No Pressure

When I independently published my first book in 2020, it felt like a monumental achievement. In fact, I need to give myself full credit here, because it was a monumental achievement. Plenty of people begin writing a book but very few finish. If you’re in that select group then take a moment and give yourself a pat on the back. After all, you did it!

The creative writing habit formed as a way to relax and escape the pressures and mundanity of my day job. It was a place where I could exist in my imagination, the ruler of my very own world – at least until the numerous characters in my head took charge and made my books way better as a consequence. I loved doing it and, as an added bonus, I was good at it. I’ve steadily improved my craft and reached a level I’m proud of, and justifiably so.

In 2021 I wrote a piece for this blog asking What Does Writing Success Look Like? Back then I’d been published for a year and everything was exciting and new. I’d thrown myself into social media and the wider networking necessary to reach readers and I was having a pretty good time! I approached things with energy and enthusiasm, where every sale felt like a win (it still does) and one part of the article particularly struck me as I was re-reading it for this post.

I’m still at the start of this phase of my writing career and I now understand the single biggest challenge is for new authors to be discovered by readers and establish that fanbase. You have to keep working on that, alongside creating content people want to read. Writing good quality books and stories is really the only measure of success that matters. Without that you have nothing to offer and the other stuff I’ve mentioned [i.e. social media, marketing, etc.] won’t be able to make up for such a deficiency.

It’s a useful reminder that the writing is what it’s all about. In the whirlwind of activity over the last six years since Hall of Bones came out I think there are times when I’ve lost sight of that.

Now I’m seen as more established in some quarters people often ask how it’s all going, expecting me to tell them I’m about to quit the day job. The reality is different. If you follow my annual year in review blog posts you’ll already know that I sell fewer books now than I did two or three years ago.

Why is that?

When I first started out, I naïvely expected my growth in readership to follow a linear, upwards trajectory year upon year. However, this isn’t how the independent or traditional publishing industry works. It’s all about visibility and discoverability, and the attention of the public is fickle. I had a major stroke of luck when I entered the Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off (SPFBO) writing competition in 2021. Hall of Bones made the finals, much against my expectations when I filled in my submission. SPFBO has played a massive role in shining a light on independent fantasy fiction and I benefitted hugely from that.

As I acknowledged in that 2021 post, “the single biggest challenge is for new authors to be discovered by readers”. SPFBO gave me a platform and an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. People started picking up Hall of Bones and subsequent books in the series and I did really well on Kindle Unlimited, where I passed the 1,000,000 pages read milestone in 2023.

Back then I didn’t realise these numbers were unusual for an independent author. With each passing year more fantasy books continue to be released and SPFBO has announced successive new rounds of semi-finalists and finalists. As to be expected, the attention of readers moved on to new authors and things slowed down. I pushed hard to complete my series in 2024 and, if I’m perfectly honest, I was disappointed more people didn’t pick up the fourth and final book to find out how it all ended (Broken Brotherhood is a great book, by the way – if you’ve enjoyed the earlier books then you’re missing out. Just saying.).

An author’s social media messages and their email account spam folder are always packed with approaches from random strangers, all of them promising to turn things around. They can optimise your website. They can market your books on social media. They run the very course you need to transform your business. There’s a grain of truth in their pitches, because you do need to put yourself out there. I was now back in the trenches, with millions of other authors, all seeking to grab the attention of potential readers.

Last year I began to feel a growing sense of pressure to try and turn things around. I didn’t like this feeling of going backwards, although looking at things now I think what I was really experiencing was a normalising of previously higher than average sales. I put myself out there on social media, maintained this blog, kept up with my book reviews, took part in author interviews, attended online and in-person events, contributed to a couple of anthologies, launched a Patreon and even ran my own Kickstarter.

I made sure I did things I enjoyed, rather than out of a sense of obligation. However, at the back of my mind was the thought that if I did all that then surely those efforts would translate into more sales. Right?

Wrong.

Now, I’m sure all that activity did have a positive impact. For example, I recently posted about my series on social media for the first time in about a month and, guess what, I sold a book! However, that post didn’t sell me 100 books in one go, or 1,000. Those numbers are earned one book at a time, and this is a business that works through word of mouth, built up over years.

Sometimes things can blow up and you experience runaway success – or in my case… er… steady jogging success? The reality is this whole business is built on a huge element of luck and being in the right place at the right time. Forcing things is impossible, and you have to be able to reconcile yourself with that fact. If you don’t, you’ll burn yourself out.

So, how do you deal with these things in a healthier way? The answer is simple – you continue to write good books. Every one of those is an opportunity for another reader to discover your writing and enjoy it. I was right about this in 2021 and I’m right about this now in 2026. I just needed to remind myself what really matters.