Trying to become a full-time author is fraught with bad advice. Over time, you get better at absorbing the good advice and abandoning what doesn’t work for you. After all, no two people will ever use the same methods, no matter how similar their work may be. Despite this, there’s one consistent piece of one-size-fits-all advice given to authors who want to take the next step and push from hobby to career. That suggestion?

Write to market.

It’s pretty simple in concept. Pick a niche–preferably one that doesn’t have a whole lot of books available in it–and research thoroughly to learn the genre expectations. Study the clichés (er, I’m sorry, tropes) present in the most popular books, work out the successful formula, then write until your fingers bleed. The idea is that if it’s already out there and you’re fitting yourself perfectly to the mold of expectation, your books will be a hit.

For some people, supposedly, this is the magic bullet. It’ll launch your career like nothing else, bringing you enough royalties to write full-time and gathering masses of passionate fans. Like a lot of writing advice I come across, I tried it. It wrecked my physical and emotional health, and almost killed my love of writing.

See, while I’m sure it has worked for a few people–since it wouldn’t be touted as a cure-all if it hadn’t–it’s not good advice for most people who have a passion for writing for a few reasons.

For one, it requires you to write fast. This isn’t a problem for everyone. Some people are able to jump in and write 2,000 words a day or more from the get go, but most people have obligations that keep them from doing that. Work, school, family… any number of things can dig into that writing time, and if you need more than an hour or two to plan and write, you’d better not count on completing a book a month. Actually, that’s not even considered the optimal speed anymore for writing to market; most modern plans suggest publishing books written to suit market no further than 18 days apart. Ask yourself, and answer honestly: Can you write a good book in 18 days?

One solution offered in response to that problem is waiting until you have a bunch of books ready to release all at once. But there’s another problem that comes out of that situation. How do you know your books are going to sell? How do you know they’re going to be liked? How do you know you aren’t writing six books in a series and just throwing money away, buying professional covers and paying for editing on something that will never be read? Yeah, exactly.

You don’t.

A secondary problem is that books written to market are rarely picked up by traditional publishers, outside of romance novels, where the genre is already given to high amounts of churn. Your heroine and her steamy harem of werebear lumberjacks might be successful if you work fast and pop it on the indie market while that subgenre is hot, but if you need six months to write six books for the series, don’t count on the genre still being hot when your series is complete. And if it’s hot now, traditional publishers probably won’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole. After all, it’s not unusual for a book signed today to hit the market two years from now. If you don’t know it’s going to be successful in six months, what makes you think it’s going to be the bees knees in a few years?

Then there’s the biggest issue I encountered, the one that almost did me in.

Writing to market is a soul-sucking experience because at the end of the day, I’m not part of that market. I don’t typically like what’s hot and trendy, so trying to write it is soul-crushing and discouraging. I find a lot of popular books trite and cliché, sometimes even painful to read.  Sure, fitting the mold might be a shortcut to success, but it’s also a path that runs contrary to the reason I started in the first place. And of all places, the harsh wake-up call came from an episode of My Little Pony. My friend Megan blogged about the same episode recently, if you want to read her thoughts, but for me, it pretty much boils down to one thing.

I write because of a piece of much older advice, which I think suits most people better: Write what you want to read.

I started writing because the books I liked had fallen out of popularity, and I found everything coming out of publishing houses when I was a teenager to be sorely lacking and highly uninspiring. And that’s the core of the conflict between writing to market and writing what I really love. Writing to market means finding a big audience, learning exactly what they want, and then giving it to them.

Writing what you love means writing to an audience of one.

Writing what I love is obviously better for me. Writing it at my own pace is better, too. The difficult part is that, contrary to what they show you in My Little Pony, the chances of what you want to read being what a large market wants to read are pretty slim. But it’s a richer experience, more fulfilling, and it results in what I think are better books.

Unfortunately, not everyone shares that opinion.

I wrote Her Midnight Cowboy because I wasn’t a fan of the super explicit paranormal romance. I found a few authors I enjoyed and wrote what (I felt) was the best thing I’d ever done. It was story-rich, just a little spicy instead of smutty, and completely lacked a snarky weapon-wielding heroine in leather pants, like what’s most popular in paranormal romance.

It totally bombed, and yet I still feel like it’s one of the best things I’ve written, because it was what I wanted to read. A sweet, fun and funny story with an immersive world and a gritty, violent paranormal adventure, rolled together under a charming country coat of paint.

But because it bombed, I was bombarded with the same message again: Write to market. Write to market, or you’ll fail again.

