In the midst of all this, I have pursued my dream of becoming an author. My husband has been endlessly supportive, as have my friends, who have never once allowed me to entertain the idea that I might not, in fact, be cut out for this.

But it means I have to be very deliberate about how I allot my time.

When writing was still a hobby, I could revise and tinker and tweak a passion project to my heart’s content, but now I have quarterly goals and accountability partners and a Kanban board with multi-coloured Post-Its. Not to punish myself, certainly, and not to take the joy out of it, but to ensure that I am actually moving closer to achieving my dream.

So in January, I set out to begin building my author platform. I put writing aside for the whole month to double down: I built a website, set up a Mailerlite newsletter, launched a reader magnet on BookFunnel, and then started a Substack.

I wish I could tell you that I came to Substack with a plan, a business strategy, or even just a rationale behind my choice of platform. But in truth, I had nothing except a very strong gut instinct that Substack was where I needed to be.

Well, if being in my forties has taught me anything, it’s that you have to trust your gut instincts even if you currently see no reason why that feeling is there.

So I simply…started. No content pillars, no plan, just a passion for writing romantasy, a desire to connect with other romantasy authors, and some very vague, unorganized ideas about possibly creating a romantasy-writing course.

And readers, I’ve had an absolutely marvellous time. I’ve connected with inspiringly talented authors and read intelligent, thought-provoking work. In a world of toxic social media, Substack has proven itself to be the last bastion of nuanced, thoughtful discourse on the Internet.

But as I watched and learned and tried to figure out where L.M. Sanders Writing Romantasy was going, I noticed that the content I was most attracted to on this platform had nothing to do with writing romantasy, or even just general author concerns. When I was scrolling, the topic that compelled me to click over and over again, reading post after post, was all the controversy around AI in indie and traditional publishing.

Now, AI may seem like something of a departure from the dreamy romantasy world in which I spend my fiction-writing time. By many accounts, AI is ruining literature, destroying creativity, and usurping the place of authors and artists in the world.

But that hasn’t been my personal experience with AI. I don’t use it to write for me (though you can see from this post that I love a good Rule of Three—and a good em dash even more). But in the early days of AI, before I knew about all the controversy, I thought it might be fun to bounce ideas off it, to brainstorm, to discuss character motivations.

I ended up discovering a tool that pushed me to be a sharper and more observant writer. A tool that finally enabled me to understand story pacing after literally years of going in plotting circles.

I am both happy and proud to be what author Joanna Penn refers to as an AI Assisted Artisan Author. I use it to build the scaffolding, not the building itself.

If you are opposed to AI, as I imagine many of you are, that’s an entirely reasonable position. The environmental impact, the incentive for students to surrender their learning, the disruption to the arts and the broader economy are very real concerns. I share those concerns as well, especially as an educator who fears the gaps that will form in my students’ skill set because of what they can now outsource to the machine.

But I also believe that, since it’s not going anywhere, we need to influence its development in a positive direction. We were laissez-faire about social media, and only now are some countries starting to grapple with its impact through changes in legislation and policy. We can’t afford to wait twenty years to do the same with AI. Since it’s in its infancy, we need to be proactive as a global society about shaping it for good (and Anthropic is taking steps toward that).

I have observed the growing tide of unprovable accusations, cancelled publishing contracts, and fear with alarm—because it’s working in the opposite direction. Instead of creating an environment of disclosure and transparency, it’s forestalled nuanced discussion around AI, eroded authors’ mental health, and polarized the author community in a world that’s already polarized enough.

It’s become very easy to believe there are only two camps: people who think generative AI is the future of writing, and people who think no author should touch AI at all.

But there’s a growing group of authors who belong to a third group. Authors like me—who enjoy using AI in their creative processes but don’t want to take work from other artists, and who don’t want it to replace their own creative thinking.

Right now there isn’t much in the way of an online space for such authors. While I was bemoaning this, suddenly it occurred to me—maybe I could create it?

So I sat down with a notebook to brainstorm. Suddenly it was all there—the content pillars, the community I wanted to build, the resources I could offer. Suddenly I had an actual business plan and a clear sense of direction.

And I realized that this was where my gut instinct had been pointing me all along.

So I’d like to invite you to Pen First, Prompt Second—a place where AI-assisted authors can share ideas, compare workflows, ask difficult questions, and explore this technology in a supportive, welcoming environment.

Here, we’ll discuss how to use AI to become better authors and entrepreneurs—while your writing stays yours. I’ll give you:

• Actionable AI workflows you can implement at every stage of the writing process—brainstorming, plotting, drafting, revising—so your creativity can soar.

• Practical AI strategies for managing the business side of authorship—turn your launch week brain-dump into a day-by-day checklist, draft the ARC requests you keep putting off, find comp titles for your Amazon categories—so you have more time to spend actually writing.

• Thoughtful, nuanced essays about AI and the publishing industry—from privacy concerns and AI detectors to evolving legislation and exciting new tools. No hysteria, just clear-eyed analysis.

• Discounted early access to the comprehensive guides I’m building for AI-assisted authors.

• Lifetime paid tier access for the first 500 free subscribers.

Subscribe to Pen First, Prompt Second

The more authors share our knowledge and discoveries, the closer we can get to an environment where authors can be transparent about how they use AI, and trust readers to make up their own minds.

As excited as I am about this new project, I’m aware that many of you may have very different feelings about AI than I do. You signed up to read about romantasy, not AI, so if this isn’t your cup of tea, I completely understand.

