It's time to look back on 2018 and take stock — what worked, what didn't, and where I spent my time.
Accomplishments
Feels like it all passed in a blur…
The first five months were consumed in followup activities following all the marketing work I did in 2017. That included:

* ONIX development. StreetLib had some technical woes, and altogether the process needed to be solidified before I could consider it reliable.
* Standardized deliverables. As part of the ONIX finalization, I tightened up the formalization of all my final output folders, with their various text, image, and marketing component content so that the loose assemblage of files for works-in-process had a clean transition point to rigid folders with standardized deliverable content. This has proved a great time-saver whenever I need to deal with ONIX data or distributors or marketing requirements, including my websites. With almost 30 titles now, order is a fundamental virtue.
* New covers for the Chained Adept series. Having lost that cover artist, I took a long look at the covers and decided I not only needed a new cover artist for the Affinities of Magic series, just starting, but might as well have him redo the Chained Adept series as well. I like the new Affinities of Magic series that he's been developing, and the Chained Adept got a visible boost from better covers. I even asked him to create an advertising image I could use for advertising for the Hounds of Annwn series.
* German translation. While I was in an investment mood, I decided to make my initial experiment with translation by finding someone to do the first book of the Chained Adept Series for the German market, where the SFF genre does well. I'm very happy with my translator — she has delivered the full manuscript, and I still have to go through it with my minor German and automated translation to make sure there's nothing odd about any of the results, before releasing it into the German market to see how it does. By then, I hope to have my Facebook Ads beyond the USA processes in decent shape.
* Publishing contracts/royalty reporting. A little after the fact, I completed the final version of a standardized publishing contract to use and got everything cleaned up for my first outside author. At the same time, I created the processes for tracking and reporting on royalties and payments for outside authors.
* Google Analytics. After several stumbles, I finally commissioned a decent tool for looking at the fate of my various UTM statistics for articles and other things.