I guess that means it’s time to reevaluate success, because if writing to market means writing to someone else’s expectations, I’d rather not do it. I’m writing for me. An audience of one. And as far as I’m concerned, these stories are pretty fantastic.

Maybe my books won’t ever be successful because I’ll never give people who enjoy a mainstream market what they want out of a book. But maybe, just maybe, someone will eventually find my books and love them.

I mean… I could probably write for an audience of two.

Last week was my challenge week. The goal: Write 2,000 words every day, Monday through Friday. The plan was to end the week with 10,000 words of new material written for Her Midnight Hunter, the next book in my current paranormal trilogy. HMH needs to be done before I move on to something else, but it had been a while since I wrote, so I needed to get back into the swing of it.

On an average day, when I’m writing on a daily basis, I get about 500 words written. In an average month, I log a total of around 20,000 words,  doing a little extra on weekends and in stolen time. By that standard, 10k would be half a month’s work, packed into 5 days. I wrote a little about how I was feeling after every session, which I’ve pasted below. Here’s how it went…

Monday

That was exhausting.

I dropped Eevee off and headed out to the garden right after. I picked a spot and took a couple pictures to share with the people who knew I was doing this today, then sat down and got out my stuff.

Before I could do anything, I needed to reread everything I’d written so far. I haven’t touched this story in a few months, so I need the refresher. I got caught up editing a little along the way, but it didn’t take too long, as I was just shy of 12,000 words into the story. After I was done reading and knew where I was starting from, I copied my outline paragraph for that chapter over to the story document and started work at around 10. I brought headphones to shut out the sound of the sports the hundreds of kids here were doing, so I was in my quiet little bubble on the other side of the garden. It’s beautiful, so it’s hard not to be inspired there.

I thought it would be easier to just pick up and go, but I was picking up at an action scene, which is one of the harder things for me to write. I really struggled through the beginning. Well, I guess I really struggled through the whole thing. I haven’t written in so long that I really had to buckle down and when it hit 11 AM and I only had 700 words, I wasn’t sure I was going to make my goal.

But it did get easier as I went. I stopped at 11:55 with 2,206 words. I can’t say how happy I am with those words, but it’s the better part of a chapter, and at least it moves things forward. The first half of the week is supposed to be beautiful weather, so hopefully I can keep this up.

Monday’s word count: 2,206

Tuesday

I started earlier today, finding a shortcut into the garden. I started writing at 9:15. The first hour was the most productive this time, starting a fresh chapter and refining my outline and plans as I went. But after an hour some other people came out to enjoy the weather and it got pretty loud. It was hard to concentrate after that, so even though I got over a thousand in my first 45 minutes, it took me another hour to reach my 2k goal. I stopped at 2,142.

I think I’ll be able to do 2k comfortably each day after Eevee starts school, but working at home will probably be easier then. One issue is that I can only go that hard for about two hours, then I’m exhausted. I took a break at 11 and explored the library and enjoyed the weather until 12, then sat down to write a bit more. But I was tired, so I didn’t get much farther. Rough.

Overcoming that mental fatigue will be the hardest part and I think it’s a big challenge for this week, too. How much can I do in one week with consistency? Will I burn out and wear out before I reach the end of the week? Today was okay, but maybe tomorrow I’ll sit in a different place with fewer tables and see if I can keep things quieter for more of my work time. It would be pretty cool to break 3k one day, but I won’t push it. I made 2k and got extra. That’s progress, so I’m satisfied with that.

Tuesday’s word count: 2,464

Wednesday

I didn’t charge my laptop last night, so I sat down with under 30% battery. Whoops. Still, that got me almost two hours of work time. I wrote from 9:15 to 11, though I worked faster in the last 45 minutes. Funny contrast, compared to yesterday. I overslept this morning and ended up in a mad scramble to get ready and make it to the church, so I was still groggy when I got to the garden. I imagine that’s why. I wrote until I got a low battery warning and just barely squeaked by 2k.

I’m all right with averaging a thousand words an hour. It’s not great, but I’m trying to strive for quality as I work, so you sacrifice speed when doing that. It makes editing way easier later on down the road and I’d rather have easy editing than a document full of horrid word vomit to sort out later.

As of today, the document is about 250 words shy of the 20,000 word mark, which means it has almost doubled in length in the span of 3 days. If I can write this way full-time in August when Eevee starts school, I will be content. Working in the morning may be better for me, instead of putting off writing until the evening. I am not sure how I’ll fare with writing before I do any housework, though—having dirty dishes and undone laundry tends to distract me. That’s one nice thing about coming and writing in the garden. It’s impossible to do anything but focus on my work while I’m here.

