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Pretty much at the moment of my birth, my mother decided that she had a writing prodigy on her hands.

The hilarious part is I didn’t actually learn how to read until I was about five, maybe six, years old. Or rather, I refused to read until then. It was a whole fight with the kindergarten teachers to just let me be. Other kids were being coached on the alphabet and sounding out words (this was the 1970s), but not KimBooBoo. I got to draw or just goof off during those lessons.

How my mother won that victory against the school administration was a story my mother told over and over again to demonstrate that she knew what was best for me no matter what the professional educators told her.

No one should be surprised when she pulled me out of the education system and started homeschooling me when I was eight.

My mother’s firm belief was that my latent talent was all I needed to succeed. At the time, I had no other options than to believe her (she was Mother after all), and so began my journey of learning without a curriculum, driven by interests and “raw talent.”

But here’s the thing: she was wrong all along.

(I dare you not to be singing that!)

Mother believed that talent would always trump skills. Since I could learn how to do anything, that was not the important part. Skills were not worth focusing on, instead, once I crossed the Rubicon of literacy, I was let loose to do pretty much whatever I wanted…as long as it was reading or writing.

I guess my homeschooling was like the old Model A advertisement that claimed you could get that model of car in whatever color you wanted as long as you painted it yourself.

(I want to make clear that I’m not slamming on the “unschool” homeschool experience. I think it is possible to raise children in an unschooled environment without simply abandoning them, it’s just what my mother did.)

Since she decided I was a writing prodigy, she expected me to live up to the designation. What this meant in practice was that I wrote. Constantly. Obsessively. Not because I had self-discipline (definitely NO) but because writing was essentially the one structured thing I was pointed at and told: go. There wasn’t much else my mother had on offer.

I filled notebooks. I started stories I never finished, finished stories I immediately threw away, and wrote the same dramatic plot beats over and over in slightly different costumes. I wrote Star Wars and Star Trek fanfiction by the ream. I wrote fake newspaper articles for an audience of zero. I wrote stories where I was the hero, the villain, the narrator, and the love interest simultaneously. Just call me “Mary Sue KimBoo”! I wrote pastiches of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Anne McAffrey, Vonda McIntyre, and every other author I liked.

Mother looked at all of this and saw proof of her theory: talent. She believed my innate gift was expressing itself naturally, the way a flower grows toward light.

What she didn’t see (what I did not understand until much later) was that the flower was growing because someone had been quietly, relentlessly watering it. Not with metaphysical genius. With repetition.

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There’s a story I love from the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland that gets at this. A ceramics teacher divided his class into two groups on the first day. One group would be graded entirely on quantity, so their work would literally be weighed on a bathroom scale at the end of the semester, fifty pounds of pots earning an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. (Can you imagine being the kid with the pots weighing 49.8 pounds? I would riot!) The other group would be graded on quality. They only needed to produce a single pot, but it had to be perfect.

You can probably guess where this is going.

At the end of the semester, the pots which were the most technically accomplished and the most artistically interesting had all come from the quantity group. While they’d been busy making pots, screwing up, figuring out why, and making more pots, the quality group had spent the semester thinking about what a perfect pot would look like. In the end, they had, as Bayles and Orland put it, “grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Doing the thing, it turns out, is how you get good at the thing. Not thinking about the thing or waiting until you feel ready for the thing. The thing itself is the teacher.

My mother accidentally made me make ten thousand pots.

She thought she was nurturing a gift. And maybe she was, a little? I’m not here to argue that aptitude doesn’t exist at all, because I think it does. Some people do seem to take to certain skills more naturally than others. But aptitude without volume is just potential sitting on a shelf gathering dust. It doesn’t become skill until it gets used, over and over, until you’ve worn grooves into it. Then, and only then, does it become talent.

This is the thing I want to tell people when they compliment my writing and use the word talented, as if what they’re seeing is something I was simply born with, a coat I arrived wearing. It’s a kind thing to say but it quietly erases all the pots.

What I know now, looking back, is that talent was never the engine. Obviously I had a spark of something which was the thing that made writing feel interesting enough to keep doing it over the course of decades, but the engine was always the work itself.

If you’re a writer (or an artist, or a musician, or anyone trying to get better at a thing you care about) the best thing I can tell you to do isn’t to wait for your talent to show up or to sit with a blank page until something perfect emerges. It’s to make the pots. Write the bad first draft. Finish the messy story. Then write the next messy story.

Then, start the next one.

You don’t need to be talented to begin. You just need to begin, and then keep going.

Your talent, it turns out, takes care of itself.

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For years and years at the start of January, my friends and I have subjected ourselves to the popular visualization practice of “imagine where you want to be in five years.”

We all know that as an aspirational goal, that vision is something that may or may not be realized. Most of the time, plans get derailed due to “Life Happens,” but despite that it has generally been a good exercise to work through. Looking past the immediate moment is a crucial step in planning how we spend our time and plan our days, weeks, months. It is very necessary.

After decades of a few hits and many misses, though, it feels mostly pro forma, something we do by rote at the start of every new year. Personally, my goal changes flavor but never substance: financial stability, owning my own home and a nice used car, moving out of Florida, getting another rescue dog or two. Basic shit, as they say, and while I’m closer to those goals than ever before, it’s still a work in progress.

This year, though, a new question hit me like a meteor, and has profoundly changed not just my outlook but my plans and my goals. This question gets at the heart of being a writer and a storyteller, and digs its hook deep into my soul:

What do I want to have had written in five years?

What of my own work do I want on the shelf behind my desk? What stories do I want people talking about? Which of my (very many) story ideas are the ones I want to know are completed when look back in five years?

When the question first appeared in my mind, it was so shocking I had to sit in silence for a few minutes. I have, of course, given thought to what I want to publish, and what I want my author career to look like over the years. That part isn’t new.

What this question tears away though is that layer of “should” that has always weighed down my goals. I should write to market. I should publish X number of books a year. I should write X amount of words every day/week. I should focus on this or that metric, this or that trend, this or that income.

The difference is that all those “shoulds” are external goals, while asking myself what future!me wants to have written when I look back is internal.

This isn’t saying those external goals are not important if you want to make a living as a writer. Those “shoulds” are solid advice which have served many, many successful authors well over the years.

But in the end, for me at least, the question “Where do you want to be in five years?” rests on those externalities. It doesn’t speak to me as a storyteller.

What do I want to have had written in five years?

I now have a short list of the six writing projects which are the most important to me as a writer. These are the ones I want to see on my bookshelf in five years. They will not be perfect (nothing is!) and they might not be exactly what I envision today, but they will exist. I am writing them now, today, and tomorrow.

Whatever else I want to do and need to do must fit in around them. Whatever goals I have in other areas of my life have to make room for those stories.

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Here’s a fun question for every author who spends too much time staring at the “keywords” box on Amazon: what exactly is metadata, and why should you care?

Okay maybe it’s not that fun, but it is important!

Most writers think metadata begins and ends with categories and keywords for Amazon, or maybe BISAC codes if you’re feeling fancy. But metadata is a bit like an iceberg: what you can see above the surface is only a small fraction of what it actually does. And, like icebergs, it can either keep your boat afloat… or take it down.

Before you panic, take a deep breath! As a librarian, I studied things like taxonomies, metadata, paratext, cataloguing, and other obscure but incredibly important elements of information technology. I know just how complicated and arcane those topics can be, but I’m here to simplify it for you!

No, you won’t have to memorize schema.org fields (IYKYK!). You just need to know how metadata and paratext work together. They are simply two halves of the same coin.

The Basics

Metadata and paratext overlap in content, but not purpose. The title of a book, along with the author, the genre, and the blurb, are all important bits of information that can function as both.

Metadata is structured information about a thing, designed primarily for systems, not humans. The title and other data (along with the ISBN, tags, publication date, and more) let the system know what your book is and where it belongs. Metadata is functional.

Paratext is the interpretive framing that surrounds a work and shapes how humans experience it. It tells potential readers what they will feel if they read the book. So, yes, the title and the blurb and the writer and the cover are all paratext, too, but remember: the purpose of paratext is narrative.

Two Jobs for One Book

Think of your book like a job applicant. Metadata is its résumé: organized facts and descriptors that tell the algorithm (or librarian, or bookstore database) what it is: title, author, keywords, categories, ISBN, file type, page count, etc. All very tidy and measurable.

Paratext, on the other hand, is the cover letter and the outfit your book wears to the interview. It’s the tone of your back-cover blurb, the emotional atmosphere of your cover design, the tagline that whispers “you want to read me.” If metadata says “This is a fantasy novel set in an alternate Victorian England,” paratext says “Come wander the gaslit streets with a heroine who can outwit the devil himself.”

See? Same content. Different job.

Why This Matters for Writers

Because the way your book finds readers is not the same as how it keeps them.

• Metadata is all about visibility. It feeds the search engines and recommendation systems that decide what readers see. It’s all about how your book functions within a massive, impersonal ecosystem of algorithms, classification, and databases. That’s the brain: metadata.

• Paratext is about persuasion. It shapes the reader’s expectations, mood, and sense of whether this story belongs to them. How does your book make a reader feel when they encounter it? What’s the atmosphere, the promise, the allure? That’s the heart: paratext.

Confusing one for the other can sabotage both.

You can have flawless metadata that makes your book discoverable, but if the paratext (cover, blurb, description) doesn’t emotionally connect, readers will scroll right past.

Conversely, you can have dazzling design and a killer tagline, but if your metadata is vague (“General Fiction,” “Fantasy”), nobody is going to stumble across it in the first place.

And here’s the super annoying truth: one doesn’t work without the other. Metadata might get your book in front of 10,000 readers, but your paratext is what convinces some of those people to click “Buy.”

Making This Work for You

You don’t need to become a metadata specialist (that’s MY job!) but you do need to treat your metadata fields and paratext elements as part of one coherent reader experience.

When you’re updating your book details, pay attention to:

• Keywords and categories: Are they accurate and specific? Do they reflect the story’s actual audience, not just a dream market?

• Title and subtitle: Do they include natural language cues readers might actually type into a search bar?

• Blurb and jacket copy: Do they echo the mood implied by your cover art and reinforce what your metadata claims the book is?

• Series or author branding: Does your metadata reinforce continuity? Does your paratext carry an identifiable tone or promise that makes readers recognize you at a glance?

The Takeaway

Metadata and paratext are not separate worlds, they’re partners:

• Metadata helps your book get found.

• Paratext helps your book be chosen.

And both are, ultimately, part of your storytelling craft. Your story starts long before a reader opens it to the first page, often as early as when potential readers see a thumbnail image of your cover while scrolling Amazon on their lunch break. How did they find it, and what’s the author promise?

Get that part right, and the algorithms will be happy. But more importantly, the readers will be, too.

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I know! I know! I’ve been out of the loop forevah!!!!!

Yes, a large part of my absence for most of November ‘til now was due to being very sick for most of that time. I picked up a bog-standard cold on my way back from AuthorNation 2025 on Nov. 7th, and it just got worse and worse and worse until I went to the doctor, who gave me the good drugs. It’s over a month later and I’m still sounding hoarse and chugging cough syrup before bed, so you know it was bad.

But now, shockingly, it is December 9th! I’m looking down the barrel of 2026 and wondering what the hell I’m doing with my life.

Skipping the Backstory

There are a few things contributing to my current situation, including health, finances, gig work, and failed expectations. I’ll go into the details at some point, probably on January 31st. But for now, I want to talk about that thing we all love to hate, the end-of-year recap:

• Did I meet my writing goals? No.

• Did I hit my financial goals? Also no.

• Was the real destination the fun I had along the way? HELL NO.

Yes, I did have some fun in 2025! I did meet some goals! I did make enough money not to be homeless or even hungry! I count those as real wins.

But the aspirational goals? Nope, no, nada. ☹

The Diagnosis

I tend to be overly ambitious in my plans, but I am very self-aware of that. I know that I won’t hit all the targets I’m aiming for, simply because I put up too many targets and demand too much of myself. Still, it hurt a little to see just how many targets I missed completely.

As I did the autopsy of the past year, a few realizations hit me:

1. I’m a writer yet I don’t set long-term writing goals. I myopically focus on the short term, and usually that focus is centered on “what will make me money?” A valid question! …but not the only question.

2. Part of the reason that past attempts at “coaching” businesses always failed was because of my resistance to being “a teacher.”

The “5 Year” Prompt

I’m going to write a post about this exercise later, but the first problem led to asking myself an important question:

What do I want to have had written five years from now?

Think about it: In five years, what is on the checklist of “completed writing projects”? What do you want to be able to say “I wrote that!” about? You’ve got five years to make it happen, so what makes the cut?

Once I (literally) sat with this question, a lot of priorities crystalized for me. Not just stories, but time, effort, and energy.

Will I still be writing stories for money? You betcha. But I’ll also be writing stories for my legacy. Pin that thought, I’ll be coming back to it in future posts!

The Reframe

The second insight was more like wrestling with an angel. For years, friends and colleagues have told me that I’m a good teacher. I knew they were wrong because I do not have typical “teacher traits” such as extensive patience, a willingness to repeat myself a lot, and a sustained commitment to student excellence.

If that sounds like the description of an elementary school teacher, that’s because it is. That was the entire concept I had around being “a teacher.”

Until a few friends ganged up on me over the past couple of weeks and gave me a whole different paradigm: “professor.”

While I am not, technically, a professor (I have no desire to rejoin higher ed in any capacity, if I can help it; I did my time!) it’s the idea that a professor is not just a teacher but also a scholar, a collaborator, an author, a presenter, an expert.

That I can do!!!!