But when I decided to undertake this, I had to face the fact that, as much as I’ve loved every minute of L.M. Sanders Writing Romantasy, I have to retire it. I simply don’t have enough bandwidth to run two Substacks—at least, not if I ever want to actually finish my book. But I am so glad I did this because of the amazing writers I’ve met and how much I learned.

I’d like to thank each and every one of you for coming along with me on this journey. I will continue to follow your progress and am cheering you on in your writing endeavours. I wish you all the best, and thank you so much for supporting an indie author just starting her career. ❤️

This is my first post showing one of my workflows. Aside from quoting the AI’s output, all writing is 100% mine (including the em dashes).

For the past month or so, I’ve been typing like mad toward the midpoint of my novel, Realmcrosser, all the while congratulating myself on having escaped the “messy middle.” No midstory slump for me! I knew exactly where the story was going!

Hubris.

When I actually finished writing the midpoint, I celebrated for approximately three minutes before I realized I had no idea where to go next. The story had shifted, and the outline I’d so carefully prepared no longer fit. I have multiple plot threads and was worried about forgetting them. Not to mention that my manuscript is currently 120,000 words…and I’m only halfway done.

So I created a plot thread timeline using ChatGPT. Not only is this helping me to figure out where the book is headed, it will also be a valuable tool when I get to revisions.

Today I’ll share my process with you so that you can duplicate it with your own novel! If you don’t want to use AI you can do it manually—it will just take longer.

1. Determine your categories

I wanted an easy way to have a record of my plot threads that I could refer to, along with a chart that allows me to see their progression at a glance.

To do this, I bounced ideas off ChatGPT before settling on the following categories to track:

• Plot Threads

• Category (Character, Politics, Mystery, Magic, Romance)

• Status (Introduced, Resolved)

• First Appearance

• Latest Appearance

• Planned Resolution

• Notes

You could track any number of things this way: character arcs, romance arcs, foreshadowing and payoff, secrets and revelations, mysteries and clues, politics—whatever you want!

2. Create a spreadsheet or database

Next, you need somewhere to put this information. You could use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and create columns using your own custom categories.

I chose to create a Notion database. Notion is a platform where you can take notes, assemble your story bible, organize your outline, schedule your drafting, and track all your administrative tasks. You can also filter categories easily, which makes it simple to find the information you’re looking for.

Plus it lets you add banners, which has nothing to do with tracking anything but gives my ADHD brain a dopamine hit. Prettier than a spreadsheet!

3. Identify your plot threads and create a controlled vocabulary

I entered my manuscript chapter by chapter into ChatGPT (it’s too long for me to put it all in at once) and asked it to extract plot threads.

As we went along, I asked it to create a controlled vocabulary, which means a standardized list of names for each thread. For example, if a thread starts out being named “Eira and Toren’s Relationship,” ChatGPT will keep that name throughout instead of adding similar threads like “Eira and Toren’s Romance” that are basically the same thing.

Here is my first prompt:

Below is ChatGPT’s first output for the prompt. Note that I did not ask it to include a Planned Resolution for each thread, as I will add those myself as I get to them.

Again, you could certainly do this manually, but ChatGPT identified far more plot threads than I could have managed to come up with on my own.

4. Enter the information into your spreadsheet or database

This part is a bit tedious, but the result was worth it. I took ChatGPT’s output and moved it over into Notion, adding each plot thread by name and copy-pasting the information into the appropriate fields. Since I used Notion, I also got to have the fun of selecting an appropriate emoji for each plot thread.

ChatGPT also determined which type of plot thread it was: Character, Politics, Mystery, Magic, or Romance. The benefit of putting this information into Notion was that it allowed me to add additional categories to threads if they fit into more than one:

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about why I bothered putting this information into Notion and didn’t just work out of ChatGPT directly. My manuscript is too long for ChatGPT to handle all at once, so we had to go chapter by chapter to make sure it could really drill down into the plot threads.

But that made our conversation far too long and unwieldy for ChatGPT to reliably assemble the data into any sort of useful chart. It needed to be transferred to an external platform and then fed back into ChatGPT to do a decent job.

5. Repeat for every chapter

This was by far the most boring part. I copy-pasted all thirty-seven of my chapters into ChatGPT, had it assess the plot threads, and then moved the outputs into Notion one by one.

Here, Notion proved its worth again. As I added more chapter notes, I ended up with a dedicated page for each thread, listing all the chapters the thread appears in and showing the timeline and causality. This will be incredibly useful all on its own!

Here is my prompt, which I just repeated for every chapter. It ensured that ChatGPT listed new threads first, followed by previous ones, without mixing them.

As I got further in, I found that ChatGPT began to drift away from our controlled vocabulary, so I had to prompt it occasionally to get back on track. But overall, the process went well.

6. Export your spreadsheet or database

Once finished, export your spreadsheet or database as either an .xlsx or .csv file.

7. Open your file and add chapter word counts in separate tab

If you’re using AI and wish to generate more robust analytics, it will help to add columns with the word counts of each of your chapters. I added another tab to my Excel file and added two columns. I copy-pasted the word count information manually from my Scrivener document.

I would not give this task to ChatGPT because AI is notoriously unreliable when it comes to estimating word counts. Better to do this part myself.

Don’t forget to save!

8. Create the Manuscript Plot Thread Tracker

If you’re doing this manually, you could create your story architecture map using your spreadsheet or database all on its own.

