I’m doing something a little different with my Wednesday blog posts in April. Together, this four-part series is a deeply personal investigation of the career I’ve created so far. Last week I wrote about why I’m here. This week we’ll build on that. Enjoy!

An Honest Audit, Part Two: What?

For this post, the subtitle I had in mind when I sketched out notes for this series was “you can create.” 😉

In Part One, I wrote about my why: wanting to help and inspire others, and using writing to do so. It makes sense, then, to talk about what that actually means!

For me, being a self-published or “indie” author means running a tiny business out of our spare room, the room we used to call “William’s room” because my little tortoise’s enclosure takes up an entire corner. I have an LLC–Phoenix & Kelpie Press–and I file lots more taxes . . . sigh.

I still work part-time in the nonprofit world, and I have ongoing volunteer commitments. So, author stuff gets about four to six hours of my day during the week . . . Theoretically. That’s assuming I can turn off my brain or “clock out” of mulling over storylines and business goals and did I reply to that email??, which I often can’t. 😉 It’s a work in progress, and a familiar issue for people who work from home.

Let’s break it down further. Of my “author stuff,” I work hard to keep the writing itself at about 50%. And sometimes I do find that to be difficult. Non-writing author activities include social media (making posts, posting posts, commenting on posts…); business administration (the dreaded emails, taxes, maintaining accounts, checking on numbers); networking (keeping up with professional message boards, finding conferences to attend, etc); web presence (maintaining my site and oh, yeah, blogging!); learning (attending seminars, reading newsletters, taking courses); outreach (presentations, blog swaps, submitting short stories to anthologies, contest submissions); and one of my weaknesses, creating graphics (for me this means spending time in Canva, which I call a “weakness” because I tend to get sucked into manipulating photos or searching for the perfect book clip-art and then I lose track of time!). Oh, and where does advertising fit into that? Well, at the moment, it doesn’t.

But that’s kind of the point. All of those non-writing activities fluctuate. Most overlap, too: for me, social media and outreach are advertising. And very few of the things on that list above are technically required to be a self-published author. For example, I’m positive I spend more time in research rabbit holes than many of my peers, because that’s another of my weaknesses (“I must be sure I learned ALL the things first!” she yells at her laptop before finally making a decision). And many authors never learn Canva or give a presentation. You don’t have to. No one will fire you. 😉 In fact, if you have the budget for it, many of those things I listed are things you could hire someone else to do.

Lesson one: you can create your own understanding of what you must do.

(Or perhaps that’s lesson two, right after “it helps if you have a closet full of hats or the time to learn new skills”?)

The thing is, budgets with room for hiring people are in short supply when you’re starting out. And that brings us to lesson three: you can create your own definition of success.

But you can’t create sales.

Okay, let’s back up. I bet a lot of people just rolled their eyes or huffed at my lack of drive. There are plenty of services and classes out there promising more sales to creative types. There’s lots of accepted-as-fact common-sense out there saying things like “if you just become a Instagram celebrity, you’ll sell tons!”, too. Compared to all that, you might find my approach kind of . . . Zen. That’s not to say I was born this way, believe me! Only in the past few weeks have I stopped hitting my head against the “but what am I doing wrong why are my numbers low” wall.

“Oh, foolish acolyte,” says the enlightened monk of my imagination. “Even if wishes were horses, the math wouldn’t work. You can create the space in your spreadsheet to lead numbers to, but you can’t make certain numbers show up.”

A lot of what we think of as “success” boils down to luck. Luck comes to people who deserve it; it comes to people who don’t. It comes to those who have prepared, but it also sometimes comes to those who haven’t, too. What I’m getting at here is that you can not make people buy your book. It’s good to advertise and get your book out there so that more people might buy your book, definitely! But at the end of the day if you find you’re staring at ads and posts and algorithms and wishing the right number would appear, you might be putting the cart before the horse.

Success, as any “S.M.A.R.T.” goal-maker will remind us, comes from inside you. From things you can control. For example, I wrote a book. Just finishing it was a success! I wrote a few more. I published them all and survived the process. I now have learned a bunch of lessons that I can share with others, plus I have some cool stories with characters I love that I can share with the world. Success. 🙂

So, at its philosophical core . . . what I’m doing is living my dream. I got my wish to be an author–or rather, I made it happen. And that’s the deceptive thing about dreams or wishes or metaphorical horses: they require a lot of care (even if you can’t make them drink right on cue!). My real challenge now is creating a balance between caring for my author career and caring for myself–and any other dreams that come along the way.

Want to Keep in Touch?

Options! You can sign up for my newsletter, which comes out twice a month and includes sneak peeks, book recommendations, cat pictures, and a round up of recent blog posts. Or, you can subscribe to the blog itself, to make sure you never miss an upcoming release. You can also do both! Either way, I’ll never share your info, and I’m looking forward to sharing with you again. 🙂

Newsletter:

Blog: