A Twitter poll circled a while back, asking people who they write for: themselves, the readers, or fame and fortune. The answer came back, as these things do, a mix. The more I thought about it and read the responses to the tweet, the more I wavered on the correct response.
I wrote my first book to prove to myself that I could, but I also really wanted readers to like it and have the theme resonate for them as well. Does that make me a writer for the readers person or a write for me person? And does it matter?
Online pressure… or keeping up with the Jones’
My recently published debut novel took about thirty-six years to write. Well, it took one year to write and thirty-five years to be brave enough to share it. I barely celebrated for a few hours before I was in a cycle of research, stress, and freakouts.
You see, I realized what I should’ve realized long before: I wanted to be a full-time writer. And I wanted to be one now.
So, I did what I always do; I threw myself into researching the answer. I read some great blogs, posts on Medium, other social media posts, and Facebook group posts focused on author success. And they all pretty much said the same thing.
It was a numbers game.
The more of a backlist you had, the more money you made. It was a logical argument. Without a backlist, your readers only had one book to purchase. Yes, you could go viral and suddenly sell thousands — it has happened — but those were unicorns. Most authors didn’t make any money until they had written several books.
Authors who were writing full-time had multiple series, multiple books, some even in a short period of time. Others had taken years to build up their backlist and were just now seeing success.
I didn’t want to wait ten years for full-time writing success. I waited too long to write the first book and I needed to make up for lost time. So how did some of these successful authors get to six-figure earnings on their books?
By writing a book every month or every other month. Yes, some authors could do this regularly and successfully. Some writers could even write a book in weeks, if not days. But that was not me.
It took me a year to write one book. Even if I could speed it up, it still wouldn’t hit the book a month or every other month some writers achieve. I went back to the drawing board and came up with the next best way to create a backlist and generate some book sales: rapid release.
Rapid release is writing a trilogy (for example) in full. You then publish each book in quick succession, with links to your next book in the back of the one before it.
It sounded like a great idea, but it didn’t work for my current series. I don’t have book 2 and book 3 ready to go. I was, and am, in the middle of writing book 2 right now, but it was at the ugly first draft stage with a lot of plot issues to sort out. There was no way I could release this by the end of the year.
Nor did I want to. And this was where the pressure from anonymous authors out there got to me. I didn’t want to rush my urban fantasy series because I wanted the world-building to be tight and consistent. I wanted the story arc to make sense in each book and over the course of the entire series (potentially, a seven-book series).
Ever desperate to find the golden ring to author success, I hit the drawing board again. This time, I came up with a new plan: write a series of cozy mysteries in between my fantasy series.
Why cozy mysteries? For one, mystery was my favorite genre and I had read a ton of them. For another, once you had the setting and the characters in place, the books were relatively easy to create. There was no massive world build behind them that needed creating or checking for inconsistencies. They also could be shorter than the 80k word books I wrote for urban fantasy.
My husband looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. Because then I watched another video of someone saying stay in your lane — stick to one genre for at least six books as a new author. My heart sank. Was my plan the wrong one? But there were more videos to watch. The next one said, “Write whatever you want,” which was exactly what I wanted to hear.
My strategy for success became a table tennis match, bouncing from one extreme to the other as I desperately planned how best to achieve my goal of a full-time writer.
And then I added in the advice preached the loudest.
Write to market
This one was a bit of a doozy for me. The saying went that if you do the research and find the genres with the biggest gaps, the niches with the hungriest of readers, and the least number of books, you’ll be successful. And it certainly appeared to be true if you followed Booktok.
Spicy books (heavy sex) were trending hot; any romance author pushing their books on that platform was more than likely to get a lot of readers if they filled that insatiable pile of people.
Many authors have found success by doing just that — finding the trend that garners them little competition and a hungry audience as well. This advice also rang true and made sense. You’ll sell more books if you go where the duckswere, as one of my favorite mystery writers once wrote in a book about politics.
But that premise fails to take into account the kind of book an author wants to write. Yes, I could write to market and generate a ton of steamy romance books, push out one book a month, but would I walk away from it feeling good about myself and my writing?
