This week’s blog post is a couple of days early, because I wanted to share book release day with you. My latest book for authors, The Intuitive Author: How to Grow & Sustain a Happier Writing Career, is a survival guide for writers on how to create a thriving, satisfying career in a challenging, complex publishing environment.
There’s a story behind the writing of it.
Regular readers may remember that for a couple of years now I have been working on a book about character development as my follow up to Intuitive Editing. In fact it’s about a third of the way finished, with all the material worked out and outlined and ready for drafting.
But I started noticing that the blog posts I wrote that had more to do with writing life and managing a writing career were getting a lot of response from readers. I was hearing from authors, more and more of them, that they were finding the current publishing environment challenging, daunting, overwhelming. A few told me they were actually thinking of leaving the business.
I started writing more of that kind of post in response. I started speaking about these “squishy” topics a lot in keynotes, writing about them in other outlets as well, and over and over I heard the same feedback: it’s really tough out there in publishing these days, and writers were feeling Not Okay.
As an editor I love to take an analytical approach to creative/seemingly amorphous problems and figure out practical, actionable ways to solve them–that was the genesis and the basis of Intuitive Editing. I started bringing that same approach to figuring out how authors could build and sustain a more satisfying and successful writing career—and what “success” as a writer actually means, and eventually I realized that this was all my brain wanted to focus on.
Writing the “hard-skills” character book felt harder and harder, with all my thoughts focused on trying to crack these “soft skills” of writing: how to stay motivated amid the ups and downs of any career in publishing, how to advocate for themselves in a business where it can seem authors aren’t offered a seat at the table, how to handle rejection and criticism and failure, and build resilience in our careers.
And oh, yes, the demons. Regular readers know that I often write about the most common writer demons: those negative internal messages that create additional obstacles from within, on top of the many external ones creatives will encounter in any career. Impostor syndrome. Comparison. Competition. Procrastination. “Writer’s Block.” Fear of failure…and more, the full demon cadre.
I decided to start following my own advice I was developing in these areas, and revisited what I really wanted to be writing about—so I stepped away from the character book temporarily so I could switch gears to write The Intuitive Author.
More than anything, I want to help authors gain a feeling of control over their own careers in a business where it often feels the artist has the least amount of it. I want to help authors reclaim a sense of autonomy and agency in forging a career path for themselves that meets their goals and values, that brings them contentment and joy, and that lets them create a happier career—and a happier life.
I hope The Intuitive Author offers those tools to writers—to any creatives. It’s designed to be used as a guidebook, one you can consult topic by topic as needed, or read start to finish to start internalizing and mastering these skills.
It releases today, and if you decide to check it out I’d love to know how effective these techniques and tools are for you. And please leave a review if you have a few moments! You already know how much it helps with visibility to reach readers.
Thanks to all of you who’ve shared your stories, thoughts, worries, fears, and hopes for your careers. Thank you for inspiring and teaching me with your experiences and insights. And thanks for being here as a treasured part of my writing community.