Press updates. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes at Talem, and we can’t wait to be able to share it all with our readers.

Of course, we’ll also continue delivering you plenty of fiction writing and self-publishing advice in our regular articles throughout 2019. If there are any topics you’d particularly like to see us cover, feel free to shout them out in the comments and we’ll see what we can do.

blog-tour-2
Image via Pixabay

That’s a wrap

Well, that’s my first Year in Review post done and dusted!

A huge thanks, as always, to everyone who supported Writer’s Edit and Talem Press throughout 2018. Whether you purchased one of our books, took one of our courses, shouted us out on social media, or took the time to submit your work to us, we want to let you know how much we appreciate you and your interest in our platform.

Wishing everyone a wonderful 2019 filled with plenty of books and words.

Claire Bradshaw
Editor

Writer's Edit

Writer’s Edit is a young online literary magazine created especially for writers and lovers of books. Founded in July 2013, the magazine is home to writing and book-related news, as well as advice and inspiration for emerging authors. Writer's Edit also publishes the anthology Kindling. To find out more, click here.

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