I suppose one possibility is coming to the garden to write even when Eevee is in school. I’ve been sitting in a beautiful portico (I went back to the same spot, since there wasn’t anyone else here this morning) so I could come even on rainy days, as long as it’s not too hot or too cold. At 2k a day, I could finish a 90k word book in 6 weeks. Leaving room for editing, that means I’ll be able to put out about 4 books a year. My fantasy stories will probably average around that, so that would be great. But if I can get up to 3k a day (including weekends) and do that consistently, I’d be able to complete a 90k word book every month, which would put me great strides forward in my author career.

I can’t be greedy, though. Maybe tomorrow I can try for 3k. Since I stopped at 11 today and my laptop’s battery is depleted, today is not the day. But tomorrow, if I stop for a short break in the middle to stretch and clear my head, I might be able to do it.

Wednesday’s word count: 2,089

Thursday

I can’t seem to push any higher. I’m wiped out. Exhausted after days of early mornings and late nights, because I still have to go home and tend Eevee’s needs and get my normal amount of work done on other projects. I felt like this morning was going okay at first, but then everywhere got crowded. Dozens of people outside in the portico, hundreds in the lobbies. I tried to find a different place to sit. Noise and people everywhere. I can work around noise okay, but I can’t work around people. People are distracting. So while I did make it to 2k, I couldn’t seem to push much past that, and it took from 9:20 to 11:50 to get that far. At that point, I was too worn out to keep going, so I decided to call it good enough.

I dream of someday doubling that word count, but I have to keep reminding myself that this is good enough for now. Especially knowing I normally only accomplish 500 words in a day, a fact I try to remind myself every time I feel frustrated about the progress I’m making now. This is good! This is better than I’ve been doing! It’s huge strides forward. I know I can keep up this pace when Little Bit starts school, and if I want to boost my productivity then, it’ll be easier to do—I can write two hours in the morning and land around 2k words, then work on other things until lunch. I can do another hour or two after I eat, then go pick up the munchkin. That should be able to put me in the neighborhood of 3,000-4,000 words a day for week days, and I’m sure I can carve out at least an hour—roughly 1,000 words—a day on weekends.

And the more I do it, the faster I get. So why does it still feel like hitting that ceiling is a disappointment, even when I know I’m doing better than most? I guess that’s an inner struggle I need to work on.

Either way, I’m ending today with close to 22,000 words in my novel’s document, which means by the end of tomorrow, I should have the book close to a third of the way done.

That should be inspiring, right?

Thursday’s word count: 2,197

Friday

Today’s writing session totally derailed my book outline!

That’s not unusual for me. I usually derail twice, but I end up getting back to the end point eventually. I started writing at 9:20 and this time, I decided to allow myself a couple short breaks to stretch and refill my water bottle. Kind of important, since it’s 90 out today and I’m still outside to do my writing.

I stopped at 12:05. At that point, I felt like I needed to stop and reevaluate my outline to figure out what came next. That’s an important part of my process these days, so I didn’t want to fight it. I figured it’d be better to take a few minutes to revisit my plans and then I would be starting with fresh notes next time I sit down to write.

If I hadn’t hit that obstacle, I probably could have reached 3,000 words today, which felt like finally getting close enough to clear that hurdle. Hopefully that’s one I’ll clear when I do this again in August, after Eevee starts school.

Of course, I hope I won’t be working on this book at that point. HMH is now 24,356 words long, which is right around a third of its total projected length. For some reason, I thought I had more of the book written before I started this project. But I’m nowhere near the midpoint. Either way, it was still a pretty substantial week of work for me. I briefly considered trying to write a little more tonight, but I think I’ll give myself the weekend off. This whole ordeal was pretty mentally taxing, so a break might do me some good.

Okay, maybe I’ll give myself tonight off…

Friday’s word count: 2,490

Total word count for the week: 11,446

All in all, not too shabby.

Now to figure out how to do this every week.

Unsurprisingly, as a fan of fantasy, I love world maps. I’ve always wanted maps in books I read, and have seen some beautiful maps in the past.

When I started writing my own fantasy stories, I knew I wanted to make my own maps. I’ve tried a variety of options, such as Inkarnate, Dundjinni, Campaign Cartographer, and countless others. I’ve drawn my own maps my hand, drawn maps in Photoshop, and used a number of fractal generators. But recently, a new idea sprang to mind.

A couple years ago, the ‘macaroni method’ for map making went viral on the internet, but it was just a pasta-fied version of the old D&D drop map, where spilling dice across a piece of paper gives you an idea of the lay of the land. Tracing the spilled dice (or macaroni) defines the shape of the landmass, then you fill it in as desired.

