Lessons Learned and Plans for 2026
What to expect this year from My Favorite Suspects.
After 40 years since I started writing and submitting my work, and occasionally being published, I hit several milestones in 2025. I hit these milestones thanks to your support, your reviews, your likes, and your purchases of my work:
Five titles on the market and selling—including the start of two series.
Hundreds of books sold, on my own, as an indie author.
New short stories and dozens of other articles written and published.
Hundreds of followers and subscribers on Substack.
By any reasonable definition, 2025 wasn’t my year of “starting out”. And yet, it didn’t feel like a victory lap. It felt more like lining up for another race and realizing that it isn’t about showing up or even just finishing the race. It was about consistently achieving tangible results, like a racer who’s no longer satisfied to simply place and craves getting on the podium.
There were no viral moments this year. No breakout post. No sudden inflection point where everything clicked into place. What I experienced instead was a growing clarity that I’d moved past the opening moves of being an indie writer, and that what comes next requires a different approach. I had to start thinking about making my indie author work sustainable.
Being a writer encompasses a lot of different aspects. There’s the writing itself, of course, and then there’s the writing business. Up to the end of 2025, I’ve invested a lot of time in the writing. But the part about existing as an author is tough, too, and involves making tough choices, if I want to continue writing novels (and believe me, that’s what I want to do).
As a result, I’ve made two key changes:
First, I chose to take on a more complex novel, one which is challenging me structurally, emotionally, and technically. Not because complexity is a virtue in itself, but because the characters demanded it. And I strongly believe that this story has the type of depth is what you, my readers, want to see.
Second, I began shifting my business model away from serials and back toward novels as the core unit of work. Serials were useful. They were an opening move: a way to write in public, to experiment, to learn about you and what you like. But novels are the foundation and future of my indie career.
When I started here, Substack felt like a possible income stream, a platform to optimize, something that needed to justify itself in spreadsheets and projections. At the end of 2025, however, after exhausting myself chasing too many things, that idea died quickly, and alone, in a back alley of the big city of self-publishing.
In 2026 and beyond, Substack (and Medium, and other platforms I use) are no longer the center of my writing work. They still matter, of course, as places to connect with you about my books and a way to share what I’m thinking about craft, and process, and to generate interest in my characters and stories.
What I learned in 2025 is that stepping back from socials freed my creative energy to focus on my novels. And for me, that’s where my real work lies. I can’t compete as an influencer and I don’t have any interest in trying. My real audience are you readers who follow characters across years, not posts across moments.
So for you, what this means is simply this:
99% of my creative energy on books.
1% of my creative energy on social media.
You’ve shown, through your reviews and likes and purchases, that you want to see my characters and stories, and not my “takes” on different issues. In 2026, my focus is on finishing the next book after The Good Killers, releasing a new anthology, and getting started on the next books in both the Terry Perez series and the Ben Rossi / Riley Lopez series.
That’s what I’m looking forward to... and I hope you are, too.
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