2025... Year in Review

by Mike Turner

Please welcome back Mike Turner, poet and songwriter living on the Alabama Gulf Coast in the USA, to the Writers Journey Blog with his Year in Review!

Another One for the Books (and Journals!) - My Writing Year in Review 2025

My thanks to Elaine for inviting me back for what’s become a year-end tradition: an update on my writer’s journey! I’m a poet and songwriter living on the Alabama Gulf Coast in the USA - I’ve been writing songs since 2012, and submitting poems for publication since mid-2019. I want my poems and songs to bring people together in a common purpose: to live together in peace, and collectively build a world that’s based on love, understanding and cooperation.

Lofty goals? Absolutely. But ones I find purpose in striving for.

I’ve been writing these year-end guest posts since 2020, and if you look over my prior posts (I’ll include links at the end of this entry), you can read about my “strategic planning” approach to managing my writing. I’m not going to take a deep dive into my goals and objectives here - suffice to say that to achieve my purpose in writing, I need to do four things:

I.         Write poems and songs that illuminate what we have in common and what we want our world to be

II.       Achieve wide distribution of my work

III.    Grow and support an engaged audience

IV.     Achieve professional/peer recognition as a writer (in furtherance of gaining distribution and readers/listeners)

My annual plans are built around gaining publication in print and on-line journals and anthologies, rather than preparing my own books for publication. I made this decision early-on in my writing career, for two reasons: first, I felt I’d achieve a wider reach to potential readers through multiple outlets; second, I found with my 2021 collection, Visions and Memories, that I really, really don’t like promotion and marketing - by focusing on journals and anthologies, the publisher takes on the heavier marketing “lift”, not we contributors (although we writers have a big role in promoting the outlets that carry our work - perhaps a topic for a future blog entry…).

The goals and objectives I set for myself (things like how many poems/songs I’ll write, how many I’ll submit for publication, efforts to find and submit to new outlets) are mostly to keep me focused on these four major tasks; and the metrics I track (how many poems submitted and published; how many new outlets carry my work) are to maintain a sense of whether I’m applying myself to what I need to do to achieve my broader purpose.

So, how did I perform to my plan in 2025?

Let’s go back to my four areas of activity/effort, and take a look both at some metrics as well as some anecdotal evidence:

I. Write poems and songs: I no longer put a lot of effort into tracking how many poems and songs I write in a given year, because I’ve learned that “production” isn’t much of an issue for me. I’m always writing - hardly a day goes by that I don’t write something, be it a haiku, a longer poem, or some sort of social media content on the craft of writing. I generally have at least one song lyric under development. I find I write far more pieces than I have time to submit for publication - which does raise the question of, what will I do with all of them? I’m still pondering that; but my output does not seem to be diminishing, so I’m not worried too much about “making” myself write.

I have, however, refined somewhat, what the content of my output is. The best way to explain this, is this: when I first started writing, I wrote a lot of blues songs - things about loss, and pain, and the bleakness of life. While I believe these are common themes that we all share as members of Humanity, I’ve come to recognize that, for me, it’s not enough to write about the common human experience - I want to offer something to improve it. So more and more I find myself striving to write pieces that not only talk about love and loss, but which also give support and hope in the face of such adversity. I don’t want to offer just  complaints and problems, but solutions - or at least help people see that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a subtle but important shift in the topics and themes I find myself returning to - things like love, world peace, collective action, and faith; and I think essential to achieving my “big picture” purpose of building connection, community and commitment.

And, not to put too find a point on it, but I wrote a lot of poems and songs this year - by way of example, in the month of November alone (the period of data  most readily available to hand as I write this, Thanksgiving week - recognizing that the month isn’t over yet), I’ve pumped out around 35 poems and songs so far. And I’d say it’s been a pretty common month, production-wise (that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 420 pieces a year).