For me specifically, no. I didn’t want to write spicy books or even romance books. I have nothing against them and have read my fair share of them. They were a great afternoon read of escapism. But to sit down and pound out book after book in quick succession in a genre I didn’t want to write about would have been like sitting at a desk job for forty hours a week doing something that you sort of find okay, but don’t really enjoy.
If I wanted to do that, I’d go back into online marketing (no offense to marketers, but it’s just not my jam). There are plenty of people who love it and enjoy it. Awesome — they could fill that gap in the market for me.
What am I writing for?
If I’m not pumping out a load of books in short succession and not writing to market, then what was my plan?
Could I get my book out quicker than I planned on? Could I do that while also writing blog posts, book reviews, and marketing for my just-published novel?
I didn’t know.
When I prepared my book for launch, I got caught in the cycle of keeping up with the Jones’. I prepped articles to post in different places to promote the book, while also sharing some of the journey. On top of that, I felt like I needed to feed the machine and keep my writing front and center to keep my book front and center.
I plotted. I planned. I brainstormed. I came up with several article series and ideas that I jotted down. And they were good. They would educate and promote my book in a unique way. Rather than focus on the book contents, I discussed my journey of writing or publishing the book. But they were marketing, not stories I wanted to share.
Or could they be both?
I recently received feedback from someone who complimented me on something I wrote in a weekly journal post about the floodwaters that invaded my house. They found it touching.
My weekly journal was a post I put on my blog and shared with my entire 30 followers; I also promoted it on social media. But I started it for me, to document my journey of writing this book and to process all the stuff I went through while doing so. It not only helped me sort through my feelings, but I had legitimate writing breakthroughs that made it into my final edit of the book.
My other story that resonated with readers, about whether I missed the creative boat or not, was also a spur-of-the-moment story. I’d been reading a book and had a doubt, a question, a qualm about whether it was too late for me to be successful as an author. If I missed the boat, so to speak. It again received a lot of comments on all my social media platforms where I shared it.
But I initially wrote it for myself, because I was inspired to do so.
And that was the key to my story and my writing. I couldn’t write to market. I could write a good post about something when I had to, but to write a great post required me to be inspired to do so. I’ve created several posts about the publishing process around my book that were well received and were not on my “list” of brainstormed ideas.
This article was one of them. We’ll see how successful it was after it posts.
I am not knocking these groups who give advice as to creating a backlist or writing to market. They are a great resource for a variety of crazy questions you never thought you’d ask once you decided to be an author. They also don’t say rapid release or a book every month are the only ways to be a successful author.
Every choice a writer makes is valid. You do you. But I was getting sucked into what worked for everyone else and feeling less than, behind, slow, never going to achieve my dream of just writing books for a living.
I still want to create a backlist more quickly than I originally planned, and I have a plan to do that. We’ll see if it works, if I stick to it or if I burn out. I’ve given myself the flexibility to not meet my goals and still be okay.
Because the point isn’t to bang out a bunch of novels that I think are okay so that I have a backlist. The point is to write the best books I can and that, for me, takes time.
I got caught up in the machine of writing, in the rush for financial success, rather than celebrating my amazing achievement. The idea of creating a fast backlist turned me inside out as I tried to fit it with who I am as an author.
Now I know better.
Who are you writing for?
Writing full-time is a secondary goal. My primary goal is to write books for readers like me. I want them to feel something, learn something, remember my words in odd places and situations. I want my books to be inhaled on a rainy Sunday. I want them to be excited when a new book launches.
I forgot that purpose during my freakout about what I should do next. I forgot how much I loved my book while I read post after post that made me feel like I was doing it wrong (this was my perception, not what they were saying).
Every writer is writing to the readers, but not every writer is writing for the same reason or to capture the same reading audience. They are all valid paths. I do believe you need to step back and ask yourself:
Who are you writing for and to what purpose?
Once you find that answer, make a plan, but keep it flexible. If you’re anything like me, you’ll see that it can change overnight.