However, if using AI, upload your saved file into it and feed it my prompt, which you can get as a free PDF by clicking the screenshot below! Simply copy-paste it into your AI of choice.

9. Iterate

Using ChatGPT, I had to take a few tries before I got my chart the way I wanted it. At last, it generated both a PNG and a PDF. My final version is a printable four page PDF designed so that you print it out and tape it together to create a poster.

I know this image might be confusing, so here’s what the finished product looks like on my desk. It’s hard to see, but adding my chapter word count was a benefit, because it’s spaced the chapters according to how long they are. This gives me a better sense of my pacing.

I did, of course, check to see if ChatGPT made any mistakes with this chart, and it took a second iteration to get it right. But I’m pleased with the result!

From now on, I will add each chapter to my Notion database as I complete it, enabling me to continue to expand my plot thread timeline and making sure that every thread is resolved by the time I reach the end of the novel.

What next?

Now that I have this beautiful sheet before me, my plan is to determine which threads I will need to address again in the next chapters, and generate a rough outline that will hopefully get me to the climax. While author’s intuition remains important, it helps to have this solid data that I can base my decisions on.

And you?

If you want to give this a try, or you’ve done interesting data analysis on your own writing projects that you wish to share, drop it in the comments! I am always fascinated by people’s workflows.

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available 2027.

The analysis is shown only to readers who request it, and creators have the option of disabling detection on their work (though it appears that you have to do this on a post-by-post basis, rather than disabling it for your publication as a whole.)

As you might expect, this led to a lot of concern among Substackers about the nature of Pangram’s AI detection, as well as fears that this will only lead to more witch hunts. (I had a great chat about it with Ivy Charlotte Dally over at Romantasy Realms—check it out!) Given the polarized nature of the AI debate within the author community, I think that fear is valid.

There are many legitimate reasons to be opposed to AI, from its environmental impact to its unethical scraping of authors’ works without their consent. But hunting down authors whom we suspect of using AI to destroy their careers is neither an ethical nor effective way to address these concerns.

They don’t address the underlying problem either: the same lack of transparency that Substack, however clumsily, is currently trying to address.

AI detectors are too unreliable

It looks as though Substack’s integration of Pangram is an attempt to create this transparency. I applaud them for that, though I can’t say I’m a fan of their methods, simply because AI detectors are too unreliable.1

So when I first saw Pangram’s announcement, I did a little experiment. I took a draft of another post I’m working on that is entirely my own writing, and added an AI-generated paragraph. Then I ran it through Pangram’s AI scanner in Substack.

False negative. I wasn’t sure why.

I continued my experiment by going directly to Pangram. This time, I dropped only my AI-generated paragraph into the checker. Here’s what I got:

This time, Pangram correctly identified the AI-generated paragraph. At first, I wasn’t sure why it gave Pangram red flags here when it didn’t catch anything in Substack.

I decided to try one last time, including my entire draft post consisting of my original writing and this one AI-generated paragraph.

Pangram caught the AI-generated paragraph when it was on its own, but not when it was included as part of a longer post. The paragraph does include a number of AI-isms: the “all-in-one” opener, the contrastive setup “Unlike a static spreadsheet,” and the excessive parallel lists of three: “sort”, “filter”, “connect.”

My theory is that despite these, the paragraph does integrate seamlessly into the overall post and helps it to accomplish its objective. (Which only goes to show that text generated by AI is not automatically slop, but that’s a post for another day.)

The main takeaway here is that these checkers, which are a multi-million-dollar industry in their own right, should not be the basis for destroying someone’s career.

Choosing not to use AI is a totally legitimate decision. But if we’re going to criticize authors for using AI, we should at least be willing to acknowledge the limitations of using AI to make those accusations—especially without an author’s knowledge or consent (as in the Mia Ballard case).

That’s why I will disable AI detection on my posts, even though I write my own words. I don’t trust AI detectors enough to let them be used as “evidence.”

I’ve seen this movie before…twice

I entered the library field at a time when there were still many old-school, 20th-century librarians who had been around since before the Internet—and were fighting it tooth and nail.

I watched them resist digital databases, Wikipedia, and cloud-based library catalogues. I saw them insist on keeping their card catalogues until well into the 2010s. I saw them refuse to implement ebooks to force students to read print.2 I firmly believe that this resistance to change undermined the library field, contributing to the public perception that libraries were outdated and irrelevant because we had Google now.

It took a good twenty years (and a global pandemic) for libraries to prove their worth again.3

Now, I do think the librarians’ concerns were understandable. They were afraid of misinformation, of skill degradation, of a loss of knowledge. But refusing to engage with the Internet didn’t stop it from proliferating; it only reduced librarians’ influence in how people learned to use it. That’s the same trade-off we have with Pangram and other AI checkers: the more we lean on blunt, unreliable enforcement instead of building actual literacy around a technology, the less say we get in how it gets used.

I was not particularly keen to start that cycle over again with AI. So when my school asked that we model appropriate usage to students instead of banning it outright, I jumped right in.

Likewise, while I attended library school from 2011-2013, I spent two years listening to everyone collectively freak out about whether ebooks were going to put us all out of jobs. Well, not only did that not happen, the growing ebook market also gave rise to the entire indie author industry.

While I don’t doubt that AI is shaking up the job market, I don’t believe that it will kill either the indie or traditional publishing industries.