II. Distribution of work: Here’s where we’ll do a little numbers crunching. First, I passed a big milestone this year: I had my 500th poem published (as I write this, I’m at a “lifetime total” of 517, not including the poems published in my book). I’m on track to surpass last year’s total of 109 pieces published (as I write this, the year’s total stands at 104, and I have several pieces scheduled for publication in December which should carry me beyond the 2024 total), which will make 2025 my best year for publishing since I started submitting for publication in 2019.

I submitted 156 poems to 51 outlets in 2025, year-to-date. Of these submissions, 104 poems were published in 42 outlets; 16 are still pending acceptance/rejection; and two outlets folded without publishing my pieces.

These numbers yield a 76% acceptance rate, which is consistent with prior years. I’m told that most poets have a 10-25% acceptance rate - I believe my rate is based, in part, on the fact that I don’t as a rule do simultaneous submissions; and I put a good bit of effort into trying to match my submissions to what I can see a given journal tends to publish. I’m also  a stickler for adhering to submission guidelines, which many publishers tell me is their number one complaint about submissions: writers who don’t abide by the submission requirements.

Of the 42 outlets carrying my work this year, 36 are “new to me” journals/anthologies carrying my pieces for the first time. I put a good bit of effort into finding new outlets to submit to, to further grow my readership, so I’m pleased to have a good mix of “new” journals/anthologies to add to the outlets that are “repeat customers” for my work.

And while once again this year my song output was down (in terms of the number of original songs I record and post up to streaming), I posted four new songs in 2025 - and I’ve got a couple in the wings that should go up either late in December or early in 2026. I’ll talk a bit about my recording challenges below.

III. Growing/Supporting My Audience: This factor is a little hard to track - unlike book sales, which give a ready measure of “reader consumption,” there’s no hard number to track of how many people actually read the poems I get published in journals/anthologies. Evidence here is more anecdotal: individual feedback received; the fact that publishers run my subsequent submissions, which I take to mean they and their readers found value in the first. One well-established publisher in the UK recently told me that I, “already have a reputation in the field [of poetry]” (which I’m taking as a compliment!). On the songwriting side, I do have metrics for “listens” of my recorded songs on streaming platforms, and this year’s numbers are consistent with last year’s (around 5500 listens for all songs across platforms like YouTube and Spotify) - not as high as I’d like, but it does mean people out there are listening. And sales of my book are up a little - not bad since it was published back in 2021.

IV. Professional/Peer Recognition: Here, I think I’m committing what, in the newspaper trade, they call “burying the lead”: I was named 2025 Poet of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society. This is an award, not for writing, but for service to the poetry community; and was given in recognition of several things I did in the past year, like organize/host poetry readings, financially support poets’ attendance in national conferences and competitions, sponsor several state-wide contests, and other such activity.

Separately, I was nominated and short-listed to be Alabama Poet Laureate; and while I didn’t receive the appointment (the person who did is a friend and a terrific poet), the nomination was certainly a high mark of my writing journey so far. I’m very grateful for all  this recognition - it’s certainly raised my profile in the state literary community, and opened doors for more readings and presentations.

In any endeavor, there’s always a balance to be struck between “activity” and “accomplishment” - one can be busy, but not be achieving much. I think that by staying focused on my “big picture”, I can see that I’m both doing a lot (writing, publishing, speaking) and actually “moving the ball down the field” in accomplishing the tasks I’ve set for myself and the larger purpose I’m pursuing.

Addendum: I wrote this post in mid-November. Now, as we’re publishing on December 31, here are my final stats for 2025:

First, just by way of interest on the volume of my output, in November I wrote 49 poems; in December I’ve written 85.

In 2025, I submitted a total of 179 poems to 53 outlets; with 123 poems published in 45 outlets (39 of which were “new to me” outlets). The remaining submissions are a mix of pending, which I’ll carry over to my 2026 totals; and a few outlets that did not publish (canceled planned anthologies, ceased publication, etc.). My acceptance rate for the year works out to 74%. My lifetime publication number stands at 536 poems published (not counting the poems published in my collection, Visions and Memories).

In song streams, I had just over 6250 streams of all songs I can track on YouTube and Spotify (there are some plays on Spotify I cannot track because Spotify reports the stats to the record label that released the songs - I can’t access those numbers).