Again, something I plan to expound on in later posts, but the core of this reframing allowed me to reconsider teaching and coaching again.

Specifically: teaching authors about serials and serialization.

I’ve had people ask me to do this, and several people who attended my AuthorNation 2025 presentation on the topic told me that they learned a lot and would love to learn more. I wrote the book on it. I have presented on it locally and nationally and on multiple podcasts. I write about it. I study it. I am, in fact, one of the few experts on “modern serials and serialization for authors” anywhere.

Thus begins my Professorship Era!

And, more importantly, thus begins Serial Nation Academy!

MORE COMING AT YOU SOON!

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As usual, my friend and I were talking about books recently. She was frustrated because she had recently read a historical fiction novel and been thrown out of the story by some anachronisms that kept popping up. They were subtle, in that they were sociological terms and concepts that were simply unknown/undiscovered in the era the story was set in, so they were markedly out of place (and time!).

While I do not write and rarely read historical fiction, I understood her disappointment, because nothing will drive me out of an epic high-fantasy story faster than the phrase “laser-like focus.”

To be fair, it’s easy to do. I once was writing a story set in a pre-industrial society and had a character say, “Let’s put the pedal to the metal!” Which, if you don’t know, means pressing the gas pedal of a car all the way down to the floorboard in order to go as fast as possible. The characters were not driving a car, and in fact, cars did not exist in that world at all. I think they were running? So it was wildly inappropriate to use across all vectors.

Fortunately, I caught it in edits! But there are plenty of times when a story makes it to print with anachronisms like that. We’ve all seen them at some point.

In the case of the book Gina read, though, I wondered. Had the author of the historical fiction novel purposefully chosen those terms? They might have. It was a book that dealt with a lot of issues like racism, classism, and sexism, which were threaded through the storyline. Could it be the author wanted to make those elements clear to a modern audience?

We can argue about whether or not that is a skill issue, but I can see situations where even a highly competent author of historical fiction might want to do that.

I should know. I am that author.

To be fair, I’m talking about fanfiction in this case, which by its very nature requires a huge investment on “suspension of disbelief” from the outset. And also, I’m not entirely convinced I’m “a highly competent author,” but I am, at least, one possessing a professional level of experience.

Here is the situation: I am a huge fangirl of the Chinese dramas Nirvana in Fire and The Untamed. They are very different stories, but both are set in fictionalized versions of “ancient China.” In the case of Nirvana in Fire, that’s around the year 600 c.e., give or take (the Southern Liang Dynasty era, although again: fictionalized). In the case of The Untamed…er, it’s more like the popular “vaguely medieval European fantasy world” of Western high-fantasy traditions. It’s a whole mishmash of aesthetics with a lot of magic on top that is generally and generously described (with a raised eyebrow) as “ahistorical.” Even for the wuxia genre (the name of the fantasy genre the show is in), The Untamed is infamously non-specific about era, setting, fashion, and politics.

In writing fanfiction for those stories, I’m coming in like a wrecking ball: middle-class white American woman who does not know Mandarin and who has never visited China. I walked through the touristy parts of Chinatown in San Francisco once, which I can tell you for sure does not actually count for anything.

In such stories, a lot can fit into a small mistake. If I read a fanfic for The Untamed where the lead characters get married, they better be in “wedding red” and not “mourning white”…unless the story has been shifted to a western setting and they are very specifically having a Western-style “white wedding.” If an author does not explain that in-story, the author’s note needs to pick up the slack. If neither is in evidence, I will definitely bounce. I do not want readers to bounce out of my own stories, so I head that off at the pass.

My solution? The humble author’s note.

While an author’s note is not a required field in ye olde Archive of Our Own (AO3), it’s used a lot. For me as a writer of c-drama fanfic, I often use it to make clear what research I’ve done, why I made the choices I did about some aspects of the story, where I know I’ve fallen short, and that I’m open to corrections. I do a lot of research, and in fact I am the creator of the NiF Resource & Rec List, a database of online resources not just for fans of the show but for people interested in the Chinese history and culture of the era it is set in.

Despite that, I know that I get things wrong. How can I not? What I want the readers to know is whether those things were done on purpose or out of ignorance. An author’s note is an incredibly convenient way to do that.

But I’m biased. Honestly, one of my favorite things to read is an author’s note. Whether that’s a preface, an introduction, or the humble “note from the author,” I love ‘em. And while they are not usually done by the author, I love annotated editions of books too.

I know, ‘death of the author’ and all that. I promise you that I can and do appreciate the value of reading a work without the author forcibly imprinting their interpretations on me outside of the text itself.

Still, I really enjoy hearing from the author about their work. I always have.

In my not-so-wayward youth, author’s notes were pretty sparse. Publishers had no space to give most authors for extracurricular writing, unless it was a special edition of an already famous/infamous book. Most of the meta was saved for interviews, magazine articles, or conferences. The scarcity made such asides all the more valuable and interesting, but on the other hand, they were pretty scarce.

That is not the case with fanfiction.

If anything, it’s the reverse. Writers use the author’s note to recount their inspiration, or talk about problems they had with the story, or thank beta readers, or explain story elements that might not make sense otherwise (such as shifting the canon timeline or the canon ages of the characters).

Furthermore, AO3 also offers authors endnotes as well as chapter notes. Not everyone uses all of these options, but many do.

For instance, I have used chapter notes to warn for upsetting content. I know some people hate content warnings, and it must be nice to live a life of such privilege. The rest of us often have things that we find so upsetting that we’re pulled out of the story, which can range from arachnophobia to animal abuse to rape. In my opinion, it’s just polite to give people the resources to make their own decisions about what they read. I use tags for stories I put on AO3, but the chapter notes are where I can detail what is happening in that specific chapter, if it relates to a warning.

(If you want to see this in action, the chapter note for Chapter 65 (“End of an Era”) of my fanfic The Bastards of Yunmeng is a good example, where I explain the scenario behind a “read more” cut for those who feel they need to know.)

But aside from all those practical reasons, author’s notes are great place to have some fun! I often include humorous asides about what characters are thinking in a given scene, which are little bon mots that would be completely out of place within the story itself. Not quite post-credits extras, not quite blooper reels, these tiny extra story bites invite the reader in on the joke with me.

Unlike printed material such as zines, journals, and books, space on a webpage is plentiful. I’d love to see more writers embracing the author’s note as a way to connect with readers. I plan to start using them more for my serialized fiction, myself!

It’s obviously not for everyone, as there are plenty of writers who simply want their stories to stand on their own. But for many of us, the author’s note provides interesting, enlightening, and intimate connections to the story, expanding it beyond the text into a personal conversation with the author. Readers who hate author’s notes can skip them, so there is little harm in putting them out there if you feel so inclined.

I, for one, would love to read them.

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The Great Reorganization (Charlie Brown!) took nearly two years of my life, and honestly still isn’t done completely. While most everything I don’t immediately need in my life is packed up in totes (surely everyone remembers The York Hoard????), I still have six old plastic totes filled with what I call “The York Papers Archive.”

The York Papers are, as of yet, a haphazard collection of my parents’ paperwork and letters and artifacts from their lives, from high school year books (1936 for Poppa; 1956 for Mother) to their joint tax returns to letters they sent and received over the years to the remains of Mother’s inconsistent scrapbooking habit. I have a plan, I do! But for now, they sit in the janky old totes awaiting better days.

One of those totes I did repack, though, because it is mine and mine alone: my New College of Florida career-in-a-box:

That document propped up in the back is an official copy of my thesis, while all the folders represent classes I took or projects I worked on.

What is most interesting to me, though, is that little box sitting on the left. That, my dear friends who are too young to recognize it, is a box of floppy disks.

I know that by themselves they are not particularly interesting, nothing more than a footnote in the history of technology. They have been in storage for 30+ years, and it would be a miracle if any data on them is recoverable. Anyway, who needs four different versions of my graduate thesis in WordPerfect for Amiga file format?

Oh .wpd, how we miss thee!

What mesmerizes me though is the contrast: a big box of paperwork and a tiny box of data. This was the world I graduated into: the early 1990s shift from analog to digital.

It was a short walk off a short plank, honestly. We had no idea what was coming for us.

I was on the cutting edge by using a word processor to write my thesis. My school had one of the infamous “Mac Labs,” which was a classroom retrofitted to hold ten or more Apple Macintosh Plus computers donated by Apple in order to indoctrinate young impressionable minds into the Cult of Apple. (Spoiler: it worked.)

That said, I honestly don’t remember why I decided to write my thesis on the Amiga instead of one of the on-campus Apples. I certainly did a lot of work on those Macintosh Plus machines, from papers to creative writing to a very short lived, two-issue literary zine I pretentiously named Modus Operandi. I think at least one or two of the disks in that box are for the Macintoshes. Perhaps I wanted to be able to just “work from home” instead of traipsing to campus every time I needed to write? I remember that I borrowed the machine from my friend Victor, who (iirc) had just finished writing his thesis and was traveling, so offered to let me use it in lieu of him putting it into storage for a few months. Hashtag ForeverGrateful!

I rode the cusp into a new age the same way my father did. For him, born in 1923, it was the rise of airplanes and telephones and movies. He arrived during the era of post-WWI biplanes and died long after we landed on the moon. The first motion pictures he ever saw were probably silent ones, while his favorite VHS tape was the movie Silverado (1985).

We adjust to marvelous new things with alarming rapidity, I suppose. The amazing becomes mundane.

If you think this post is about A.I., it both is and isn’t. A.I. really is here to stay, even if everyone wholesale stops using LLMs (which I truly doubt will happen) because it represents an astounding breakthrough in technology.

Yes, the hype bubble will burst at some point, and then we will just be left with the tech, however useful it is or is not. It’s worth remembering that the dotcom bubble also burst pretty spectacularly and we’re all here 25 years later, using the “World Wide Web” (does anyone use that phrase anymore???) on the regular. That doesn’t mean that AI as we know it now is long for this world. Apple is still making the distant descendants of those Macintoshes, but who uses a Commodore Amiga anymore? Or even WordPerfect?

We never actually know where this is all going. The crystal ball is a bit cloudy.

True, one of the first movies ever made was A Trip to the Moon in 1902, when manned flight outside of hot air balloons was not a thing people did. And yet, less than 70 years later, a human stepped out onto the moon.

Was it prophetic? Was Jules Verne a time traveler? Did we go to the moon because we imagined doing it, or did we imagine it was possible because we knew we could do it?

Granny, born in 1898, used to tell me how much her father despised the advent of the telephone. He just thought they were unnecessary—newfangled gadgets of no actual value. And honestly, for a while, they were exactly that. They were a luxury…then they were trendy, then they were common, then they were a necessity. And then, of course, they became “smart.”

Apple set up those “Mac Labs” all over the country, knowing that the way to make their products indispensable to the next generation was to train people to use them first. Most of us who initially encountered graphic UI and a “mouse” did so without buying a machine for ourselves, because they were luxury items that cost a lot more than my car. They quickly became trendy, and as the “desktop computer revolution” rolled on, whether we bought Macs or IBM PCs, personal computers became common. Eventually, they became necessities. Then, of course, they became “smart” too.

(For all of us complaining about A.I. being shoved into everything, it’s worth remembering that the technique has a successful track record, however much we hate it.)

I was a late comer to smart phones because, like my great-grandfather griping about “a telephone in every house is excessive and wasteful!”, I did not understand why anyone needed the Internet on their mobile phone.

…Yeah, I guess we both got shown up there.

When I bought that box of floppy disks back in 1992, I was only vaguely aware of the seismic shifts of technology I was walking over. I still don’t have a clue as to what the future holds, despite a youth steeped in Future Shock and Neuromancer, but I’ve learned that the future will always surprise you, simply because we take the present for granted.

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I regret to say that I used to be a part of a Potter-head household. I genuinely loved HP at the time, but the true super-fan was my ex-husband, who was absolutely infatuated with the series. To this day I miss the era of feel-good HP fandom and all the nostalgia tinged memories I have of the book and movie releases.

But good times fade and true colors rise, so it’s been a few years now since I tossed my entire HP collection in the trash. (I love books as artifacts, but I had zero regrets throwing away those representations of hate, bigotry, and cruelty.)

I know it’s still popular worldwide, but in my little social bubble no one even mentions it anymore without doing the virtual online equivalent of spitting on the floor. So, it was a bit of a surprise to find HP discourse wedging its way back into my life.

Especially given that it was discourse around former-fanfics-turned-original-fiction.

I am not actually going to dive into that whole hoopla, since I don’t have skin in the HP game as a fan, a HP fanfic author/reader, or a fan of the authors involved. Here is a good breakdown on youtube by Jill Bearup which digs into it, and you can decide for yourself it the matter is vitally important or simply overblown.

My take on it is about the circumstances at the core of the wank: fanfic authors filing off the serial numbers to republish their fanfiction as original works.

TL;DR - Don’t do it.

I understand how tempting it is for a fanfic author to take their most popular fic and rework it into an “original” story, because it feels like it will be an easy way to publish a story you know people enjoy reading. Personally, I have about four fanfic that I think would make great original stories if I put some time into filing off the serial numbers, but every time I come close to doing that, I stop myself.

It’s not because I think it is “wrong” on some level, nor is it because I’m worried about intellectual property (IP) infringement…no, I have the skills by now to push the stories far enough from their source material not to make me liable for a lawsuit.

I could, but I don’t.

The reason I don’t do it is the same reason I suggest you don’t do it: it won’t make you happy as an author.

There are several factors behind why I believe this is true, based on the many authors I know who have done it anyway. I’m not speaking for all authors, obviously. I’ve never heard Naomi Novik regret turning her Master & Commander fanfic concepts into a highly successful original series about dragon riders of the Napoleonic Wars era. Cassandra Claire and E.L. James have done okay for themselves too (even despite their own controversies)

Those kinds of successful transitions are few and far between, but they happen often enough to tempt newer writers into trying to do it for themselves.

The drawbacks are real, though, and if you are considering filing off the serial numbers on your most popular fanfic, it’s worth considering the following points before picking up the rasp:

1. The Cheat Code Effect: Sometimes it is great to just win the damn game, no matter what it takes. More often, though, it’s a false sense of accomplishment. You cheated, and you know you cheated, and now you don’t know if you could win the game honestly. Many authors who go this route never publish a second book, because they sink into the quagmire of uncertainty: can they write original fiction? Do they have the chops? I think that most of the time, they can and they do; but the Cheat Code Effect saps their confidence.

2. Breaking the Fandom Social Contract: This is something that can sneak up on an author. It happens when they decide (or are forced by their publisher) to take down the original fanfic version of the story in preference to the novel being released. Admittedly, some people don’t care about the fandom they wrote in (ref. Cassandra Claire). If that’s you, then godspeed! Don’t look back! But most of us feel a sense of kinship with our fellow fans, and deleting a fic can result in a profound sense of guilt* even if you don’t think it will at first. It can also make former fans of the story very angry and bitter toward the author, which, especially in smaller fandoms, can resonate for years.

3. Haunted by Your Past (Fandom Edition): The basic fact is that no matter how much you shift the world-building and file down the numbers, your “original” story will always, always be remembered as “that story that used to be fanfic.” Again, witness E.L. James: you might not give a damn! But that really does bother some authors I know, especially the ones who have gone on to write a lot of other genuinely original stories. While we are moving past the era of fanfiction being a career killer for an author, there remain plenty of people in publishing and writing and reading circles who look down their nose at fanfiction in much the same way they look down their nose at the romance genre. (Misogyny all the way down? Yes. Still a factor in an author’s career? Also yes.)

All of this is why my go-to argument for anyone considering this course of action is to put down th rasp and stop doubting yourself. If you have written one popular story, you can write another!

If you don’t think you can find an original story idea that is fresh enough to interest you or potential readers, I suggest sitting down and identifying the tropes and archetypes that attract you to a fandom in the first place, then build out a story from there. This is a process I go into detail on in my book, Out from Fanfic, so if you are curious (or desperate?) you might start there!

* The situation I am addressing in this post is very specifically about authors who delete a fic because they repurposed it into a (semi-)original novel. There are a lot of other reasons people delete fic, and while I do judge a little bit, it’s not my place to question why or confront them about it. Or yours. Or anyone’s! While I think orphaning fic (as allowed by AO3) is a much kinder and more responsible road to take, the final decision rests with the author of the story.

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What is intuition?

Specifically, what is creative intuition for writers?

The dictionary definition for “intuition” usually goes something like this: “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.”

But that does not lend itself it trustworthiness. If you can’t provide conscious reasoning for your understanding, do you understand it at all? Or is it a timing issue: you understand something before you can explain it? But then is that not just akin to justification?

As someone who often could answer a complex math problem as a kid but could not for the life of me memorize multiplication tables or the order of PEMDAS (it’s right there!!! In the acronym! The order! Is! There! “KimBoo whyyyyyyy,” my parents probably), intuition has not been my friend. Instead it is the thing that got me in trouble, even with my creative writing.

“Why is this character climbing up the mountain to talk to the old witch?” Dunno, feels right, I guess?

Becca Syme in her book Dear Writer: Are You Intuitive? describes intuition as a form of pattern recognition. It’s not a “gut feeling,” as it is so often described. In fact, it is not a feeling at all. It is your brain connecting dots so quickly that you are not aware of the connections until you look backwards to figure out why you know what you know, or did what you did.

I think that is a good start for a definition of creative intuition, and I highly recommend that book for all writers, but I knew there was more to it.

When I was recording a recent episode of Around the Writer’s Table podcast, my co-hosts asked me what my definition of intuition is. I intuitively answered: “It is the combination of experience and imagination.”

I want to stress that experience isn't just about how many books you've read or how long you've been writing. It's about the depth of your engagement with stories, both as a reader and a writer. It's about understanding narrative structures, character arcs, pacing, dialogue, and all the other elements that make up a good story. It's about knowing the rules so well that you can break them effectively.

Imagination, meanwhile, is your unique perspective, your ability to make unexpected connections, to see the world in a way no one else does. It's what allows you to take familiar concepts and combine them in new and exciting ways.

When these two elements come together, that's when the magic, a.k.a. intuition, happens. That's when you write a scene that surprises even you, or when you suddenly understand your character's motivations in a way you never did before.

Intuition in Practice

In my post What is the Worst that Could Happen? I was discussing how discovery writers can get ourselves out of a jam by imagining not what should happen next but the absolutely worst thing that could happen next. As an example, I used the tired old trope, “the knight rescuing a princess/prince/princette from a dragon.”

Our experience as readers and students of literature/writing tells us what is going on: the knight has ridden his warhorse up to the dragon’s lair to rescue the fair maiden princess from certain doom.

Creative intuition is knowing the trope (experience) and then subverting it or using it in an unexpected way (imagination).

Admittedly, subverting that trope is fairly easy and at this point has been done a lot (mix up the genders, turn the dragon into the hero and the knight into the villain, make the dragon and the knight friends, give the princess the agency to save herself, etc.). But that’s part of our intuition as well. Anyone who has been reading modern fairytale retellings will know what has been done, what has worked, and what hasn’t worked (and why). They have experience with that trope, which pushes their creativity even further out into unexpected territory.

In other words, experience counts and uninformed “intuition” is just guesswork.

This is why you hear me saying a lot that intuition (and discovery writing) can be developed, and that studying the craft of writing is critical. As writers, we must read widely as well as study our genre-of-choice; we must engage in critical analysis of texts; we must put in the time to improve our craft.

But knowledge alone does not create amazing stories. At some point, we have to learn to trust our intuition by allowing our imagination to engage with our experience.

Developing Your Creative Intuition

So how can we develop this connection between experience and imagination? Here are a few ideas:

• Read widely and deeply: Don't just stick to your favorite genre. Read classics, contemporary works, experimental fiction, non-fiction. Analyze what works and what doesn't in each book you read.

• Write regularly: Like any skill, writing improves with practice. The more you write, the more you'll develop your intuitive sense of story. No, you don’t have to “write every day!” but you need to take time on the regular to practice your craft.

• Experiment: Try writing in different genres, styles, or points of view. This stretches your imagination and expands your experience.

• Analyze your own work: After you've finished a piece, take some time to reflect on why you made certain choices. This helps you understand your own intuitive process. I re-read my own work a lot to consider how I could do things differently, what worked, what didn’t. Every time I read an older story, I learn something new about my own process.

• Engage with other writers: Discuss craft, share work, give and receive feedback. This exposes you to different perspectives and approaches. (You could also listen to my podcasts!)

• Study craft: Read books on writing, attend workshops, watch lectures. The more you understand about the mechanics of good writing, the more your intuition has to work with.

• Live life: Experience is not just about books. Travel, meet new people, try new things. All of those experiences feed into your creativity!

Trusting Your Intuition

Developing your creative intuition is one thing; trusting it is another. Many writers, especially those just starting out, second-guess their intuitive choices. They worry that if they can't explain why they made a certain decision, it must be wrong.

But remember, intuition is about pattern recognition happening faster than your conscious mind can process. Just because you can't immediately explain why something feels right doesn't mean it's wrong.

That said, intuition isn't infallible. It's a tool, not a magic wand. Sometimes your intuition will lead you astray, and that's okay. That's part of the process. The key is to strike a balance between trusting your intuition and being willing to revise and rethink when necessary.

In the end, creative intuition is about developing a deep, almost subconscious understanding of storytelling. It's about internalizing the rules and conventions of writing so thoroughly that you can play with them fearlessly. It's about trusting yourself to make bold choices, even when you can't immediately justify them.

Next time you're writing and you make a choice that you can't quite explain, don't immediately dismiss it. Take a moment to explore it. You might just find that your intuition has led you somewhere amazing!

NOTE: This piece was originally published on 9/4/2024 on Jane Friedman’s blog. It is republished here with permission.

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This is the fifth post in the Hobbyist Author Guide series; please read the initial overview to see where we’re at and where we’re going!

Part 1: Overview

Part 2: Writing

Part 3: Editing

Part 4: Pre-press

Part 5: PUBLISH! (You are here! At last! …get ready for another long post, sorry.)

What does it mean to “publish a book”?

Probably not a question you’ve spent much time thinking about, but it was a hot topic for a hot minute back in 2008.

When ebooks were first on the rise after the launch of Amazon’s Kindle, a lot of people in the blogosphere (remember that? No? Just me then?) claimed that “publishing a book” was only to be used in reference to a traditional publishing house producing a hard-copy product that could be distributed to book stores and libraries. Many, many, many people claimed that “ebooks aren’t real books!” although they won’t admit they ever said that these days…probably because they have read, and possibly published, ebooks themselves.

But it raises the question: is “publishing” just the act of making something available publicly for people to read? Did I “publish” this blog post, then? Or just “post” it?

There are a lot of ways split hairs on the topic, but for the sake of this published post, I’m going to define “publishing” as “making your book available to be read by your target audience.” That’s pretty simple and straightforward and covers a lot of bases.

So! Now that you’ve got your book formatted with a cover and everything, it’s time to push the “publish” button and be done with it!

Hahahahaha! No!

There is no one button and there are multiple steps and it all circles back around to the question I keep grilling you on: what is your end goal is for the book?

Whether your plan for that family history book full of photos is to have 100 paperback copies to hand out at the reunion picnic, or if your plan is to have your magnum opus epic fantasy novel for sale on all the platforms in all the editions, you still need to make a few decisions, know what an ISBN is and whether you need one or not, and have some basic information about your book ready to go.

The Pre-Press post walked you through getting to this point, so hopefully you have most of what you need, but in addition to a formatted file and a cover in every edition you plan to publish (ebook, paperback, large print, etc.), you will need a blurb to know the category your book falls into.

First, Some Definitions

My friend reminded me that I tend to throw around these terms under the assumption everyone knows what I’m talking about, but many people are not familiar with them the way I am. Here are explanations so you will know what they mean going forward:

• ISBN (International Standard Book Number): A unique code used to identify your book which is required for printed books and (usually) for wide ebook distribution. Think of it like your book’s serial number. If you open any book you own and look on the copyright page, it’s a thirteen number code usually starting with “978-”. Depending on what country you live in, ISBNs might be free, low cost, or extremely expensive. In the U.S.A., the only official source for buying ISBNs is Bowker, and they charge whatever the heck they feel like charging. Yeah, I hate it too. (It’s why a lot of U.S. authors just go with “free” Amazon ISBNs when starting out.)

• Proof Copy: A printed version of your book used to check for errors before final publication. It's often ordered through your publishing platform (like Amazon KDP or Lulu) so you can review the layout, formatting, and physical quality. Proof copies are not for resale, they’re simply a preview, allowing you to catch and fix any issues before your book goes live to readers.

• Book Blurb: The short description that goes on your sales page or back cover. It’s what readers see first, so if you are trying to make some sales, then make it enticing!

• Book Category / BISAC Record: The genre, subject, and classification information about your book that retailers use list it correctly.

• Keywords: Search terms readers might use to find books like yours. You enter these when uploading your book to retailers, and are either single words or short phrases.

• Wide Distribution: Your book is available through a variety of online stores, not just Amazon.

• Direct Sales: Selling copies of your book directly to your readers through your own store, in person or online, without using Amazon or other retailers.

You might not need to use all of these things, but it’s good to know what they are before you get knee deep into the mud of publishing!

Taking it Level by Level

In every single post before this one, I’ve harangued you about “starting with the end in mind,” that is, what your goal is for publishing your book. This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. I’ve decided to parse this out into levels from least complicated to most complicated, so you can stop when you get to the part you specifically need for your specific, unique book!

1. Non-Distributed Books

If your goal is simply to create a printed book to share with friends and family—the aforementioned family genealogies, personal memoirs, or a poetry chapbook—then we call that a non-distributed book. You are not planning to sell it through retailers like Amazon or Barnes & Noble because it will be gifted or sold in person, and usually printed in small batches of between 50 to 500 copies.

The easiest way to do this is to use a print-on-demand (POD) service like Lulu or Canva, which is simple to use, lets you order printed copies as needed, and doesn’t require the same level of preparation that a commercially distributed book would. You will have to pay for the copies (at cost) up front, and shipping as well, but it’s one-and-done for however many copies you’ve ordered.

What You (Don’t) Need to Do:

• No ISBN is required books of this kind!

• No marketing needed (keywords, categories, or blurbs), since you aren’t distributing through a retailer.

• No public sales or online listings necessary.

I definitely recommend getting a proof copy before putting in your final order. You might be surprised at what problems you run into, such as issues with the cover or colors not printing the way you thought they would!

Another version of a “non-distributed” book is what is known as a freebie or funnel book. These are often created by entrepreneurs or businesses as a lure to get people to sign up for newsletters or other services. These books are generally digital only and also do not need ISBNs. Since they are being given away as digital files, there is no need to fuss over blurbs or keywords.

2. Limited Distribution

This is the next step up. If you’ve written a novel or non-fiction book and you want to make it available to a wider audience but you’re not interested in tackling a complex publishing strategy, then keeping your distribution limited to one platform is the easiest way to go.

A lot of people going this route only use Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), but you can chose a different platform like Kobo if you want.

Sticking with Amazon since that’s what most people are familiar with, there is a very important distinction to make here: “KDP” is Amazon’s publishing platform as a whole, managing ebooks, print books, and Kindle Unlimited (KU).

That last one is often used interchangeably with KDP but it is very important to understand that Kindle Unlimited is a program offered by KDP. When you publish on KDP, you can decide whether or not your book is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. The benefit is that your book will be available to all the subscribers of the Kindle Unlimited app, who pay about $15 a month in order to read as many books as they want which are in the program (not all books on Amazon are enrolled in KU!). You get paid for “page reads” which are extremely cheap per page but add up over time. The drawback is that your book will be “exclusive” to Amazon, meaning that for a set period of time (three months at the time of writing this) you cannot sell the ebook version on any other platform, or have it available online anywhere. While this does not affect print or audio editions, it’s a significant drawback for a lot of authors who do not want that kind of restriction.

There is a lot of back and forth in the author community about whether KU is worth the terms, but that’s an individual choice. If you only plan on publishing your ebook on Amazon, anyway, though, there is really no reason not to enroll in KU.

As for ISBNs:

• Ebook: If you have bought an ISBN, you can use it, but it’s not a requirement, as Amazon will assign their own in-house identification number, known as an AISN.

• Paperback: Requires an ISBN, but Amazon will provide a free ISBN for your paperback. There are pros and cons to using their ISBN, though, such as if you decide to publish it anywhere else you will need a separate ISBN because the one Amazon provides is exclusively for the “Amazon edition”. Or you can purchase your own if you want to retain full control over your edition.

What You’ll Need:

• ISBN: Only required for the paperback (Amazon provides one for free if you want).

• Book Blurb: This is a short, enticing summary that appears on your Amazon listing and back cover. It’s like the “pitch” for the book.

• Book Category / BISAC: You'll need to select the genre or subject area your book most closely fits when uploading (e.g., mystery, self-help, historical fiction).

• Keywords: The 7-10 words or phrases that help readers find your book when they search on Amazon, such as “small town romance” or “time travel thriller.”

This approach allows you to reach readers through a well-known online platform without having to manage your own sales infrastructure. Many, many, many successful indie authors launched their careers using KDP and KU exclusively, not branching out into wide or direct sales until they were already well established with a legion of fans. Is this harder to do in 2025 then it was in 2010? Yes, definitely, because there is a lot more competition. But, it’s still a good plan if you want to keep things simple to start with, especially if you have no plans to ever write more than a book or two.

3. Wide Distribution

“Going wide” means making your book available through a range of retailers, not just Amazon. This includes stores like Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and even some library and international platforms.

Doing this manually (that is, uploading to each platform separately) is a substantial undertaking, but fortunately, we now live in a world where “aggregator” platforms do the work for you. They charge a fee and/or take a cut of your royalties, but usually not much, and also can get your book into places that indies alone don’t have access to, like libraries. The most well known is Draft2Digital, but there a few other good ones out there like PublishDrive and StreetLib as well. Each have their own fees/royalty splits, so do your research to find the best match for you!

How does this work? You upload your book once, and they handle the distribution across multiple channels, both big ones (Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.) and smaller ones (international retailers, libraries, online lending services, etc.). You still control your pricing, book info, and content, but without having to maintain accounts with each store individually.

A few, like Draft2Digital, even offer a free ISBN for your print version if you don’t want to buy one (although the same limitations apply as using an Amazon ISBN).

What You Need:

Mostly it’s the same as the list above for limited distribution:

• ISBN: Required for both ebook and print (most aggregators offer a free one if needed, or a substitute, but definitely read the fine print!) but not audio (if they handle audio, but many don’t).

• Book Blurb

• Book Category / BISAC

• Keywords

The benefits of going “wide” is that this level of publishing gives your book more reach—and looks more “professional”—without dramatically increasing your workload.

The main issue is one that hobbyist authors may or may not care about, which is that discoverability (getting readers to find your work) is all on your own shoulders. Professional authors like me who are “wide” spend a lot of time (and money) on marketing and advertising for this very reason. No, it’s not fun. *cries over coffee*

4. Direct Sales

This level is best for authors interested in full control over their book sales, branding, and reader experience. Direct sales pulls you out of the “hobbyist” arena, though, and will take more work than you think it will—I don’t care how easy Shopify tells you it will be!

As you’ve probably guessed, with direct sales you bypass the major retailers entirely (or supplement them) by selling books directly to readers via a webstore.

You can use tools like Shopify, Itch.io, Gumroad, or WooCommerce (for WordPress-based author sites) to sell ebooks via download links or print books either through print-on-demand fulfillment partners or by shipping inventory yourself.

This method lets you keep more of your earnings, access customer data, and build a closer relationship with your audience.

What You Need:

• ISBN: Required for all editions and formats you’re selling.

• E-Commerce Setup: You’ll need a website or store platform.

• Book Blurb, Category, and Keywords are still necessary, especially if you're marketing through search engines or social media.

• Fulfillment Method: For printed books, decide if you’ll use a print-on-demand service (like Lulu or BookVault) or manage shipping yourself. For ebooks, you will need some kind of file delivery system/service (Bookfunnel is a popular service I use, it’s been around for a while).

Obviously, direct sales involve more setup but give you the most control and potentially the highest profit per sale. A lot of authors (including me) offer direct sales in addition to having our books available on all the major retailer sites. If you find yourself moving in this direction, congratulations, you have jumped the chasm to “professional author” status!

And that’s all, folks!

If you’ve read this far, you deserve A FREE CHECKLIST! It is a google doc that you can copy or C&P into a personal file for you to use and abuse.

Because this series was written for hobbyist authors, I won’t be doing a post on marketing/advertising, but if you have any questions, please ask! That said, I’m not a superior marketer, so I highly suggest finding and following book sales experts like Russell Nohelty and Mal Cooper for advice. Keep in mind that while there are plenty of good marketing gurus out there, a lot depends on your genre. There is a very big difference between marketing a romance novel vs. a spy thriller vs. a non-fiction business advice book!

I hope these posts help you or a loved one out on their journey to publish a book!

If you have any questions please leave a comment!

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This is the fourth post in the Hobbyist Author Guide series; please read the initial overview to see where we’re at and where we’re going!

Part 1: Overview

Part 2: Writing

Part 3: Editing

Part 4: Pre-press - You are here!

(Originally I was just going to have one post covering “how to publish your book” as a whole, but as I got into it, I realized that it would be very long. It made more sense to divide it into two sections instead, with this post being about the “pre-press” part of the process. It’s still very long, though. Sorry.)

What is pre-press, you ask?

All the fiddly parts of publishing a book that happens between finished edits on the manuscript and putting the book up for sale.

Most people who are unfamiliar with the publishing industry don’t put much thought into covers and formats and editions, as they tend to be things you take for granted. Of course your book has page numbers! Of course your epic fantasy story has a dragon on the cover! Of course you have ebook, audio, print, and large print editions! Like it’s hard?

To be honest, it’s not hard. But that does not mean it’s simple! Getting your book ready to be released into the wild requires a lot of important steps, some of which you probably did not account for (before reading this post, that is!).

Let’s start by asking what you want to end with. I know, you think that’s the easy question (“a book!”) but it’s got a few variations.

Back to the beginning: what is the purpose of this book?

If you want to have fifty printed copies of your family history to hand out at the reunion picnic but you don’t care much about having it as an ebook people can buy online, then your process is going to look very different from someone who wants their fiction novel in all the stores.

There is some overlap no matter what your answer is, but it will have a major impact on important aspects. Here are some examples of paths you can take:

• A printed hard copy to sell/give away to family and at regional festivals (paid for upfront and printed via a service such as Lulu.com or Canva. You can use Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) or IngramSpark for this, but they are not as user friendly).

• An ebook you can give away as a “freebie” to get people to sign up for your newsletter (depending on format, such as PDF or ePUB, this can be designed using publishing software with no need to go through a publishing service). A lot of business entrepreneurs do this to bulk up their email list.

• A book that is for sale in all the retail stores (Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.) and is available in multiple formats (ebook, paperback, large print).

• A special limited edition printed hardcover funded via crowd-sourcing (Kickstarter, etc.)

It’s possible to mix and match those options, such as giving away the ebook to subscribers while also funding a special print edition using Kickstarter. There are no rules here, which is why I put so much stress on “start with the end in mind!”

I’m going to break it down in sections: editions, formatting, and covers.

BUT FIRST: A WARNING

There are a lot of companies out there who say they are “publishers,” who offer to do all the hard work of putting a book together for you for a convenient not-so-low fee. Sometimes they even throw in editing services and cover design services.

All too often, such companies are just modern “vanity presses.” While there valid assisted self-publishing services out there who can do all of these under one roof, vanity presses are not that. They charge high prices and provide you very little quality for it.

For a much longer, in-depth explanation on the differences between vanity presses and assisted self-publishing services, visit the excellent and well-respected site Writer Beware. They also have a blog that keeps you up to date on new scams targeting authors.

Okay, with that said, let’s get down to brass tacks, starting with:

Editions

A book edition is just a version of the text, including ebook, paperback, hardcover, large print, and audiobook. A lot of authors also do “special editions” which are fancy hardcover books, usually with embossed covers and “sprayed” (decorated) edges and ribbon place holders. Those are expensive and expensive to produce, so usually they are not the initial “go to” choice to publish. But you do you!

All decisions from here on roll out from the editions you decide to print. At the pre-press stage, this determines how many different versions of the interior formatting are needed, and how many versions of the cover. We’ll get to that eventually, but for now, my advice is to keep it simple. Most hobbyist authors are well served with an ebook version and a paperback version. If you plan to put a book up for sale, then you should probably include a large print version of the paperback as well. Some printers offer hardbacks using the same formatted files as the paperback version, so check for that.

BEFORE YOU START

You have a finished manuscript, and you think you are ready to start formatting, but you are not. You will need things you never thought of, so go over this checklist:

• Title

• Subtitle

• Blurb for the back cover of the print edition

• Author bio to be included in the book (usually in the end matter)

• Short author bio for the back cover (not required, but common)

• Copyright information

• Extras you may or may not need: Acknowledgments, dedication, preface, bibliography, references, index

Once you’ve nailed all of that, it’s time for:

Formatting

“Formatting” a.k.a “typesetting” is everything between the covers! Different editions all need different formats, because what looks good in an ebook might not look good in print.

Aside: Generally, “formatting” tends to refer to creating a full ebook, while “typesetting” refers to laying out the interior of a print version. These days, though, the terms are often used interchangeably. (Sorry, typesetters!)

Even after all my years of experience in publishing, I learned the hard way how easy it is to just gloss over important elements. I published a non-fiction book about writing craft and the ebook contained a fair amount of live links to websites and apps (that is, links readers could tap or click on the link to visit the site). I used the same basic file to create the printed version, and it wasn’t until a reader complained that she had no way to get to the links mentioned in the printed book that I realized I had not provided any resource listing the URLs for those links. You can tap a printed page as much as you like, but a website will not materialize in front of you!

These days, all my non-fiction books include a URL which readers can type into a browser that leads to a webpage containing the links listed in the book. It’s an extra step I only need to do for the print version, but it’s necessary. If I had spent a few moments thinking about the different editions I needed, I probably would have done it from the start.

Once you know the editions you want formatted/typeset, you are ready to:

1. Hire it out.

2. DIY it.

I’m going to be honest with you upfront: I highly suggest hiring it out. I’ll have some DIY advice down below, but if you are not going to be publishing more than one or two books, the time and money you need to invest in going the DIY route will be outsized to what you would pay to have someone else do it. Even if you are MS Word master and/or a well-seasoned computer programmer, there are hurdles to the DIY route you never planned on.

That said, let’s break it down!

If you hire it out, look at gig sites (Fiverr, Upwork, etc.) to find professional formatters/typesetters. You do not need to go through a publishing service, in fact, I highly recommend against it as all too often they are just vanity presses with a veneer of respectability (see the warning above, if you skipped it!).

Make sure whomever you hire is familiar with formatting books, not just brochures or pamphlets, and in the editions you need. Ask them what software they are using, as well. Answers should include one or more of the following: Adobe InDesign, Affinity Publisher, Vellum, Atticus, and Sigil. There are other formatting programs out there, but those are the most common. If they only list Canva, for instance, then they are not book designers.

Costs vary wildly depending on the experience of the designer, but as with all things graphic-design related, I do not suggest going for the cheapest option because you will definitely get what you pay for. Also, if your book contains a lot of graphics (photos, infographics, illustrations) expect to pay more for the formatting—dealing with images is always a hassle, and formatters earn their keep with complicated work like that!

Most formatters will ask for details about what you are looking for, both in regards to the different editions you need and the aesthetics/style. You might not think too much about how the interior of a book is styled, but next time you are at a bookstore put a few disparate books side by side and you’ll notice subtle differences between genres like literary fiction, YA novels, and self-help. You don’t need to know a lot about fonts or art history here, but have a few ideas at hand to set the vibe: professional; whimsical; modern; vintage; etcetera.

You’ll usually get one or two revisions included in the price, but that means you need a good idea before you hire the formatter of what you want. Being able to provide them with the names similar books in your genre or books that you want to emulate is a great way to reduce the number of revisions (and being charged for extra revisions!).

If you are determined to DIY it, there are several ways to go…and none of them are MS Word.

“But KimBoo!” I hear you say. “I am a whiz at Microsoft Word! Surely this will be easy-peasy lemon squeezy!”