But if your artistic skill is limited, that’s where the line is drawn. Some people opt for color coded fields and hills, but what if you want an illustrated map? I’ll admit, my maps sometimes end up looking like childish scrawls instead of graceful cartography. I seem to be able to draw all the elements individually, but putting them all together presents a challenge, and I tend to get bored long before I’m done drawing in all the clusters of trees and rolling foothills.

Then one day I looked across my desk and saw the box of sticker paper that’s been sitting there since I decided to get myself a Silhouette Cameo 3. As I sat there staring at it, I had the most delightful idea. Why not combine the drop map method with my love of stickers? Why not make myself a map-making kit? Any time I want a map, all I have to do is pull out my sticker box and pop mountains, forests, and castles anywhere I want on the paper. No more need to redraw the symbols over and over again. No more getting bored. And it would involve stickers, and who doesn’t love stickers?

Okay, so it requires me to draw some elements before I get started, but there are other options for those who are less artistically inclined. For one great resource, I ran across Nicu’s clipart collection, which provides scalable vectors of icons for RPG maps. They’re all released for totally free use, and they look great, as you can see:

But even though they’re an awesome starting point, I think I’ll still draw most of my own resources just so they’re my own aesthetic.

I don’t know when I’ll get around to it, but once I start, I’ll make sure to share the sticker creation… and the finished maps, too.

Late in January, my husband ran across a comic with a title remarkably similar to the title he’d chosen for his own. It’s not an uncommon issue; similar titles get used in stuff all the time. Heck, even identical titles crop up now and then. We discussed it a bit, laughed about it, and he mentioned in passing that the person who was promoting the comic didn’t seem to be the artist. On a whim, I looked it up. I was curious to see what kind of marketing team the artist had, since studying other types of marketing is always useful for any author. It only took a few clicks to learn the person heading up the project was the artist’s wife. But where was the artist?

He passed away before his series was complete.

This is a sadly familiar plight in fiction. Every time Game of Thrones comes up, people discuss the completely reasonable fear George R. R. Martin will pass away before the series is finished. Robert Jordan never saw the end of the Wheel of Time, and while Anne McCaffrey passed use of the Pern name on to her son, the series as we knew it died with her. One still living. One who lived a long, full life. One who died too soon, but knew the end was near. It’s different from the comic artist, who died suddenly, only a few years older than I am now.

As a creative, it’s crossed my mind many times. More, now that I’m an adult and a parent and balancing that with a want to create. Overwhelmingly, as I pursue my stories, I see one message emerging from every aspect of life: Don’t wait.

After spending more than half my life refining a story, I can’t say if it’s any better or worse than the first time I put it together, back when I was 14. Instead of fine-tuning over and over again, maybe my time would have been better spent pushing forward, finishing the subsequent books in the series, then moving on to other books. If I’d managed even a book a year, I could have 17 books published now instead of a small handful. If I’d worked up to my current level of productivity, I could have 40 or more.

Instead, I spent entirely too much time waiting.
Waiting for inspiration to strike.
Waiting to be a better writer.
Waiting for answers to query letters.
Waiting, and waiting, and drowning in a sea of wasted time, leaving me looking at my work and wondering when it would see the light of day.
Waiting for an answer nobody could give me.
Waiting for things that may never come.

Waiting, when I really needed to move.

Even now, I find myself waiting, even when I know better, when I want nothing more than to push forward.

Waiting for feedback that never seems to come.
Waiting for the funds to do things the right way.
Waiting for the time to get everything done.
But if I don’t move forward, everything I’ve spent the better part of two decades building may never emerge.

I read an article by an author who said he reached the level he’s at now by always saying yes. Any time he got an offer for publication, the answer was yes. There was no time to wait for something better, for the perfect fit, for the dream deal he’d always hoped for. There was only now, and hopefully, tomorrow would bring more stories.
Don’t wait.

Traditionally published books take so long to reach market that if I were to sign a contract for my series today, it could be ten years before the final book is published. I suffer anxiety, and sometimes I rub my fingers over my aching chest and wonder which time it’ll actually mean I’m dying, instead of simply being stressed. And then I wonder if I’d be so stressed if I wasn’t waiting.

Death is a morbid motivator, but it’s good at pushing us beyond our comfort zones. When I finally got to see my favorite band live, I wanted nothing more than to ask the lead singer for a selfie together. Instead I spent a couple hours on the edge of a panic attack, letting the opportunity slip by time and time again. My husband kept urging me to go ask. But I waited. And waited. Eventually, I saw what I was doing and challenged myself.
If I died on the trip home, would I regret in my final moments that I hadn’t been brave enough to ask?

