Tag: author burnout

I hate to be the bearer of bad news – especially if you’re still slogging through a draft of your first manuscript. You know what some people say about writing a book is the hard part.

Lies. Damned lies. That’s the frothy, twinkly nonsense parroted by people who’ve never published anything beyond a social media post, probably only a comment.

Let me tell you the truth. The actual, bloodstained, coffee-fuelled truth:

Writing the book is the easy part.

It’s the visible tip of the iceberg, smugly floating above the surface, soaking up the praise and admiration. Meanwhile, everything else – the sleepless nights, the decimal-point royalty statements, the unpaid invoices to your own soul – is lurking beneath, waiting to sink your mental health like the HMS Delusion.

So here it is, for posterity and pity:

Post-Writing Gauntlet: The Real Job Begins

1. Editing (Five Times, If You’re Lucky)

• Developmental editing – “Is your plot a plot or a pile of wet spaghetti?”
• Line editing – Making your sentences less embarrassing.
• Copyediting – Catching your consistent misuse of ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.
• Proofreading – The last defence against the typo apocalypse.
• Beta feedback – Friends who suddenly vanish when asked to read a draft.

2. Formatting and Typesetting

• Print vs digital layouts. Word crimes meet paragraph crimes.
• EPUBs that break for fun.
• That one widow on page 243 you didn’t notice until the proof copy arrived.

3. Cover Design

• DIY, Fiverr roulette, or mortgage your cat to hire a professional.
• Matching tone, genre conventions, and market expectations.
• Spelling your own name correctly. (Don’t laugh, it happens.)

4. ISBNs and Metadata Hell

• ISBN purchases (if you’re not relying on Amazon’s identifiers).
• Title, subtitle, BISAC categories, keywords, blurbs, author bio — all rewritten seventeen times.

5. Publishing Platform Setup

• Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark, Kobo, Draft2Digital, Smashwords — pick your poison.
• Print proofs, bleed settings, trim sizes, the baffling difference between matte and gloss.

6. Marketing (a.k.a. Screaming Into the Void)

• Author website & blog (SEO: your new religion).
• Social media presence — the façade of charm over existential dread.
• Newsletter with a totally non-spammy freebie opt-in.
• Ads: Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google. Burn money to test the water temperature.

7. Book Launch

• ARCs, blog tours, launch events, or at least pretending you’re doing those things.
• Coordinating reviews before anyone has read the damn thing.
• Press kits and media outreach — basically shouting “LOOK AT ME” with tact.

8. Ongoing Sales Maintenance

• Price promos, countdown deals, boxed sets, bundling — keep flogging the corpse.
• Monitoring sales dashboards like a Victorian ghost watches the wallpaper peel.
• Adjusting metadata because one reviewer didn’t understand it was satire.

9. Audiobook Production (If You Hate Money)

• Narrator auditions, contracts, studio time.
• Alternatively, read it yourself and discover your own voice is intolerable.
• Or muddle through with an AI speech companion. Hullo, ElevenLabs.
• Distribution through ACX or Findaway, both of which will pay you in dry leaves.

10. Accounting and Legal Fuss

• Tracking royalties across platforms.
• Filing taxes as an “author-publisher-entrepreneur-marketer-entity”.
• Copyright registration, contracts, intellectual property trolls under the bridge.

11. Dealing With Readers

• Responding to fan mail (both lovely and deranged).
• Ignoring 1-star reviews that say “not what I expected, didn’t read it”.
• Navigating book clubs who want a discount because they’re “doing you a favour”.

12. Mental Health and Motivation

• Impostor syndrome, burnout, elation, despair — the writer’s buffet.
• Rewriting your author bio weekly because you don’t know who you are anymore.

Optional Add-Ons (for masochists)

• Translations and foreign rights – Because English isn’t the only language in which you can fail to sell books.
• Merchandise – T-shirts nobody buys, mugs that mock your financial situation.
• Public speaking / readings – Summon the courage to read your sex scenes aloud in a room of pensioners.