While it is possible to create a viable print-worthy PDF out of MS Word, it’s also a lot more difficult than you think it is (if you aren’t a master of such techniques such as using styles and sections, please don’t even try). As for getting an ebook, it’s not worth the effort. I don’t care how pretty you made the text or how much time you spent on the headers/footers/images, that is not “formatting” in the true sense of the word!

Yes, I know, I know: Amazon and other platforms allow you to upload MS Word files and promise to deliver fully formatted books. Trust me when I say that the majority of time, the output is substandard at best.

If you are determined to go the way of MS Word, then I salute you. (￣^￣ )ゞ

So, then, what are your other DIY options?

Professional indie authors like me often use specialized formatting software like Vellum, Jutoh, Atticus (not recommended), Affinity Publisher, or Adobe InDesign. However, if you are not going to be publishing more than one or two books, they are not worth the price or the learning curve. Writing software like Scrivener (which, as you probably already know, I love dearly!) offers ways to “output” files in publishable formats, but I gotta say, they are not very user-friendly about it. I have used Scrivener for over 15 years and I still screw up compiling every single time. *sad trombone*

There are some options for you to try, however. They won’t give you a lot of control over features or layout, but if you’ve got a book with a straightforward structure (that is, you don’t have a lot of sub-headings or fancy pullouts) they might work for you:

• Reedsy Studio (free formatting service that is part of the Reedsy writing app)

• Kindle Create (free app from Amazon; I’ve heard mixed reviews on it, but a lot of people use it very successfully)

• Jutoh (low-cost app for formatting books; a little old school, and it helps if you know a bit about programming and HTML, but does a lot for the price)

• Sigil (free formatting tool for ebook files such as EPUB; however, you must have some familiarity with HTML coding to use this program successfully)

• Canva (low-cost graphic design app; not viable for ebooks, but you can layout something short such as children’s books as a PDF for hard-copy print version)

Covers

Most people think of a book cover as a single image, and they aren’t wrong, but also, they are 100% wrong.

Every edition of your book needs a separate cover, and while they should reuse graphics and elements in order to visually represent the same book, on the production side they are very different. What do I mean?

• Ebook “covers” are just rectangular digital images that you would normally associate with the front cover of a printed book, a.k.a. the front piece.

• Printed books need wrap-around covers, that is, a front piece, a back piece, and a spine. The back usually has a description of the book and an author bio, and the spine will usually have the title, author name, and (if applicable) the publisher logo.

• If you are doing something fancy, like a hardcover with a book jacket (a paper wrap around), it also needs inside flaps. (Usually, the actual book has a very different front piece, backpiece, and spine than the book jacket so it’s two-for-one cover time!)

• Audio book covers are square versions of the ebook cover/front piece.

• Large-print printed books need a wrap-around cover with larger print (duh) but also some indication that they are a large-print book, usually with a banner or badge on the front.

Here are example of ebook, audio book, and paperback covers for my book, The Queen’s Aerie, side by side:

(You’ll note I “cheated” by just slapping the ebook cover into a square design for the audiobook/podcast! That’s not best practices, usually you want to design something that looks more like a square version of the front piece, but eh, sometimes you’re in a crunch for time!)

The funnest part of this is, of course, figuring out the front piece. If you don’t have much graphic design background, I highly suggest looking at other books in your genre/field to see what they look like. Indie authors like me spend a good deal of time analyzing the top 100 books in our genre to see what is popular (dragons for fantasy? Shirtless men in cowboy hats for Western romance? Crowns and crows for romantasy? Lots of brightly colored arrows and big print for business books?).

Of course, the cover can look like anything you want, and if you aren’t worried about sales, then doing something “not to market” doesn’t matter. It’s up to you!

That said, book covers are another pre-press element I suggest you hire out. There are a lot of good book designers out there, but I would caution you to look for one with some references because there are also a lot of marginal graphic designers who think they can design book covers.

If you are determined to DIY your cover, first make sure you know the requirements for the edition you are publishing. Each type of cover has a size requirement:

• Ebook: 2,560 x 1,600 pixels is the standard, but honestly I always do mine at 2,560 x 1705. I have no idea why that seems to work better across distribution platforms, but 30 years working on websites has taught me not to question the mysteries of image sizing.

• Audio book/podcast: 3,000 x 3,000 pixels. This was a standard set years and years ago by Apple and so here we are, please do not question the man behind the curtain.

• Print books: The size depends on the sizing of the book itself, including factors such as trim size (the measurements of the finished book) and number of pages (more pages = thicker spine). Most publish-on-demand services such as ‘zon and Draft2Digital and BookVault will give you a template in PDF form once you’ve uploaded your print edition manuscript, which you can use as a layer in photo apps or Canva to build your cover design around.

Designing a cover is an art form, but it can be fairly simple if you use a program like Canva that has templates you can riff off of. You’ll probably need some graphics no matter what you use to create the cover, though, which brings me to:

WARNING: Make sure that you have the licensing rights to graphic elements you use, including photos, illustrations, and fonts. Too many amateur authors have published books with images they pulled off of Pinterest or a google search and then gotten themselves sued by the actual rights-holder of the image.

A professional book designer will include rights/licensing in their design contract. If you are DIY-ing your cover, check the license on the graphics from wherever you get them, such as stock photo and graphics sites like DepositPhoto, CreativeMarket, or AdobeStock. If you use Canva, most of their graphics have a business license for publishing, but do yourself a favor and double check.

And finally, a word on AI-generated book covers: They aren’t all that. You can get some elements out of AI that you might use on a cover, but most people doing so are “photobashing” the output in Photoshop or Affinity Photo to create cohesive covers. Maybe in a year or two, there will be a decent AI-driven book cover design app, but I’m not holding my breath. Humans are still the best book cover designers!

Ready, Set, GO PUBLISH!

To be honest, I could write another 3,000 words on the pre-press process. If you are really interested in creating a beautifully designed book, there are a lot of resources online to reference. One blog I really love to follow for ideas and insights is cover designer , who does a lot to demystify the cover creation process.

But, once you have formatted files ready to go, it’s time to publish!

The next (and final!) part in this series is all about publishing. I’ve touched on a few aspects here but in that post I will go into further detail on your options, the pros and cons of them, and how to simply your life as a hobbyist author!

If you have any questions please leave a comment!

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This is the third post in the Hobbyist Author Guide series; please read the initial overview to see where we’re at and where we’re going!

Part 1: Overview

Part 2: Writing

Editing.

What is it? How is it done? How much does it cost? How long does it take?

The correct answer to every single one of those questions is “it depends,” which is super confusing, I know. Sorry.

Yet, if there's one thing authors love to complain about more than writing, it's editing. And truthfully, editing can be a real slog.

Admittedly, I enjoy some aspects of editing, because it feels great to fix mistakes and see the work becoming recognizably better as you go. A continuity correction here, a typo there, and your work starts to look so much better!

Alas, that enjoyment rarely lasts long, because by the fourth time you've read the story, it starts getting to be more drudgery than enjoyment. By the thirtieth time you've read the story, you hate your work so much you want to throw it and possibly yourself off a tall cliff. That's perfectly normal!

In fact, one of the biggest mistakes that newer authors make is they get deep into the editing process and believe that somehow their work is worse than anyone else's because it had to go through so many edits. Speaking as a professional author, let me assure you that is not true. You’d be surprised at how much of the work of “naturally talented” authors goes through multiple passes of extensive editing.

Part of that mistaken belief is due to a misunderstanding by a lot of newbies about what exactly editing is. They believe that if a draft is good, it will need less editing. And…well, that’s true, but only to a point. What you don’t hear about is how much editing the author did along the way.

I’m known for very clean drafts, for instance. If you look at the story installments I post online, you’ll find that they are pretty good, even if obviously not polished (edited). But I tend to edit as I write, so every chapter has already been edited multiple times by me before anyone else ever reads it. I have a built-in lag time to give me the chance to do those edits before I post, because I know from hard, bitter experience that if I don’t take the time to edit, then I will live to regret it.

And here is the catch 22 of editing:    Someone else needs to read your work. It’s the basic requirement for editing something to make it better, but it also means someone else needs to read your work before it’s perfect.

I know that hurts. Believe me, I know.

But the payoff is that a different set of eyes will catch errors that you've blankly read over a hundred times and not seen. For instance, a developmental editor (I'll get into the different types of editing in a moment) looks at the ideas and the overall structure and can tell you when you've made a mess of things. They might suggest moving scenes around, they might suggest expanding a certain character's role or removing a another character completely.

Trust me, you will hate every suggestion they make. With the heat death of a thousand fiery suns, your editor is going to be wrong about everything. Your editor is going to be an idiot who doesn't know or understand your vision. Your editor is going to be incompetent and untrustworthy. You’d be a fool to listen to anything they recommend!!!!

Then the next day, when you've had some time to sleep on it and a chance to walk around and clear your head or drink your favorite version of caffeine, you will realize that most of the time—not all of the time, but most of the time—your editor was right about almost everything. It’s tragic because it’s true.

I'm spending time explaining all of this because the emotional impact of being edited is usually far more intense than people expect, especially if you aren’t used to it. In fact, it can be so upsetting that some people quit writing altogether, or convince themselves that their work is just fine as-is and they don't need no stinkin’ editor!

Trust me, you do.

It’s not that you’re bad at your job, it’s just that all writers everywhere are too close to their work to objectively see all of its problems.

Back to the questions we started with: What is editing? How is it done? How much does it cost? How long does it take?

“Editing” in the publishing industry has worn many hats. It was originally just a verb; no one was “an editor” for a long time after Gutenberg. It was simply part of the publishing process, carried out by the publisher himself (for they were overwhelmingly men), an employee, or the author. An academic or scientific work might be sent out to be read by other experts in the field, but a lot of works were only edited as they were typeset. But times changed and the publishing industry became a massive enterprise, which meant that volume alone required specialists, and thus were “editors” born.

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The common popular stereotype of an editor is usually someone who is employed by the publisher and works closely with the author to help shape the book into the best it can possibly be. That’s a little romantic and a lot unrealistic, especially in these days of rapid release and self-publishing.

Editing is actually an umbrella term for a variety of types of “manuscript repair.” The actual question should be: what kind of editing does your manuscript need?

From there, you can do research on how much it might cost you and how long it might take, but that is the place to start. Here are the different kinds of editing as described by my friend and professional editor, . Not every manuscript is going to need every single kind listed here, but generally, every written work needs at least a couple:

In-Progress Editing: Involves assessment of whether the manuscript is staying true to the author’s original vision and intent. These are high-level edits, with a focus on structure, organization, consistency, and clarity. Aspects considered are point of view, character development and arc, plot development and arc, voice, tone, theme, conflict and tension, pacing, setting, and dialogue.

• Developmental Edit: Done during the early stages before the draft is complete. For nonfiction, the developmental editor also may serve as a project manager of sorts, guiding the author through the project from conception to publication.

• Content Edit: Sometimes called structural or substantive edit, this is done with a completed but early draft.

Manuscript Editing: You, like me, might wonder if the terms “line editing” and “copy editing” mean the same thing. Spoiler: they don’t! But they are similar and sometimes overlapping, with each having a different primary focus. However, they look at the following issues and usually require one or more passes through the manuscript: Bland language, redundancies and digressions, passive voice, ambiguities, extraneous or overused words or phrases, run-on sentences/sentence fragments.

• Line Edit: Paragraph- and line-level assessment of transitions between chapters and scenes, repetitive paragraph structure, and tonal or point-of-view shifts. A skilled line editor may also point out substantive issues and can flag things at the copy edit level.

• Copy Edit: Word-by-word assessment looking for things such as repetitive sentence structure, corrections of errors introduced in the revision stage after the line edit, continuity and consistency (spelling of unique character or place names, capitalization, hyphenation, numbers). They might include a review of your author bio, book cover, query letter, or submission package to an agent or publisher. A skilled copy editor may also point out line edit issues and flag things at the proofreading level.

Pre-press editing: This is the stage where it all comes together and the manuscript gets a last-pass or two to catch egregious errors before “going to press.”

• Proofread: Not editing, but a final pre-press check to correct errors introduced in the revision stage after the copy edit or overlooked in earlier edits (remember this when you see typos in a published book—it often went through multiple edits and several different people missed it anyway! No one is perfect!). It might also review the pre-print proof (called an Advanced Reader’s Copy or ARC) to catch any errors that were introduced in the formatting stage.

A word on style guides:

A style guide is a personalized reference document that helps writers maintain consistency in their writing, from grammar and punctuation choices to character details and world-building specifics. Unlike traditional style guides used by journalists or academics (like The Chicago Manual of Style or AP Style), a fiction writer’s style guide is tailored to your own story (or stories!). It includes things like preferred spellings, character names and descriptions, setting details, recurring terminology, and even decisions about formatting (e.g., how you handle italics for thoughts, or flashback scenes).

For hobbyist authors, a style guide might sound unnecessary, but it can be incredibly useful, especially in later drafts or when writing a series. It ensures you don’t accidentally change a side character’s eye color halfway through the book or use inconsistent hyphenation for a made-up fantasy term. A simple style guide can make editing smoother and help create a polished, professional final draft. Some editors, especially at the developmental stage, include creating a style guide for you as part of their editing package, but not all. Be sure to ask if you want one made for you.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, the editing you need will vary depending on your skill set, your intentions, your end goals, and (yes, alas) your budget.

Some authors pay thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars, for a full sweep of edits. They might hire one person to do all of them, but it’s more common to hire different specialists for different stages. For instance, I’m a pretty decent developmental editor because I’m a “big picture” person. I am good at helping authors figure out plots and character arcs, and offering advice on how to fix them if they are broken. I am, however, a terrible, awful no-good line editor. I suck at spelling, I forget style guide rules, and I get my grammar mixed up. Use me as your line editor at your peril!