So, what’s in store for 2026?

As always, I’d like to do more on the songwriting side of my work - it’s my first love; and while I’m still writing a lot of songs, I’ve been frustrated by a hearing loss that impacts my ability to record what I’ve written. As it happens, some new technical tools have become available in the music production field to help compensate for hearing issues (it’s not so simple as wearing hearing aids while recording and producing, but it’s similar technology, and it seems to be helping me). I’ve returned to some limited live performances of my songs, and I’m looking at ways to integrate some of my songwriting/music performance into my live poetry readings. And so I have some hope that I’ll be able to do some more musically in the coming year.

On the poetry side, I’ve been getting more involved in local and state writing groups - last year I joined the board of directors of the Alabama Writers Cooperative, one of the oldest writers’ groups in the US, and had a big role in helping to run their annual conference this year; and I’ve gotten more engaged with both the Alabama State Poetry Society and a local group, The Pensters, in my hometown. It’s a great way to network with other writers, and to have an opportunity to help some of them get published as I have. I see growing those activities in the coming year.

And I’ll continue writing - as fellow writers, can you envision a time when you won’t write? When you’ll no longer feel compelled to tell the stories you tell? Me, neither. So I don’t see “stopping” writing.

***

As this blog’s name reminds us, as writers, we’re on a journey - some of it individually, as we pursue our personal projects; some of it collectively, as we network and support each other. And while we might have a map that generally shows us where we want to go, it’s always interesting to pursue the twists and turns of where the road takes us, enriching our experience along the way.

I invite you to follow along where I’ll be going in the coming year! The best way to track me is via my Facebook page, “Mike Turner Songwriter”, where I post up links to pieces I’ve had published and other writer’s news (and blues!). The links are below.

Many thanks to all out there who are reading my poems and listening to my songs; and a special thanks to the editors and publishers (Elaine amongst them!) who run my work.

Come along to see where we go in 2026!

Prior Posts:

“It All Started With a Pen Name” (Sep 27, 2020): https://www.authorelainemarie.com/post/it-all-started-with-a-pen-name-the-writing-story-of-mike-turner 

“2021 - That Was the Year That Was” (Jan 2, 2022): https://www.authorelainemarie.com/post/2021-that-was-the-year-that-was 

“Another Year ‘In the Books’ - My Writer’s Journey in 2022” (Nov 20, 2022): https://www.authorelainemarie.com/post/another-year-in-the-books-my-writer-s-journey-in-2022 

“2023 - My Writing Year in Review” (Dec 31, 2023): https://www.authorelainemarie.com/post/2023-my-writing-year-in-review 

“My Writing Year in Review 2024” (Dec 29, 2024): https://www.authorelainemarie.com/post/my-writing-year-in-review-2024 

Links:

Website: http://www.MikeTurnerSongwriter

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MikeTurnerSongwriter

YouTube: www.YouTube.com/MikeTurnerSongwriter

X: @SchoonerSkipper

Instagram: @MikeTurnerSongwriter

Book: Visions and Memories , available on Amazon.

Bio: Mike Turner, a poet/songwriter living on the U.S. Gulf Coast, was named 2025 Poet of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society (ASPS); and short-listed to be Alabama Poet Laureate. He has more than 500 poems published in over 150 international, print and on-line journals and anthologies. Mike’s poem/song lyric, “Sense of Peace,” was awarded the 2023 Roger Williams Peace Prize by the Alabama Writers Cooperative (AWC). He was featured on the “15 Minutes of Fame” stage at the 2020 Monroeville Literary Festival, performing his original songs about life along the US Gulf Coast; and was named 2017 Male Gospel Entertainer of the Year by the North America Country Music Associations International. Mike is on the AWC board of directors and is an active member of ASPS, the Emerald Coast Writers and The Pensters. Mike is the Featured Author in the anthology, Journeys IV: Magic & Mystery, published by Stone Pony Publishing in 2024; his collection, Visions and Memories, was published in 2021 by Sweetycat Press and is available on Amazon.