To Write a Book
There are all kinds of careers in writing. Most of them don’t rely on a big break with a publishing house and a lucrative contract with a fat advance check. Hell, most of them don’t even require writing every day to be successful.
And that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? The big lie that modern internet algorithm-driven publishing is pushing on aspiring writers. You can’t be successful if you don’t write (and publish) every day. Every. Single. Damned. Day.
I’ve done that. It doesn’t do anything if the algorithms choose to pass you by. If a machine deems your content as unworthy of being pushed to the top. It was a depressing horrible grind that sucked the love of my craft out of me at a time when I really should have been enjoying every minute of my new (and admittedly minute) popularity.
I had a loyal following on my now-retired blog, for my now-retired pseudonym. I had regular (but small) book sales. But only so long as I was “relevant”. That success was maintained only so long as I was publishing new content to be pushed to social media on the regular so that I could keep my work in forefront of the algorithms. Getting likes, and shares, and followers was always at the top of my mind.
For 40-plus hours a week, I wrote and networked. This was the equivalent of full-time work in exchange for hobby pay.
It was exhausting.
So…I stopped.
And guess what happened? Writing started being fun again. I stopped “writing for the
market”, I stopped writing for other people and started writing what I wanted and most importantly when I wanted. Fiction, fantasy, paranormal, adventure, all the genres that I loved reading and writing before I started getting paid to write were what I fell back into.
My following is much smaller now that I’ve started over, but you know what? The people who read my work are willing to pay more for it. That’s nice. I’ve made more from my writing in the last year than in the three previous years combined. This was all done, without daily writing or sticking to a grueling publishing schedule. It was even done without many social media accounts, a blog, or much of a platform to speak of.
Sure I don’t have as many followers. Yet the followers I do have are more likely to engage with my writing.
For those writers and aspiring writers who are discouraged by the endless blog posts, free e-books, and articles claiming that you can’t “make money as a writer” or be “successful” if you don’t write every day…relax. Take a breath. And feel free to ignore the “hustle” writers.
What’s a “hustle” writer, you ask? It’s the group of writers who treat their writing career as a gig. They are the kind of writer who thinks getting as much published as possible as quickly as possible and staying at the top of new content is the end all, be all of writing professionally.
Stop comparing yourself to them. You don’t have to write that way.
That is how you write if you are monetizing a website and making your money from ads, and the products that you pimp for affiliate programs. That’s how you write when you’ve signed bad contracts with content mills that stole the rights to your work and now the only way you’ll ever profit from it is if you meet their daily word count requirements. That is an endless grind of desperation. For most writers who try this, the rewards are not nearly enough for the effort put in.
It’s okay to be the Sunday morning writer who shares a few thoughts once a week. It’s okay to publish one chapter at a time once a month. It’s okay to release the next book in a series once a year or spend ten years working on a book and seek to traditionally publish it after it’s edited and polished. You don’t have to write today, tomorrow, or the next day. Just like every other profession, professional writers take days off.
Sometimes we take weeks or even years off.
True, we have other forms of income sometimes if our royalties don’t support us through those times that we aren’t writing. But there is more than one way to write. There’s more than one way to be a writer. There are so many ways to publish. I’m not saying that every writer is going to be successful no matter what because success looks like different things to different people. It just isn’t necessary to write every day in order to be successful. You just need to be consistently refining your writing to be better and find the right audience for your work.
So write when you want to, what you want to because it’s something that brings you joy and makes you happy. Don’t turn your dream into a soul-crushing life-suck by trying to follow someone else’s expectations of what a writer is.
Comments