Author Advice Overload
Too many options is a great thing, except when it isn't
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Something I’m seeing a lot of right now is authors flailing about, wondering WTF they need to do to be successful in 2024/2025.
In the past, answers were never easy, but they were simple. First, and for most of the 20th century overall, the only path for writers to succeed was to write well, network, get an agent, then get a publisher. A second and complementary path to that which translated well to the early self-publishing years was: write a lot, write to market, and release a lot of stuff as rapidly as possible. When self-publishing took off, a third approach made many writers a lot of money, which was to write to market, put your books on Kindle Unlimited (KU), and run some (many) ads. Combinations of these three paths to success happened all the time, too, but were not exclusionary.
We can (and should!) argue about how the majority of writers never succeeded at any of those models, but ehhhh, enough did to validate them and make them the go-to advice for authors looking to build a full-time career out of their writing.
These days, though, the path to success for writers is more like a snarled knot.
The reason so many people experience so much overwhelm when researching “how to succeed as an author” is that, in this here 2024, there are so many options. It’s not 2013 when it was “KU or nothing” for self-published genre authors like me, or “go trad with an agent and publishing contract” for literary authors. There is KU; there is wide; there is the subscription model; there is crowdsourcing (kickstarter etc.); there is hybrid indie/trad; there is audio and audio options. There are so many combinations of all of that too!
Every writer I know who is starting or re-launching or just trying to catch up feels overwhelmed by all the choices on the plate, and all the advice they get from so many people which is all so very different. Answers are not simple anymore, and they are also twice as hard.
Where to start, then?
(Or re-start / re-launch / revitalize!)
I get this question a lot from my coaching clients. Since my speciality is productivity coaching and project management for writers, I am often asked how a writer should pursue publishing. Which lane is the best lane? What is the right path to success? How can I change what I’m doing to improve my odds?
To be honest, my advice is always the same: begin as you mean to continue.
What will work for you depends entirely on the writing/publishing model you are going for, which in turn is driven by both your genre and your target readers.
What genres are you focusing on? Something like “romance” or “fantasy” are just broad categories at this point, it tells me nothing about what you are actually writing. Romance can be paranormal, romcom, contemporary, historical. Horror is less stratified than romance as a genre, but it still makes a difference if you are writing gothic horror, legend/myth horror, psychological horror. Mixing subgenres is much more common these day (witness “cozy fantasy mystery romance”), which is fun, but can dictate the approach you should take to your career.
In short, some genres just demand higher output than others for an author to be successful, and you need to know that.
I have a friend who writes heavily researched historical fiction, and in that genre, a book a year is a high output, which affects their social media approach and determines how important a book launch is. Many contemporary romance authors I know shoot to publish a book a month or every six weeks, so have jumped successfully out of KU into a subscription model on Patreon or Ream. I write across multiple genres and categories, so the advice for authors in tight niches doesn’t work for me at all.
If you have not written a lot of publishable stories yet, you’re in a good place to sit down and think about what you plan to write next, and then after that, and then after that. If you have written a lot of published books, think about how it feels to keep writing those same kinds of books for ten years.
If you can only see yourself writing, say, Appalachian horror novellas for the next couple of years, that requires a much different approach than if you are going to write a romantasy series of six 100k long novels. Are you willing to go all-in with KU indefinitely, or do you want to expand to going wide with the next few books? Do you feel comfortable serializing your work? Do you want to build a tight community of fans or are you aiming for the New York Times bestseller list?
I mean, yes, some things are universal (advertising works, putting out a lot of content consistently will help sales), but the rest of your choices need to be based on what you can do and what you want to do.
What you can do is a productivity issue, so questions to ask yourself include:
Is this is a side gig for the foreseeable future, or are you planning to make this your full-time career?
What kind of writing/publishing schedule can you commit to?
Are you comfortable with a long publication process or do you want to flip stories as quickly as possible and move on?
How much can you invest in things like editing, covers, advertising (in both time and money)? And yes, even if you go trad, you will be paying for things like initial edits before submission and social media/marketing.
What is a comfortable writing output for you?
The last is the trickiest but also the most important. Can you write 200 words a day every day forever? Can you write 1,000 words a week? 10k words a week? Do you need “fallow time” after finishing a story to re-energize for your next project? Do you write one story at a time or do you always have 3+ stories in the hopper?
Word of caution: Beware maxing yourself out from the get-go; all of us long-timers have done that and suffered burnout. Do as we say, not as we do! Ahahahah! But burnout is real and ‘zon is littered with writers who shot their wad for the first year or two, publishing like mad, and then we never saw them again.
What you want to do is a personal preferences issue, and the FIRST question to ask is this:
Are you doing this for the money or doing this for the story?
There is no right answer, and truthfully, we’re all on a spectrum because we all are professional writers for a reason! If all we cared about was money, we’d be investment bankers.
But how you answer this will determine a lot about your approach to your authorial career.
People who are more money-driven tend to focus on the tried and true method of “niche down/write to market/rapid release.” They are usually more comfortable writing the same basic plot over and over again, finding their creative joy in tweaking the characters/setting/world building. I’m more story-driven; I have to write my funky, genre-bending stories, but gosh it would be nice to get paid, too! (I make life hard for myself that way, but it’s just who I am as a writer. I assure you that sometimes I wish I cared more about the money.)
From there, you might also ask the following:
What do you love to read?
What do you daydream/fantasize about?
What kind of stories do you enjoy talking about (oddly, may not be your fave reading genre!)
If you have hobbies, see if they link to storytelling (cosplay, fanfiction, D&D, video games) and how you can draw on that for your stories.
Imagine you are NYT best-selling author: what do your book covers look like when stacked up behind you?
Imagine you are NYT best-selling author and are being interviewed: what questions do they ask?
Think out to book #20 (or #40!) in your stable. Are you enjoying writing the same genre, similar characters, an ongoing series? Or did you cringe at the thought?
Honestly, this might be simple enough to answer, because if you enjoy writing a certain type of story well then, that’s the kind of story you want to write!
But we humans are good at tricking ourselves. For a long time I thought I was a romance author, but when I asked myself these questions, I realized that I enjoy romantic plotlines but I’m much more invested in writing SFF stories with heavy world-building and complex plots.
No matter where you are in your author journey, taking time to sit down and figure out what you can do and what you want to do is good place to start planning.
As someone very early into their writing journey, I’m glad I read this. I feel that I need to experiment more and be more realistic with my goals. I really don’t want to experience burnout
Thanks for all the info and important questions we should ask ourselves. You perspective is meaningful. As an aside, I first read the title as "Author Advice Overlord" and was very impressed with your willingness to claim your authority. ;)