I got up and pushed my way over. I didn’t even have to ask. All I did was hold up my phone and he grinned and said, “Yeah!”
I clicked a couple pictures and went back to my seat, but I felt better. For just a moment, I could die without regrets.

If I went now, my biggest regret would be never sharing the stories I have written that I desperately want to release. So that should be my biggest goal for the year. Getting it done. Getting it out there. Knowing that after it’s done, that for just a moment, I could die without regrets.

No more excuses.
Don’t wait.

Eight.

Just typing that headline makes me cringe.

It’s not uncommon for books to go through a lot of different drafts, but this is a little bit different. After a serious reevaluation, a split and a renaming, the first book in my epic fantasy series is now in its eighth full rewrite. That’s eight times I’ve started at the beginning with a book full of notes and a pile of index cards, tearing the story apart and putting it back together. And in some ways, this one–the eighth rewrite–is the hardest rewrite I’ve ever done.

Splitting the first book in two does a lot of things, one of which is messing up the pacing. Though there wasn’t really any fluff in the first rendition, it was long simply because the book had a great deal of territory to cover. But in the end, this ended up working against it. I reached a point where I had to go back and ruthlessly chop out pieces of the story for brevity’s sake. Prior to splitting, the book was 182,000 words, which isn’t bad for an epic fantasy story. But I encountered two problems.

One, agents kept telling me it was too long for publication (For epic fantasy? Really?) and encouraged me to reduce the word count by half.

Two, the first version of the book would have been closer to 240,000 words. Ultimately, paring out so many side stories reduced the epic scale of the whole thing and didn’t do it any favors.

So if 182k was too long, 240 was way too long.
But with a little care, maybe splitting could work out better in the long run.

I split the book exactly at the midpoint and started with an endingless manuscript just under 95,000 words long–the count agents kept telling me to shoot for. There were exciting things happening at that part of the book, and it was right around the time when the first character arc ended, meaning it told a full story on its own. I roughed out an ending when I did the seventh revision.

But it didn’t feel right, so the eighth revision began, and some of the cut content has started filtering its way back into the story. One third of the way into the eighth revision, the first book is just under 98,000 words long. I don’t think it will end up anywhere near the 120k it would have been the first time I wrote the story, if only because I’m better at writing now and can say more in fewer words. But I expect it will creep over the 100k word line, and the second half–which will become the second book–will probably be a shade longer than that, as it lost the most content in early revisions.

What comes after this, I don’t know. I don’t feel like the next book in the series lends itself to splitting, but it’s also the shortest of the original three, at 160k words. I actually think it’s the best book in the series, but there are a lot of logistics to consider and what path I take to publication will play a large part in the decisions to be made. Right now I’m just trying to finish book one.

I war with myself a lot on the decision to break it up. It’s easier to present to traditional publishers, and easier to turn into a readable paperback if I take an independent publication path. But it’s hard to stop thinking of the book as three books instead of six, because it’s been three in my head for half my life. I even had visions of covers in my head. The first book was to be green, the second blue, and the third red. I made a cover mock-up for the first, featuring Rune’s sword with a vine coiled around it, the bark turning to scales. I kept it to myself for several years, using it as something to encourage myself with as I slogged through each draft of the book.

But no matter how the book ends up reaching readers, it won’t be the cover used. If I go with a traditional publisher, I won’t have any say in the cover, and if I go independent, I know now that “iconic” covers rarely perform well and I’m better off having one of the characters front and center. Might as well share the rough mock-up. I even changed the text on the front to try to sell myself on the title change that went along with splitting the first book.

While I’m feeling better about the choice to break it in half these days, I’m still mired in revising (or re-re-re-re-re-re-re-revising, as it happens) and publication is a long way off. But learning what I have about the publishing industry, its current practices, and the way they treat their authors, I’m less confident than ever about traditional publishing and strongly feel like independent is the better option for me. I never would have signed a contract that required me to surrender my rights to the world and characters I’ve created, and my aggressive desire to have say in things like the covers and how the print books look means I’m probably better off doing things on my own, anyway. It will still be a quality book, with pretty pictures, beautiful formatting, and a whole team of skilled editors. I just want to take my time and make sure everything is done right, no matter which way it reaches the market.

Yet I also don’t want to sit forever, waiting for a contract offer that probably wouldn’t meet my desires, anyway. Were I to sign a contract for this book today, it would not hit shelves for around two years. I don’t want to wait that long, but I guess I may if that’s what’s necessary. I just have to accept that I can’t have it both ways.