“AI isn’t going anywhere”

This is a commonly cited argument for simply accepting the presence of AI in our lives. But that doesn’t mean we have to just sit back and let it evolve unchecked, as we’ve done with social media for the past twenty years.4

AI is a new technology. We have the power to proactively shape policy and norms around its use. We can develop standards and expectations around it in a way that encourages transparency.

That can’t happen when authors are chasing down other authors with pitchforks.

Let’s encourage clear disclosure from creators instead, and trust readers to make their own decisions about what they want to read.

My AI Code of Honour

A lot of the discourse around AI in the author space is a false binary: either you refuse to use it at all, or you’re using it to churn out 100% AI slop.

As I said before, there are many legitimate concerns about AI. But the debate has become so loud and polarized that the quieter third group between the two extremes is only just starting to poke its nose out from underground. A group that author Joanna Penn refers to as “AI-Assisted Artisanal Authors.”

These are folks like me. Folks who enjoy using AI in their creative processes but don’t want to take work from other artists, and who don’t want it to replace their own creative thinking.

That’s why I created an AI Code of Honour for myself:

1. I will not use AI in a way that takes work from other artists. (For example, I hire editors and book cover designers.)

2. I will only use AI in ways that expand and augment my own creativity, like extra RAM for my brain.

Okay, this all sounds great in theory, but what does it actually mean? Especially the second one. How do I use AI to make myself a better creative thinker without killing off my own brain function?

Well, in the interest of creating the environment of transparency I just talked about, I will devote my next few posts to showing you how I use AI to make myself a better indie author and entrepreneur—without having it write for me. Right now, I think this is something that’s still difficult for a lot of people to visualize, especially because so many are still afraid of being pilloried if they dare to bring it up.

But the more we share our knowledge and discoveries, the closer we can get to an environment where AI witch hunts are no serve any purpose.

In general parlance, “romantasy” basically means any story where romance and fantasy co-exist. Now, I want to make it clear that I’m not here to police how you use the word—if you feel like your favourite novel is a romantasy, then hey, it is.

But from writer’s perspective, there are actually significant differences between fantasy romance, romantic fantasy, and true romantasy. If you want to write a romantasy, it’s important to understand these differences when planning your plot, characters, and conflict.

So let’s dive in.

Fantasy Romance

Simply put, fantasy romance is a romance set in a fantasy world. In this type of novel, the romance is central, and the plot would collapse without it. The fantasy aspects are there, but if you removed them, the story would still be able to stand on its own.

I would argue that, while Sarah Beth Durst’s novel The Spell Shop is marketed as romantasy, it’s technically fantasy romance.

Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz―a magically sentient spider plant―have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite.

When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy―and very handsome―neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she’s fed and to help fix up her new home.

Yes, Durst does have a fantasy plot in the novel that Kiela has to unravel, but it would be easy enough to drop the romance storyline into any contemporary romance novel where the FMC moves to a small town to start up a cosy business with the help of her love interest. Emily Henry’s Book Lovers comes to mind, along with many Hallmark Christmas movies in a similar vein. I mean, Laurent even builds shelves for Kiela’s jam shop—all the tropes are there!

Romantic Fantasy

On the other end of the spectrum, romantic fantasy is a fantasy novel with a romantic subplot. If you took the romance out, the novel might not be as good, but the fantasy plot would hold just fine.

A good example is Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes.

After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time.

The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success — not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is.

If Viv wants to put the blade behind her and make her plans a reality, she won't be able to go it alone.

But the true rewards of the uncharted path are the travelers you meet along the way. And whether drawn together by ancient magic, flaky pastry, or a freshly brewed cup, they may become partners, family, and something deeper than she ever could have dreamed.

In this book, there is a slow-burn romance that develops between Viv and Tandri, the succubus who works in her coffee shop. But their relationship never overshadows the fantasy plotline. The book would suffer if you removed the romance, but the plot would still stand up.

So what’s Romantasy, then?

Romantasy is when the romance plotline and the fantasy plotline carry equal weight. They are so intertwined that if you took one out, the whole thing would collapse.

Brigitte Knightley’s The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy and its recently released sequel The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy are a perfect romantasy duology. The romance plotline and the fantasy plotline are so intertwined that the story would topple if you tried to separate them.

Osric Mordaunt, member of the Fyren Order of assassins-for-hire, has bribed Aurienne Fairhim, an a member of the Haelan order of elite healers, to heal a nasty injury that is shutting down his magic and will eventually kill him. Disgusted by his line of work, Aurienne initially tells him to sod off. But she’s forced to help him after he makes a sizable donation to her Order so they can develop a vaccine for a pox that is infecting a huge number of children.

The romance tropes in this duology are held up by the fantasy elements. Aurienne’s Forced Proximity with Osric happens because healings can only take place in liminal spaces beneath a full moon. (It doesn’t hurt that Aurienne has to put her hand on the back of Osric’s neck to do it, which as a reader I adored.)

Likewise, as Aurienne and Osric investigate the true cause of the pox outbreak, they are forced to learn about each other (and themselves) in ways that push their romance forward. As Aurienne works out how to heal him using long-forgotten speculative magic, she makes important medical discoveries. The two plots always complement each other.

This duology is true romantasy.

Setting up the dual romantasy plotlines

I’ve sometimes heard romantasy plotlines referred to as a “braided narrative,” but I prefer to use the metaphor of the Rod of Asclepius (which sounds fancy, but is basically just those twin snakes you see on MedicAlert bracelets). The romance and fantasy plotlines need to interweave and balance each other out at the same time.

When planning your novel, set up the stakes so that the two plotlines constantly push against each other.