There are a lot of people of various skill levels selling their services as editors, so always ask for examples or references for their work. A word of caution: do not “test” editors by sending them your work and demanding that they do a sample edit of it for free. They won’t, and they will also blacklist you. Most professional editors will ask to see your work anyway, and will want to talk to you personally about your goals before agreeing to work with you. An editor is a partner in your work more than a hired gun, so always treat them with respect.

The reverse is true, though: if an editor talks down to you, is disrespectful, or trashes your writing, you don’t have to work with them. The old myth that “mean editors are good editors” is just flat out not true and if your editor is in any way unsupportive or abusive, fire them immediately.

When you are talking to a potential editor, keep your ask of them clear. One editor may do several types of editing, but be clear about that before you hire them. Ask how many passes they’ll make through your manuscript as well (most stick to one or two; no one will agree to “unlimited”). Don’t expect developmental editors to fix typos unless you want to pay extra for it, for instance. Hiring someone to do line edits means you are not going to get back an analysis of problems with the plot or characterizations. Proof readers usually want the print-ready version, formatted and all, and will only correct typos and mispellings—they will not fix grammar issues or problems with sentence structure, for instance.

Finally, to answer the question I get asked the most: Yes, you need an editor (at least one!).

Trust me, as much as you love your first draft now, next week you'll look back and see all the mistakes that you made. And six weeks after that, you'll see all the mistakes you missed.

There are some authors who are gifted with the instincts, the talent, and the skill-set to push out first drafts that are nearly perfect. You probably won't be that lucky. I know I’m not! It takes years to get to that level, honestly, and even the most precocious newer writers make critical errors in character or plot development that they can't see until someone else points it out for them.

We all love to complain about editing, but we all love it when it’s done!

Next Up: Pre-Press!

Getting a manuscript ready for publishing is not glamorous, but it is a critical part of the publishing process. I know you think you just need a lovingly formatted MS Word document but…uh, no. That’s literally just step one of getting your manuscript ready to distribute. Remember, a “book” is not just a book, it can be an ebook files, a paperback, a hardback, large print, and even audiobook. You ready for that?

Don’t worry, you will be! Time for PRE-PRESS!

If you have any questions please leave a comment!

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Allow me to share with a behind-the-scenes peek at my glamorous lifestyle! This is my in-progress storage closet:

I regret not taking a “before” picture, when it was haphazardly jam-packed with cardboard boxes so old they were falling apart and cheap plastic totes that were likewise. One plastic tote actually cracked when I pulled it out of the closet to re-pack it!

I’ll have more to say about the Great Repacking (Charlie Brown!) later but I would like to point out that long, black carrying case sitting in the middle of the photo, on top of the smaller totes.

That’s my violin.

If you are wondering how you never knew I played the violin, it’s because I don’t. I have always wanted to, and in 2006 (before the divorce) I bought the cheapest instrument I could—I think it is made out of balsa wood to be honest—and signed up for lessons.

For a few months, I diligently practiced several times a week and went to those lessons. It was hard and most of the noise I produced had the dulcet tones of an eagle screeching in pain. (Was that a contributing factor to the divorce itself? …maybe? 😂)

But I got frustrated. I was not progressing fast enough, I was not showing the advancement I wanted to see, I could not play the music I dreamed of playing. I practiced less often and I canceled lessons until eventually it had been months in between even the most basic scales. Resigned to failure, I packed the violin up and stuck it in the closet. In the intervening years, I legitimately forgot that I ever bought it until I started on the Great Repacking (Charlie Brown!).

When I rediscovered it, I realized, damn, it’s been almost twenty years since I last opened the case.

Twenty years of not playing the violin.

Twenty years of giving up the violin.

I cannot help but ask: Where would I be today if I had just not given up?

Not Carnegie Hall, for sure. But that is fine, since I never wanted to learn how to play in order to make it my identity or my career (sorry, Mother!). The dream I walked away from was simply to play for the joy of it and make music using an instrument that has always called to me.

Admittedly, my favorite violin pieces are difficult to play. Teleman’s Fantasias are not for the beginner; Biber is notoriously challenging; and the shortest pieces of J.S. Bach’s solo violin works are arduous.

But…but I wonder how close I’d be to playing any of them after twenty years of practicing regularly.

I wish this was an isolated event in my life, but sometimes I feel like I’ve given up more things than I’ve tried. When it comes to writing, I look back on decisions such as deciding not to start a Patreon in 2015, and walking away from story ideas that I thought would not be popular. I’ve watched other authors just make the jump and not give up and now are reaping the benefits, such as a large, supportive base of subscribers or a genre niche that became popular despite the lack of precedent.

Authors who are my peers and began publishing around the same time I did are now well-known in our community and popular with readers because, unlike me, they did not give up. I might not want their version of success, but I am insanely jealous of the success they have.

As I talked about this with my friend Gina, we both realized that the violin represented my failures—not that I tried and failed, but that I failed to try.

I gave up the violin.

I gave up the Patreon.

I gave up the ideas.

I gave up my potential.

I’m trying hard not to do that, but often staying the course is frustrating or even scary. While I’m not planning on attempting the violin again anytime soon, there are several things I want to do that I keep back-peddling from, and I have to remind myself that this is how I got here to begin with.

So, ironically, this is my new mantra, my guide to life, and my creative compass: Do not give up the violin.

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This is the second post in the Hobbyist Author Guide series; please read the initial overview to see where we’re at and where we’re going!

Part 1: Overview

Writing.

For many professional authors, writing is both our favorite thing to do and also the thing we try to avoid at all costs. It’s hard work that takes up a lot of brain power and energy, but the results are so very worth it. Once we get the results, that is!

I don’t think it is very different for hobbyist authors, either. We all want to have written the thing, but struggle with actually writing the thing. Why can’t it just appear on my bookshelf, fully formed from the ideas in my mind?????

When someone talks to me about “a book I’d love write, someday” it is often accompanied by a litany of failed attempts at writing, or questions about how to finish a project they keep restarting. I can count on one hand the number of times someone has come to me and said, “I have a book I’ve already written. What do I do now?” No, by and large, it’s the actual writing part that people need help with.

Writing stories is one of my favorite things to do in the world, but unfortunately I don’t have any quick and dirty hacks for getting the words onto the page for you. Quite frankly, I don’t trust anyone who does.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have any advice at all!

The basic, hard truth here is that to publish a book, you first need to write a book. Writing comes first. The good news is that everything can be fixed in edits!

Which means you do not need to worry about how good your writing is while you are actively writing.

All you need to do is sit down and write. Just start. Today! Now! Do it!

Tips & Tricks

No two professional authors write the same, and despite what some charlatans tell you, there is no One Right Way to get the writing done. Here is a quick overview of approved and successful ways you can use to write your book:

• Sit down and write. Or stand. Or walk. Just write.

• Dictation counts as writing.

• Fifty words a day counts as writing.

• Fifty words every other day counts as writing.

• Co-writing (body doubling) counts as writing.

• You are writing if you write every day or once a week. It all counts.

• No one cares how you write, just write.

• You can write using a pencil, pen, or keyboard. Or chalk. No one cares.

• All first drafts are bad. Just write.

• You can follow an outline, or just wing it (aka “pantsing”). It’s still writing.

• WRITE!

The one trick that professional authors lean on that amateurs generally don’t is accountability. If you really want to move the needle on your word count, holding yourself accountable is the best way to go. That said, there are different ways of doing that, but (again!) it doesn’t matter which you choose. Use whatever works!

Here are the four best “accountability hacks” for getting some writing done:

• Outsourcing Accountability: Knowing that someone else is expecting a progress report from you can be a powerful motivator. There are many ways to implement this, starting with setting up a daily check-in with a friend via text or email to share your goals or report on the previous day's accomplishments (a.k.a. an “Accountabilibuddy”). Online co-writing sessions on platforms like YouTube and Facebook groups are another great way to stay on track. Writers’ communities on Discord often have dedicated channels for live writing sprints, where groups gather to write for a set period and share their progress.

• Tracking: Tracking is all about holding yourself accountable and making your progress visible. For some writers, seeing daily or weekly progress can be a huge motivator—though if tracking feels discouraging or stressful, don’t be afraid to skip it! There are plenty of options to choose from, whether you prefer the simplicity of a spreadsheet, the creative flexibility of a bullet journal, or digital tools like Notion or Pacemaker Planner to log your writing sessions.

• Gamify Your Writing: If you love gaming, turning your writing into a fun challenge can make it easier to stay engaged. This could be as simple as rewarding yourself with a treat or special event when you hit your word count goal. For a more immersive experience, platforms like 4theWords transform writing into an RPG adventure, where your progress earns in-game rewards. You can also create your own "writing quest" by setting a bold challenge—like completing a novel in four to six weeks—while awarding yourself points, milestones, and prizes along the way.

• Deadlines: The OG writing hack! We love to hate a deadline, but they are effective. True, it is hard to set a deadline for yourself, as most freelancers know. But if you can commit to a deadline, then this is a great way to see a project through to the end. One method is to put your book on your editor’s schedule before it’s done, giving you a hard deadline to finish the draft (although a word of caution: if you blow off such deadlines, your editor might end up firing you as an unreliable client! This is how you lose your deposit $ and goodwill, so don’t take this road unless you are confident you can hit the mark). Some professionals set up pre-orders on sales sites for the same reason. Making a public declaration of your deadline on your social media platform of choice is a good option if peer pressure motivates you.

One warning I want to make here is don’t over-commit. It is a newbie mistake to think something like, “I can write 200 words in an hour, so if I write for four hours a day for two months, I’ll have a book!” Writing for four hours a day is in fact doable, but it is something you have to work up to, and it is a very rare writer who can do that kind of brute-force writing every day.

Say it with me: writing is hard.

Spend a whole day writing, and you will feel exhausted. Do that for weeks on end, and you will drive yourself straight into burnout.

In fact, I would argue that the biggest mistake hobbyist authors make is trying to do too much in too short a time span, to the point where they simply give up in exhaustion or, if they persist, end up burnt out and hating their work.

I have known quite a few professional authors who eventually worked up to writing three thousand to ten(!!!!!) thousand words a day in order to keep up with a punishing publishing schedule, only to disappear after a year or two because they burned themselves out so hard. A few returned to writing, but usually only after a multi-year break from it.

My advice is to start with your minimum. If that is just twenty minutes a day, or 100 words a day, that is ideal. You will quickly ramp up to writing more, and writing faster, I promise! If that seems slow to you, do the math: 250 word per day for five days a week for a year is 65,000 words—a whole novel. This is really a case where less can be more, if you stick with it.

My friend has run writing retreats for years. One thing she cautions attendees is that they need to start writing before they get to the retreat, because if they expect to show up and spend eight hours a day writing without having built up the brain muscle to do that, they will end up extremely disappointed.

Just like every other thing we have to learn how to do in life, the secret is practice practice practice!

As long as you are writing and trust the process and keep writing you will hit your goals!

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Tech Stack

In the technology crowd, a “tech stack” is simply all the tools you use for your work, including the actual hardware (computer, laptop), services (internet connectivity, web hosting platforms, etc.), and software/apps.

For our purposes here, I’m talking about two separate “stacks” of technology that you need (and remember, even a pencil is “technology” in this context!): productivity tools and writing tools.

Productivity

Attention/focus apps: These are apps that lock you out of the internet/social media in order to keep your attention from straying. I recommend Freedom.to but there are others out there. A lot of internet providers these days have apps to control your modem/router, so start there if you work from home!

Sound: You might not think of sound, or the lack of sound, as important, but most professional authors know it is crucial. You might have to play around with what works for you, but there are plenty of options from playlists to noise canceling headphones. Consider whether you need ambient noise (rainfall, cafe sounds, fireplace crackling noises), chill music (lofi girl is popular for a reason!), a specific type of music (I listened to a lot of modern bluegrass while writing Dawn in the Orchard, for instance), or deep silence.

Pomodoro/writing sprints: Using pomodoro apps for writing sprints is really popular, but in a pinch a good old fashioned clock app with a timer or stopwatch can serve the purpose. Focus on writing for ten or twenty minutes, take a break, and then do another sprint.

Time tracking: This doesn’t work for me, but if you want to approach your writing like it’s your job, using a time tracking app such as Clockify, Clockspot, or Gusto can put you in the mind frame for writing. A simpler option is just using a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets to track your time (both have plenty of “time card” templates).

Note taking: Don’t underestimate how much a paper journal or note taking app like Notion, Evernote, OneNote, or Obsidian can help you be productive. Using it to store ideas, brainstorming sessions, or plot outlines can be invaluable. Trust the pros: no, you cannot keep it all in your head!

Writing

As with all my recommendations, my suggestion is to keep it simple. If you have used MS Word for years and are comfortable using it, then keep using it. Same for Google Docs or Apple Pages. Or, for that matter, Notes or Notion or Evernote.

But if you feel like your work has outgrown those programs, or you want something with more features, there are plenty of options for you to try out! That said, it is important to understand that there is no One True and Perfect Writing App, because writing is an extremely individual process that no two writers do the same way. For instance, I love Scrivener and have used it for fifteen years, but one professional author I know tried it out, asked for a refund, and continues to do all of her writing using Google Docs.

The most important thing is to be willing to switch apps if one is not working for you. There is no law that says all writers must use MS Word! Other options include Scrivener, Campfire, Novlr, Ulysses (for Mac), WorldAnvil, LivingWriter, 4TheWords, and Dabble. Some you can buy, some are subscription based, and most have at least a small learning curve. Try out a few if you can and see how your brain works best!

Next Up: The Doldrums (a.k.a. editing!)

So you’ve written your book at last! Now what?

Editing, of course!

Some people enjoy editing more than others, but everyone agrees that it can be a slog. The next post in this series explains the different types of editing (yes, there is more than one kind!), how to figure out what type of editing you need, tools that can help along the way, and what you should expect to get out of the process.

If you have any questions please leave a comment!

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“I’ve got an idea for a story! What do I do?”

I get this question a lot, as do most professional authors. Usually it is just small talk at a party, but occasionally I get asked for help by someone who really truly madly deeply does have a story to tell. It might be a family history, a memoir, a guide to their hobby or passion, or a fictional story that has haunted them for years.

It’s easy to just say: “Write it!” and move along. Often people are only looking for that permission by someone with authority (an actual author!), allowing them the right to do what they want to do, anyway. In such cases, “write it!” is enough.

But sometimes I am confronted by someone with a novel or a non-fiction work that they really want to share even though they are not, and have no intention of being, a professional author. They want to get their work out into the big wide world and be able to point their family, friends, and supporters to it. Some have no interest in even selling it, or plan to charge nothing more than production costs.

Such works of love are fully deserving of being published, in my opinion, and while the modern world of self-publishing makes it easier than ever, it’s not actually simple.

Back before ebooks and self-publishing took off in the early 2010s, about the only way for a non-professional writer to get a book published was to hire a vanity press to do it. This usually required putting a lot of money upfront for editing and publishing costs, no small investment for someone who had no intention of doing this for a living. The unfortunate part is that there were (and are) a lot of grifters who take the money and run, or use it to create a cheaply made book. There is a reason that most hobbyist writers are warned off of using a vanity press.

The flip side, of course, is that hiring someone else to do it means they do not have to learn all about editing, copyediting, formatting, cover design, proofreading, paper signatures, book sizes…the list goes on. Like I said, publishing is easy these days, but not simple.

Unfortunately, most “how to publish a book” advice out there is geared to people who want to become professional authors, or at least write as a side gig. A truly dedicated hobbyist can sort out the basics, but it takes a bit of work, and if you are not already a little familiar with writing and publishing in general, extremely confusing.

Which leads me to this new series of posts: The Hobbyist Author’s Guide to Getting Published.

The goal of this series is specifically to help hobbyist authors bring their vision to life. If they want to take that information and expand it in order to build an author career, they can do that too! But if all they ever publish are a few books about their family history, or that one single fairy tale they have worked on for 20    years, or the fly-fishing guide they promised their grandchild, then they have the resources to do it well enough to be proud of the end product…and all without breaking the bank.

Where to start?

First I recommend really thinking about the end result. We’re starting from the premise that you’re not interested in beginning an “author career,” but there are still a lot of variables to consider. Do you just have a fun story idea you want to share with friends and family? Is this something you want to give away for free or have available for sale? Do you want a bunch of hard copy books to drag around to the garden/chess/tai chi club?

The decisions you make through this process will rest on that final outcome. As a professional author, I have to look at things like writing to market, widely available formats, pricing, availability, and so on. You don’t, but you still need to know the target you are aiming for.

Just a reminder: no target is too small! If you just want fifty copies of the family history to hand out at a family reunion picnic, that’s entirely valid! If all you need is a web link to send people to so they can read your short story, that is also valid.

What’s Next

It will take a few posts will cover the steps, some of which take more work than others:

1. Writing the damn thing! Every writer knows this is the hardest part, and that’s as true for hobbyists as it is for professionals. In this post I will set you up with all the tips and tricks I know of that should help get that book written, along with advice on the best software/apps to use for what you are doing. You won’t have to spend a lot of money on anything, I promise!

2. Editing is next up, and while the best advice remains “hire a professional editor,” there are a lot of quid pro quos to that. Not all editing is the same, and you need to know what you need before you decide on what you can get. These days apps like Grammarly or ProWritingAid will help a lot with brute force corrections, but they are not the end-all-be-all of editing. This will help you through this tricky but necessary task.

3. Publishing! The fun part!…sorta. Publishing can get complicated quickly, but first I’ll advise you on how to narrow down what you really need (ebooks? Print copies? Print on demand? You have options!). You’ll need a cover! (Oh no!) Hobbyists don’t need advice on building a branded website or a following on social media, but you still need to have a way for people to find your work. This post will show you different paths you can take, from dead-simple to sophisticated.

In the end, I’ll give you a pared-down checklist for you to work from. The goal of this series to give hobbyists a simple, uncluttered path to bringing their dream to life!

Time to start with the next post, WRITING!

If you have any questions please leave a comment!

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As a self-employed author and introvert, my life appears to a lot of folk as an ongoing seclusion: rarely seen in the outdoors, never going where the party’s at, hiding in my room 24/7.

That’s wrong, of course, since I do actually go grocery shopping occasionally!

Truth be told, while I don’t get out for hours every day the way I did when I had a “normal” job at the local university, I do leave the house regularly to visit with friends, co-work with Gina, and attend book signings.

But more to the point, I’m almost always online or online-adjacent and nearly always (always) working. I sometimes forget to respond to personal texts for days, or simply don’t check in on a platform for weeks (sorry, LinkedIn friends!), but I check the news, check YouTube, check the author forums, and check Neko Atsume. I write, I edit, I freelance, I have a part-time job, I have plans.

The result is that my so-called “down time” usually consists of my executive functioning imploding and going bye-bye, at which point I just vegetate. It’s not the healthiest rest, just the most necessary.

So, a few years back, I started doing an end-of-year seclusion/retreat where I check out of the digital world, sign out of “work,” focus on meditation and yoga, try to eat healthfully, do some fun art stuff (zentangles! Coloring books!), and generally rest in the truest sense of the word. A retreat of mind, body, and soul focused on recuperation and re-centering myself.

I did not do that at the end of 2023, and I’ve felt it all year, honestly. I’ve decided that this year, it’s time once again to retreat.

It helps that the final week of the year is the doldrums of time, at least here in the U.S.A. Other than retail and hospitality, most businesses either close or go on skeleton crews for the week between Christmas and New Year. It’s a quiet time of life and perfect for a personal retreat, when outside expectations are low and the general mood is laid back.

From the evening of the 24th through the morning of the 31st, I plan to be holed up in my house with my dog, making good on the promise of rest and restoration. Computers will be off completely; social media apps uninstalled from my phone; and time will stand still. The only reason I’m not turning off my internet completely is so I can stream music and watch a few movies or shows.

Almost nothing I do will be about work in any sense of the word. I will probably work on the household (reorganizing the studio room, mainly), and there will be journaling and self-exploration and introspection, but no goals.

Planning for 2025 will happen, but the focus of that planning will be on what is healthy and achievable. Gina and I are meeting on the 26th for brunch and to mastermind our personal and writing focus for the year, but I think that’s a good time to do it, honestly—when I’ll have few other distractions, and I’ve had time to decompress from 2024 a little bit.

I’m privileged to be able to take this time without worrying about going homeless or hungry, and I don’t take it for granted. In fact, one of my big goals for 2025 is to find a way to “pay it forward,” because I am not sure how I would have survived this past year without the intense support of my friends and family, both emotionally and financially.

I want to be in a place in my life where I can pay that forward to others who need it. I hope my end-of-year retreat can help me get there.

Have a lovely holiday season, and I’ll see ya’ on the other side!

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Wondering what’s in the House of York?

What a wonderous delight is in store for you! *digs through pockets* I have some history of text technology, a few opinions on pantsing and serial writing, and…hmmm…opinions about fanfiction…and…wait come back! Don’t go!

How about a picture of my dear precious Keely, RIP (2008-2025):

You can find out more about me specifically at The Storyteller’s Room, and you can find links to all of my projects at my official website, House of York.

Coffee and Hope what?

That’s my motto: Living on coffee and hope. That has never been more true than since 2020, when I decided to go all-in on being a writer. So here we are!

What’s in the Storage Closet

This blog was started as a way to share my thoughts on the history of text technology, my essays on holistic productivity, my explorations on topics such as fiction serials and discovery writing, and my observations of life during late-stage capitalism (urk!).

So yeah: a bit of everything. But! There is order behind the chaotic feed. I’ve broken things up into sections, aka “newsletters,” and I use metadata to make topics easy to find:

Newsletters from the Scriptorium

• General: Everything. All of it. The fire-hose of KimBoo’s brain!

• The Task Mistress: All the Tasks Fit to Print: Productivity thoughts and advice for authors and other solopreneurs; updated every Thursday. Usually.

• Storytelling in the Machine Age: Opinions about writing, publishing, technology (yes, that includes A.I.) and the history of text technology. Updated every other week or so.

• The York Hoard: My bi-weekly “updates” post, where I share what I’ve been doing (or not doing, as the case may be!)

If you don’t want all of everything dropping in your email box, here are instructions on how to subscribe/unsubscribe to specific newsletters.

Topics

I write about a lot of things so if you want a list of the wide range of topics covered here, check out my list of categories: Full List of Scriptorium Tags.

Fiction, Y/N?

Mmmmm….sorta? When I started this blog I had all my fiction on a different platform. A year later I decided to part ways with that service, and moved all my current/ongoing fiction over to a separate blog, KimBoo’s Bibliotheca. Head over there for dragons, magical doggos, and adventure OH MY!!!!!

THAT SAID…I did actually serialize a novel here on the Scriptorium! The Queen’s Aerie was originally meant to serve as a funnel to the other platform, but now it is just sitting here gathering dust. The book was released in mid-2024, so you can buy it if you want! But if you’d rather read for free, you can!

Support Me!

I am an independent author, which means I don’t have a publishing house to back me up. Or, more accurately, I am the publishing house. I have a lot of ideas and irons in the fire, and so many stories I plan to write. It would help me so much if you pitched in to keep the lights and the internet connectivity on!

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I see a lot of writers anguishing over how long their work is—is it a novel? A series? A serial? A novella? What is the difference between a short story and a novella? What if it’s not long enough to be a book? How long is that, anyway?

Once again, I am here to explain that something you just took for granted about the publishing industry and writing in general is due to the history of text technology. Try to contain your excitement!

This time, obviously, I’m taking about word counts. Or, if you prefer, page counts.

We don’t use page counts much anymore as a gage for story length. At some point over the past 25 years, the standard drifted in accordance with the rise of word processing apps (which we used to call “software,” remember that? Ahahahha). As digital versions of stories became the norm, it did not matter quite so much how big an envelope you needed to buy in order to snail mail your story to an agent or magazine.

If you’re curious, though, just divide the total number of words by 250.

There is a reason that I know the general rule of thumb is “a page of text is 250 words,” and that is because I grew up before the era of personal computers and word processing software. In the USA, everything was calculated by letter-size page count, and word counts were approximate because of that. Submission requirements usually went by page counts, too. Sometimes both were listed (“5-10 pages, or approx. 1,250-2,500 words”) but writers weren’t counting words, we were counting pages. It’s one reason I think submission standards grew so strict over time, because just like undergrads who tried to stretch their page count by adding extra spaces or increasing the margin by an eighth of an inch (yes we did!), authors would put line spacing at 1.5 or decrease the margin by an eighth of an inch in order to get more words in under the page count.

Oh, those were the days!

Anyway, my point is: it’s all made up.

Mind you, this is not an exhortation to ignore submission guidelines! Don’t go around pissing off editors, my friends. That is not the way to make friends in this industry.

But what I am asking you to do is consider what format you are writing to, and more importantly, why.

Or as Becca Syme says: “question the premise.”

In the case of word counts, many writers fret and worry over how long or short their story is without stopping to consider why those standards exist, much less whether adhering to them is a sensible decision.

(Spoiler: sometimes yes, sometimes no!)

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For instance, flash fiction was not really a thing when I was growing up. There were “super-short short stories” but most short fiction markets wanted 10-25 pages of fiction. When the internet started to come of age and stories could be just a single blog post (remember blogs?), 1,000 word stories suddenly became a lot more palatable.

Drabbles—stories of exactly 100 words—were incredibly popular on LiveJournal because you could create a series or a challenge in comment threads based on prompts. A 100 word comment is fun to write and easy to read, to the point where some drabble challenges expanded to threads multiple thousands of comments long. (No wonder LJ hated us!)

Which is to say, the technology influenced the form. Yes, you could write a 100 word drabble on your Smith Corona typewriter, but editing it and formatting meant typing it over and over again. And over again. Then, you were stuck with a drabble and nowhere to send it. No reasonable publication wanted stories of 100 words, unless they invited an already well respected author to do it on a lark. If you were in a metropolitan area with a strong literary community, someone might put together a ‘zine of super-short stories, but that was uncommon.

Another example are the books of the Bible (any bible, pick one). Those are not “books.” The longest books are more like novellas, clocking in at around 30,000 (English) words. The shorter ones are chapters, at best. But we call them books.

Why?

Because when they were written, they were books. Prior to the printing press, a book was incredibly expensive and time consuming to produce. Most were one-offs, or had maybe ten copies in circulation, which is why so few ancient books survived through the years. Paper, vellum, and parchment were expensive, as was any good ink. A book of 30,000 words was a hell of a large project to undertake, and anything larger than that needed to be broken up into volumes or risk it being too big to carry or hold.

So, okay, then where did the idea that a novel is over 60,000 words come from, you ask?

It goes back to the words-per-page factor, believe it or not.

A book of 60,000 words would be between 150-250 pages, depending on how small/tight the typesetting was for it. Even today, a book much larger than 250 pages is a challenge to print, usually requiring thinner paper than standard, and/or heavier binding. Bigger books cost more money to publish, and have a thinner profit margin.

To be clear, when I say “page count” what I mean is that it’s always all about the money.

Think of any massively popular book series from the past 50 years. Consider how the first book is usually the shortest—150 pages, maybe 200—then compare it to the last book in the series, which might be 500-800 pages. The first book was a risk, and likely was cut down to size by the editors to fit the print budget. The more popular the series got, the more profitable it became, resulting in a much higher publishing budget along with a much higher profit margin. It is fine to print an 800 page book when everyone and their cousin is willing to pay $$$ for the hardback.

Why does any of this history matter? Because I think it is important to know all of that when I tell you that it makes absolutely no difference how short or how long your story is.

I know authors making a living writing 20,000 word long insta-love romance stories. I know authors deep into their second or third 500,000 word-long fantasy epic series/serial. Drabbles, flash fic, short stories and novellas all have a place online now.

Text technology has shifted yet again, and as with the term “book,” our language cues have not caught up with those changes. There are still traditional outlets such as literary journals and trad book publications with the aforementioned submission guidelines, which you should respect. But you can post anything of any length on various platforms, up to and including your own website.

Don’t let definitions that have become arbitrary limitations constrain your creativity.

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Vella is dead, long live Vella!

Well, actually, no: it’s really very much dead.

If you don’t know what Kindle Vella is (was), it was a subscription platform for serialized stories. It was Amazon’s take on Wattpad and Radish, an attempt at a cash grab from a growing population of readers and writers which launched in 2018, just in time to catch a huge wave of readership during the COVID lockdowns in 2020.

Mind you, it wasn’t a very well thought-out cash grab. They threw the idea at the wall to see if it would stick, but never gave it the resources to thrive. For one thing, it was never available outside of the U.S., when the international market for serialized stories is actually much stronger than the American one. For the other, it used an arcane system of buying tokens to read installments of stories, which most readers were unfamiliar with—it was lifted from online manga platforms, but was unfamiliar to the rank and file of readers, most of whom were coming from Kindle Unlimited.

And, of course, Amazon was very insistent on taking the largest cut of the proceeds for much the same reason they screw over Kindle Unlimited authors, which mostly boils down to “because we can.”

My bias, let me show you it.

Some are saying this is a sign that subscription platforms are not sustainable, but there are plenty of subscription platforms that continue to thrive, including sites like Patreon and Substack. So what’s going on?

Earlier this year I wrote a post related to this very situation: Books, Merch, and Audio oh my: Is the self-publishing industry growing or shrinking? (hence the callback in the title of this post!)

As people wonder if the closing of Vella “proves” that serialized fiction is a lost cause, I draw your attention to my basic premise in that post:

Are we all doomed??!?!?

Before we panic, it might be worthwhile to look past the hype and actually figure out whether the self-publishing industry is growing or shrinking. At least, that was my plan. As I considered how we might be able to determine which is the case, though, I realized that it is the wrong question…or, at least, that version of the question is immaterial.

The question "is the self-publishing industry growing or shrinking?" is less important than HOW it is CHANGING.

That has never been more true than it is now.

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Vella represents a transitional stage of subscription platforms, represented by the fracturing of subscription models.

Sites like Patreon, Substack, and Ream make it easy for you to support a writer individually by subscribing to their work. Platforms like Kindle Unlimited and KoboPlus let you subscribe to the platform itself so you can binge on whatever you like (a.k.a. the Netflix model). Your subscription dollars can be spread across all of those platforms, allowing you, the reader, to engage on your own terms.

Which is something I keep preaching about: technology has reached the stage where readers and writers can make those decisions. We are not stuck in the cable television era of 1992, where there were 57 channels and nothing on…and no options. You either had cable, which gave you access to 57 channels, or you didn’t. There was no in between and very few choices, outside of paying an upgrade to also get HBO.

The self-publishing industry has been in a similar stage for a while. When Amazon Kindle launched in 2007, it was the only game in town for digital “ebooks” and one of the few options for self-publishing, outside of vanity presses. Barnes & Noble scrambled and nearly self-destructed in its efforts to play catch up. The Apple self-publishing quagmire is still a mess. For nearly a decade, self-publishing was done by ‘zon’s rules, take ‘em or leave ‘em.

But that era is long past.

Authors can have some books exclusively on Kindle Unlimited, publish other books wide (including on KoboPlus), and serialize stories on free platforms (Wattpad, RoyalRoad, etc.) to serve as funnels to their own subscription accounts or platforms. This shift is also starting to happen with audio books, as well.

I think Vella was always doomed, unfortunately for the authors who were making a living there (and quite a few were!). But the flip side is that now authors don’t have to tie themselves to exclusive, predatory contracts for their writing just to make a dime.

Cable television could not keep up with the internet, and neither could Vella.

Many years ago I said that at some point, authors would have their own subscription platforms where readers could subscribe to a book, or a series, or the author in general, or just give micro-payments for individual chapters. That is already possible, technologically speaking, and will become easier and easier as technology advances.

(Allow me to once again flog my project scope for my dream author platform, should anyone want to build it.)

It is hard to take a high-level survey of the landscape when it is still changing so much (witness A.I.). Sites like Vella shutting down represent change, sometimes painful change for many authors, but are not necessarily negative for the publishing/writing industry as a whole.

I sympathize with those getting hard hit by this, but I want to help you all take a step back and look at the long view: the more we control our own publishing, distribution, and earnings, the better.

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As I journey forth trying to find a path through the thickets of marketing my fiction, I keep hearing the advice to talk about my characters in order to draw in a potential audience. This is, of course, great advice!

But.

I’m just not used to that. It’s hard for me to think of aspects of my characters that might interest other people aside from me.

This is foremost a drawback to not writing to market, since I’m not sure what will draw potential rabid fans to my work. I know what I like about them, because I write for myself first and foremost. I have to write the stories of my heart, and I already know I love them.

However, the other half of the problem is that I’ve been immersed in the world of fandom, and writing fanfiction, most of my life. I don’t need to explain the characters I’m writing about in that environment. To get fellow fans interested in a story, all I have to say are things like:

• Mei Changsu stuck in a groundhog day year!

• Peter Hale forced into a fake marriage with Chris Argent!

• The children of Yunmeng Jiang get disowned!

• Clint Barton adopts a grumpy cat!

In none of those set-ups do I have to tell you who the characters are, or why those particular plots might be entertaining. You either want to read about Hawkeye becoming an obsessive cat-dad, or you don’t.

This is not the case with, say, Agadart ver Kleelan.

She’s the lead in my love-triad romantasy story, The Queen’s Aerie, and she’s pretty awesome. I know that…but you don’t.

I have no shorthand to fall back on here other than basic tropes, and even those don’t fit perfectly. Is there identity porn? Yes, there is! Agadart is forced to give up her noble identity by her Queen in exchange for sparing her life. Why? …it’s a long (back)story. Wanna read it?????

That’s not the most alluring advertising for the story, is it?

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I’m just stumped about how to tell you how awesome Agadart is without you already knowing who she is.

Other authors don’t have this problem. They seem quite comfortable talking about their characters.

I’ve been told to talk about my characters as if I were a fan talking to other fans, but one aspect that is missing in that approach is the community shared world. Fandom works because all of us in a particular fandom have a common language and frame of reference.

I don’t have to spend 15 minutes setting up “there is an alien spaceship in another galaxy that humans got to through a Stargate, and they are this ragtag group of misfits.” That would be Stargate Atlantis, and every fan of the show already knows all that. They know who Rodney McKay is, they know who Ronon is, they know what the wraith are. They likely know the ‘ship I mean when I say “McShep.”

Meanwhile, my character Agadart has a complicated backstory you don’t know and lives in a second-world fantasy land you have never heard of, surrounded by dragon shifters and layers of political intrigue leading, eventually, to war. That is very interesting, I’m sure you agree!

But interesting enough to read the story? To buy the book? To want to learn more about it?

Alas, probably not. Even when I serialized it here on the Scriptorium for free, not many people read it. That’s just how bad I was at marketing it.

I’ve talked in the past about how I tend to simply fling my work out in the world and move on. Yeah, yeah, I know that it’s a very poor marketing strategy overall, you don’t have to tell me. 😕     

But what can I say about my characters that will make them as interesting to you as they are to me? For that matter, how can I describe the world building I put into all my stories that doesn’t come across as a series of bland Wikipedia articles?

This is not a problem I have with my non-fiction, where I can talk about the subjects that interest me all day long. Discovery writing? Serials and serializing? The history of text technology? Just try to get me to shut up!

Nor is this a problem I have with my fanfiction, obviously.

Is the solution just to “get over myself”? Make lists of character attributes? Pretend like I’m conversing with my characters? Imagine talking to myself?

One author who seems to have nailed her marketing is Elisabeth Wheatly, whose vids on TikTok and YouTube are highly entertaining, but more importantly, always draw you into the worlds she is building and the characters she is writing about.

I’m sure it’s not as effortless as she makes it out to be, but, damn, what’s the secret?

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It’s been a quest of mine for a long time: the perfect subscription platform.

I actually opened a Patreon account for my M/M penname back in 2018 or so. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing, and I also resisted using it because of the lack of features I wanted it to have. To make it work the way I wanted it to, I would have had to invest a lot of time and energy into work-arounds, but by that point my day!job was turning toxic and draining my creative well. I was too much of a perfectionist to compromise, so, predictably, the Patreon sat there doing nothing until I deleted it.

Then in early 2020, before the world locked down, I installed the RestrictContent Pro plugin on my self-hosted wordpress site. Could it do some of what I wanted it to do? Yes. Could it do everything I wanted it to do? No. The learning curve there was a bit more than I was able to handle at the time anyway, and I uninstalled it before the year was out.

Why these false starts? Because based on my experiences with writing and reading fanfiction, I figured out at least ten years ago that serialization and subscriptions were the “next big thing” for writers, but almost no one agreed with me.

All the subscription platforms were geared to artists or educators or personal coaches, and the ones that were built for readers were not meant to make the writers money (AO3 for fanfiction, Wattpad for everything else). Vella and Radish came on-scene, but they were designed to make the platforms a lot of money, not the writers. Much as with Kindle Unlimited, paying the authors was a burden the platforms were grudgingly willing to endure for the sake of content.

There were a few outliers, most famously Andy Weir (who published The Martian as a serial on his own website in 2011 since no publishers wanted it) and Anna Todd (whose “After” series on Wattpad catapulted her career around the same time) but they were considered outliers, not what they actually were: trailblazers.

In retrospect, I should have stuck with Patreon and just kicked my perfectionism to the curb. I should have just done the damn thing. Hindsight is 20/20, etcetera etcetera, and I have a long history of bailing on good ideas because of insecurity, fear, and perfectionism, after all.

But as time has kept marching on, and new platforms appeared (and disappeared), I started a rough scratch-list of all the components I want on a robust author platform. Here and there it kept growing, and growing, and growing, until it was just a long list of features in no particular order.

In the meantime, I had jumped on Ream in early 2023, sensing that it was positioned to become exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, that did not work out for me, and I’m closing my account there by the end of October, 2024. It was close to what I was looking for, but some issues came up and I realized it was not a match for my business strategy.

I’m doing well on substack with my publications, The Scriptorium and The Bibliotheca, but they lack a lot of features that would be helpful for writers and readers. It’s a newsletter platform with some social media features slapped on top, and sometimes that is very obvious.

Yes, I am aware that WorldAnvil exists. I love that platform, it is very robust and has a lot of excellent features, but it was and is designed for fantasy, RPG, LitRPG, and science fiction. I would not recommend it to, say, authors who write romcoms, or historical fiction. It is incredibly over-engineered for people who are not creating second worlds from scratch, and it also doesn’t have quite a few features that I want baked into a platform, including audio (for audio books/storycasts) or merch sales. It does what it does magnificently well, but that’s what it is designed to do.

I hear you yelling at me: Okay, KimBoo, so what do you want that you really really want?

KimBoo’s Dream WikiArchivePlatform for Authors (and readers).

If you don’t want to click the link, here is the tl;dr: Imagine a bastard child of Wikipedia, Patreon, and AO3.

Tip jar!

If you do click that link, though, it will take you to a gDoc that is the elevated, extended version of my scratch list of features. It’s everything I want, and how I want it all to work together.

I’d prefer it if someone else built it for me, because, whew, that looks like a lot of work.

But.

I think I need to build it myself simply because I have been online since 1996, and I know that putting all your eggs in any platform’s basket is never a good idea. I had a rockin’ MySpace back in the day, and for several years, LiveJournal was almost exclusively my online habitat. Both are still around, sure, but they are not the platforms I used to love. Features change, people move on, enshittification happens.

Meanwhile, I’ve had kimbooyork.net for 20+ years. Oh sure, it’s changed a lot, and honestly needs another upgrade. It’s always held a somewhat uncertain place in the pantheon of my websites, skipping back and forth between a semi-professional site filled with resumes and portfolio examples and a personal journal for me and my friends. Now I have houseofyork.info as my “business site” and that feels a lot more secure and permanent than, say, a linktree page. Or substack, for that matter.

So my preference would be some kind of feature set I could wrap into wordpress without having to use 40 different plugins (I’m looking at you, woocommerce). Hell, I’d consider migrating to a platform like SquareSpace or Wix if they could do it all. (They can’t.)

Otherwise I’m building a whole new platform from the ground up just for myself and ACK NOOOOOOOOOOO!

The AO3 software is open source, as is MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia), but they are very different from each other. Not sure how either could play with each other, if at all, much less complicated permissions set by membership tiers. I’m sure it’s possible.

I mean, anything is possible if you have enough time, money, or both.

If that’s you, please check out that google doc and let me know. *waggles eyebrows*

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