For example, when I started plotting Realmcrosser, here’s the political situation that I came up with:

For 400 years, Hautrei has remained under Jakrensari occupation, its people denied self-governance while enduring political, cultural, and magical erasure. Although recent reforms have granted limited freedoms, Hautreians continue to face systemic discrimination and remain second-class subjects within the Jakrensari Empire.

As tensions rise, the Empire itself has become increasingly divided over whether Hautrei's future lies in continued occupation, gradual reform, or outright liberation.

Then, I used the political conflict to build the romantic conflict:

Eira, my FMC, is a Hautreian serf bound to a Jakrensari noble family that keeps her locked up within their estate. She wants to earn enough money for her freedom and then burn down the whole Empire, in that order.

Toren, my MMC, is a half-Jakrensari, half-Hautreian nobleman. He’s fought his whole life for the approval of the Jakrensari elite, and now has a coveted spot within the Emperor’s inner circle. He believes freedom for Hautreians can be won without dismantling the current political system.

It doesn’t take much to see how these two are going to come into conflict. The fact that they’re well-suited to each other by temperament isn’t enough to make up for their ideological differences.

Forced Proximity

Next, I jammed Eira and Toren into Forced Proximity, because he has to marry her to save her from her murderous master:

“I choose Eira.”

All I could do was stare at the man as I slowly turned to stone.

He must have noticed, because his cold confidence vanished. Almost hesitantly, he added, “That is, if she’ll have me.”

If she’ll have me! Fury replaced my shock, my insides boiling. The audacity of the man! To make it sound as though I had a choice, when he had stolen the last shred of my autonomy!

Now there are two conflicts baked into the relationship. Eira’s forced marriage to Toren may have freed her from the noble family who held her prisoner, but she’s stuck in a marriage she didn’t ask for. She and Toren agree to part ways after he gets a promotion in eight months’ time, but their growing attachment to each other keeps getting in the way.

Toren can’t confess his feelings, fearing that the power imbalance between them will make her feel obligated to stay. Eira can’t confess her feelings because that means giving up the freedom she’s so longed for.

And even if they can work this out, there’s still the problem of him wanting to keep the Empire humming smoothly along while she wants to blow it up.

The romance plotline and the fantasy plotline rely on each other. If Eira decides to stay with Toren, she’s not just choosing him, she’s choosing how to respond to the empire that has oppressed her people and robbed her of her culture.

Finally, make sure this also works the other way. While the politics of my fantasy world act on Eira and Toren’s relationship, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that their choice of how to love each other ends up impacting the future of the Empire.

Ask yourself

As you brainstorm your romantasy plot, these questions may be helpful:

1. What ideological differences exist between my main characters that could spark conflict between them?

2. What happened in each of their pasts that led them to hold these beliefs?

3. What constraints does my fantasy world put on my main characters’ relationship?

4. How will my characters’ romantic relationship impact my fantasy world as a whole?

5. What scenes can I create that will move both plotlines forward at the same time?

If you can figure out the answer to these questions, you’ll well on your way to the well-integrated dual plotline you need for your romantasy story.

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available 2027.

Now, I’m not one of these people who believes that every area of your life should be optimized. I don’t like or believe in hustle culture. Doing a hobby simply because it brings you joy is reason enough to embrace it.

But my dream wasn’t just to write. My dream was to publish a book. With a full-time librarian job, three kids, and a husband I’d like to hang out with sometimes, I realized that I would have to adopt a system so that I could finish my book and market it. I had to make sure it would work with my ADHD brain and give me structure, but also flexibility.

After taking the Publish & Thrive self-marketing course, I also took another class from Sarra Cannon, HB90, a productivity course for indie authors. It actually takes into account that women authors are often juggling their writing along with jobs, care responsibilities, chronic illness, neurodivergence, etc.

I don’t want to give away Sarra’s trade secrets, so I highly recommend signing up! It will run again in September. But here were my main takeaways:

1. Work in quarters

   Setting goals for each quarter is effective. Three months is enough time to accomplish a decent amount, but not so long that you’ll go into a huge slump if you get off track. You get four resets throughout the year. That’s important for my ADHD, because it gives me novelty while also ensuring that stuff gets done.

2. Three goals max

   The best (and hardest) part of this system is that you can only have three goals at most. ADHD means I love novelty, but I also have difficulty anticipating how much time something will actually take. The goal cap keeps me from overcommitting and then shutting down from overwhelm.

3. Make it visible

   The key selling point of the course for me was how to make a Kanban board with my goals for each quarter, which gives me a clear visual representation of my progress. Since things tend to fall out of my brain if I don’t keep them right in front of my face, this has been immensely helpful.

I’ve just finished my third quarter using this system, and I would say that while it’s been the least successful in terms of goals achieved, it’s the quarter where I’ve learned the most lessons.

Goal #1: Writing 66,000 words of my novel

Current Word Count for Q2: 45,309 words.

Status: Not achieved.

This is my biggest disappointment of the quarter, and also my biggest reality check. The most I have ever written in a quarter since I started was 45,000 words, and writing was my only creative responsibility at that time. I didn’t yet have an email newsletter and a Substack to juggle back then. So why did I think that 66,000 words was possible?

It’s also, as I learned, the busiest time of year for a mom/school librarian, what with end-of-year concerts, activities, graduations, events—I just had way less time to begin with.

In future years, I will take into account that Q2 is insanely busy and will set lighter goals accordingly.

Also, let’s be real, people—45,309 words is still great progress. So I’m not going to beat myself up about it!

Goal #2: Begin marketing and get 300 Mailerlite subscribers and 50 Substack subscribers, launch TikTok and Pinterest

Current Subscriber Count: 471 Mailerlite subscribers and 160 Substack subscribers.

Status: I’m calling this “partially achieved” because I didn’t launch TikTok or Pinterest. But in terms of subscriber growth, this goal exceeded anything I had hoped for.

This was the first quarter I began marketing my as-yet-unpublished book. I had no idea how many subscribers I could reasonably expect to sign up, and this quarter has exceeded my wildest expectations.

Thank you to everyone who subscribed! You are amazing and I’m incredibly grateful for your support.

A valuable lesson I learned this quarter was that I had been way too ambitious about how many platforms I could reasonably take on. It’s not just a question of setting up an account; learning a new platform takes time. I did not factor that into my initial goal, and soon discovered that Mailerlite and Substack needed a lot of tweaking and optimization, not to mention the time it takes to create good content.

So TikTok and Pinterest will have to wait. Probably a long time, if I’m being honest.

Goal #3: To improve my operations by establishing a solid calendar for recurring tasks, and to set up Standard Operating Procedures for major operations

Current State: Calendar set up, Standard Operating Procedures not set up

Status: Partially achieved.

This was the goal I did worst at, because I decided that it was the least important of the three. So when I found that Goal #2 was taking more time than I’d anticipated, the Standard Operating Procedures were the first things I let go.

I do have a calendar, however, just because that makes everything easier. So…yay?

This goal taught me something important about priorities. When time became scarce, I didn’t abandon writing or marketing. Operations were the first thing to go.

That tells me that while Standard Operating Procedures are useful, they aren’t currently a bottleneck in my business. Growing my audience and finishing my book are.

So, what did we learn?

Here are my three biggest takeaways from the past quarter.

1. I consistently overestimate my capacity

I still have a lot of room for improvement in this area. But I’m not as bad at it as I used to be! In the past I would take on whatever project grabbed my fancy in the moment, consequences be damned. I actually cut a lot of stuff from my Q2 list before the quarter even started. But it still wasn’t enough, because I still missed many of my goals.

For Q3, I am going to cut back even further and focus only on the things that are currently creating a bottleneck for my business.

2. Building an author business requires more iteration and refinement than I expected

When I started my Mailerlite newsletter, I thought it would just be a question of signing up for enough BookFunnel promos and writing my monthly update.

What ended up happening was that I spent a lot of time looking at my metrics to tweak my welcome sequence and my newsletter content. So for example, in the second email of my sequence, I offer subscribers a playlist. But my stats show me that nobody is clicking on it, so I’d be better off offering something else.

Now I need to figure out what that something else is…which takes time.

On the flip side, I discovered that my Mailerlite subscribers respond well to me talking about the books that are influencing the world of my novel, Realmcrosser. That has changed my entire direction, and it’s also a lot easier to come up with ideas.

Likewise, I am still trying to figure out which types of posts you lovely folks of Substack enjoy most, so the next few months will be all about experimentation.

3. Reflection is important for self-understanding

Our culture rewards hustle and grind and machine-like energy. It does not reward calm, quiet reflection.

Even though I know better, I get sucked into this trap every quarter. After all, the time I spend reflecting on the previous quarter is time when I could be writing words, or coming up with my next newsletter idea, or even planning the next quarter.

But this reflection time is what enabled me to see all of the patterns I wrote about above. Without it, I would be throwing away useful information and would not learn about how to better focus my efforts next time.

For example, I now know that I really need to pare back my projects and expectations of myself in Q3, even though it’s summer and I should “technically” have more time. (When you’re a mom, there’s never more time.)

My Q3 2026 Goals

With all of that in mind, here is my new, pared down goal list:

1. Write 45,000 more words of my novel. (This takes into account me doing a July Rough Draft Challenge but also being on vacation for part of it in an off-grid cabin. I will be leaving my laptop at home, as it will be useless out there anyway.)

2. Reach 640 Mailerlite subscribers and 200 Substack subscribers. I will continue to tweak my welcome sequence, experiment with different sorts of Substack posts, and get better at both platforms.

3. Bring my family photo albums up to date. This is not a writing project, but I only have so much free time so if I want to get it done, it will have to cut into my writing time. I have literally hundreds of photos on my phone and external hard drive I need to go through. The longer I leave it, the more overwhelming it gets, so let’s get it done.

I left a lot on the table when I made this plan, like catching up on my neglected Christmas scrapbook, starting an Instagram or TikTok, and doing a 3Day30K writing sprint challenge.

But I chose according to my priorities: finish my novel, continue building meaningful relationships with all of you, and make room for the people and projects that matter outside of writing, too. The rest I can leave behind.

I’ll report back in three months and let you know how it goes. Hopefully with another 45,000 words under my belt—and maybe a few actual photo albums on my shelves?

I’d love to hear from you! What’s one thing you’re deliberately not doing this quarter so you can make room for something more important? Let me know in the comments.

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available 2027.

Reader, I spent months debating this, far more time than I should have. And it all could have been solved with a post exactly like this one. So sit back, because I’ve got everything you need to make an informed decision!

What’s the difference, anyway?

If you’re an an indie author just starting out, you’re probably like I was: you know you need a newsletter (because aren’t indie authors supposed to have newsletters?) but you don’t know anything about:

1. How to do it

2. What the heck to put in it

3. How to find actual breathing human subscribers to send it to

4. How to get said actual breathing human subscribers to willingly sign up for it

5. And the big one: How to choose which platform to put it on

When these are your questions, the options look pretty overwhelming: Mailerlite, Kit, FloDesk, Brevo, MailChimp, Moosend, etc. For the purposes of this post, I will refer to these as traditional email marketing platforms. While there are differences between them, they all basically do the same thing: allow you to deliver your reader magnet and newsletter to subscribers.

Then, of couse, there’s Substack.

This is where new authors get confused. Because when you first compare email marketing platforms to Substack, the biggest difference is:

You have to pay for the other platforms. But if you turn on Paid Subscribers, Substack pays you!

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Market your books and get paid while doing it! Why would anyone bother with the other ones?

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, because Substack is quite a different beast from traditional email platforms. And if you don’t understand its differences, you’ll end up with a marketing strategy that can’t find the readers most likely to fall in love with your books.

So let’s back up and talk about why you even need an author newsletter in the first place.

Don’t build on rented land

Many new authors assume that you have to do social media to market your books. There are definitely benefits to using Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. It’s free, you can build a community of fans there, and it can get you in front of a lot of eyeballs fast.

But there are downsides. Changes to the algorithms mean your posts are less likely to get put in front of your followers. If someone hacks your account or the platform locks you out, you have no recourse. You can spend years building a loyal following and lose it in an instant.

Hence the expression: Don’t build on rented land. You want to build your subscriber base on land that belongs to you.

Email marketing is the way to do this. When you grow a list of subscribers, your newsletters are going straight into their inboxes, where they have a much higher chance of being read and clicked on than social media posts sent out into the ether. You don’t have to worry about changing algorithms or getting hacked. If you decide you want to change to a different provider, just import your list there and boom, you’re done!

At first glance, Substack looks the same because you’re also building an email list that you own, and can migrate elsewhere if you want.

But depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, if you choose Substack to save money on email marketing platform fees, you could actually end up costing yourself hundreds of newsletter subscribers.

Here’s why.

Substack is not designed for reader magnet delivery

One of the most common indie author marketing strategies out there is to create a reader magnet. This could be a short story, a novella, or a prequel that you give away for free to entice readers to try you out.

For example, this is my reader magnet, a novella set in the same fantasy world as my novel-in-progress, Realmcrosser.

Click on the image and it will take you to my BookFunnel page, where you can download it as an ebook. BookFunnel is a platform that enables authors to share ebooks with readers for free (StoryOrigin is another popular example).

Here’s the key part: My BookFunnel is integrated with my Mailerlite newsletter. So if someone goes to download it, they can only do so if they sign up for the newsletter too.

Once they do, Mailerlite sends them a series of three emails that I set up (called an automation or a welcome sequence) spaced at three day intervals, where I introduce myself and allow the subscribers to know me better. Once that’s done, Mailerlite moves them onto my regular subscriber list, and I send them a newsletter with updates and bookish thoughts once a month.

Substack is not designed to do this. It does offer a customizable welcome email for new subscribers, and you could certainly put a link to your reader magnet in it. But it can’t send a welcome sequence, and it doesn’t integrate with BookFunnel or StoryOrigin. So if readers download your magnet, the system can’t require them to sign up for your Substack.

That means you’re missing out on a truly valuable type of marketing: BookFunnel Group promos.

BookFunnel Group Promos

Group promos are when you team up with a bunch of other authors in your genre to promote your reader magnets at the same time. Every month, you sign up for the promos you wish to do. You’ll be sent a link for the promo that you then share in your newsletter, and all the other authors share it in theirs.

That exposes your magnet to new readers who subscribe to the other authors and gets them to sign up for your newsletter.

While I have seen some author Substacks sharing promos like this, I suspect that they’re doing it in addition to a newsletter sent from a more traditional email marketing platform. Since you won’t automatically get signups due to Substack’s lack of integration, it wouldn’t be worthwhile otherwise.

Which brings me to another common misconception that new authors often have about Substack:

“I can turn on Paid Subscribers and get paid to write my newsletter!”

Well…yes and no. Mostly no.

The top of your sales funnel should be free

In her article “Substack is Both Great and Terrible for Authors,” Jane Friedman discusses how Substack may confuse authors about the true purpose of a newsletter:

Unknown and unpublished writers will have a hard time getting total strangers to either sign up or pay for their newsletter. […] Some of the most successful paid newsletters make a majority of their content available for free—and sometimes the most popular content is always free. That may seem counterintuitive—shouldn’t the popular content be behind the paywall? No, it’s the popular content that gets read and shared by people who don’t pay, but might decide to transition to paid once they’re exposed to your writing or value.

Basically, this is a marketing problem. If you use Substack in this way, you’re skipping over the first three steps in your sales funnel:

Putting your author newsletter completely behind a paywall jumps over #1-3 and expects people to convert to buyers at #4 right away.

A common concept in marketing is Know, Like, and Trust. People need to be exposed to you and your work an average of seventeen times before they know, like, and trust you enough to buy your books. Expecting them to hand over their money before you’ve created that connection will not work.

Ask yourself what you’re actually selling

I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t use Substack. Obviously I’m using it, and so are many other authors, to great success (and great income!)

But you need to ask yourself what you’re actually selling, and build your sales funnel around that.

For me, my Mailerlite exists to sell my (eventual) books, not my newsletter itself. I have done everything possible to ensure that I have an enticing reader magnet (good cover, appropriate story for my genre, related to the world of my books) and an interesting newsletter to keep people hooked so that when I do release, they’ll want to buy the books.

If I were writing serialized fiction, however, I wouldn’t bother with traditional email marketing. I’d come straight to Substack and design my sales funnel accordingly. Perhaps I would make the first three installments of my serial free, and the remaining chapters available only to paid subscribers. I could make some stories free and other stories paid, or I could put stories behind a paywall after they’d been out for free for a while.

A setup like this still brings potential readers through Steps #1-4 of the sales funnel, but it does so by using Substack in the way it was designed to be used.

I do plan to turn on paid subscribers eventually, but that will be to access a content library of romantasy craft guides. My “newslettery” posts will always remain free, because they’re the top of the funnel.

Where Substack shines

So if traditional email marketing is so great, why do I have a Mailerlite and a Substack?

Well, here are the things Substack can do that an email marketing program can’t:

1. Substack posts (or free ones at least) go out as emails to your subscribers, but they’re also available to anyone on the Internet. You can use tags, SEO, and GEO to make your posts more findable. Email marketing newsletters only go out to your subscribers and aren’t findable anywhere else.

2. Substack posts last forever. A post you wrote two years ago can still win you a subscriber today. Email newsletters molder in subscribers’ inboxes (especially if they don’t open them) and they can’t go back into circulation.

3. Substack allows for the building of a community ecosystem where people can talk to each other. With email marketing, your subscribers can communicate with you, but they have no way to interact with each other.

4. Substack has the Notes feature, which allows you to dash off quick messages to your subscribers and followers. It’s like old-school Twitter in that way. Email marketing doesn’t offer that option.

5. For me personally, I use my Mailerlite to write reader-oriented newsletters. My Substack is oriented toward other authors. For example, I wouldn’t include this topic in my Mailerlite newsletter.

What my own stats reveal…

So, of the two, which has earned me the most subscribers?

I started marketing in February 2026, and the numbers pretty clearly speak for themselves:

Yes, I do pay for Mailerlite, and I’m not paying anything for Substack. But Substack is also much more time-consuming. I estimate that I spend four times on it what I spend on my Mailerlite newsletter each month.

I don’t mind this, because my primary reason for joining Substack was to find community with other authors. But in terms of growing a subscriber list, it’s been less effective.

Here’s another revealing stat from my BookFunnel’s back end, showing how many people have viewed my reader magnet, downloaded it, and followed me on BookFunnel.

I promote my reader magnet at the end of all my Substack posts, as well as in Notes and comments (only when relevant to the discussion). But you can see that my efforts in that area haven’t yielded many actual downloads compared to my Mailerlite.

Conclusion

So far, Mailerlite has been the clear winner in growing my platform, but Substack has been the winner in helping me grow visibility online. Here’s the result of me Googling myself in an incognito window:

So if you’re a new author trying to earn subscribers, I’d choose an email marketing platform over Substack. But if you have the bandwidth for both, they complement each other nicely.

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available 2027.

1. Build a daily writing habit.

2. Develop a writing routine (place, time of day, etc.)

3. Set a daily word count.

4. Be disciplined.

5. Break your project into small steps.

The only problem is, this advice doesn’t work super well for the neurospicy among us. Since many of us only discovered we were neurodivergent as adults, there are a lot of aspiring authors out there currently beating ourselves up for “failing to do it right.”

Especially when you’ve probably been told you’re lazy or unmotivated for most of your life, whether about the homework you were too confused to finish or the complicated household chore that sent you spiralling into executive overwhelm (organizing closets, anyone)?

Friend, I am here to tell you, you are not failing. I hereby grant you full permission to write in a way that suits you.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 42, and here’s what happened:

It isn’t as linear as it looks (all five frequently coexist at once, for example), but you get the idea.

So today, I’d like to share with you some ADHD-friendly writing strategies that I have found useful. While in the past I’ve abandoned multiple manuscripts, I am currently 93,000 words strong into my current novel. I am fully confident that I will finish it this time, because I have these strategies and supports in place.

Some of these may not work for you. That’s okay. Many of the most common ADHD-friendly strategies don’t work for me at all. There are as many flavours of ADHD out there as there are ADHDers, so the more strategies we can share and test-drive, the better off we’ll all be!

1. Compress Your Writing Time

This one flies in the face of conventional wisdom about writing, which is that you need to carve out regular, scheduled time to write.

As an ADHDer you need to carve out time, yes…just not too much time.

Confused yet? Bear with me!

ADHD brains thrive on urgency. Before I had kids, when I had all weekend to write, I’d spend it procrastinating and not writing anything. Likewise, in university I had all kinds of unstructured time to do my assignments, but of course I always ended up scrambling to do them the night before. (Editing them was also painful, another odd symptom of neurodivergence—so I didn’t edit at all.)

Then my amazing 18th Century Lit professor Earla said to me, “Work expands to fill all available time.”

That was a revolutionary idea. Until that point I’d believed I’d be a better student if I just “had more time.” (From my current perspective as a parent with a full-time job, that assumption seems ridiculous—I had all the time in the world back then!) It hadn’t occurred to me that I might actually do better if I set a limit for myself, like writing an essay in two hours and actually finishing it instead of half-assedly tinkering with it for a week.

These days, my time gets compressed naturally by my full time job and parenting responsibilities. I have 90 minute blocks in the evening after the kids are in bed. But even when I’m on vacation, I take care to select a chunk of time to write and let myself off the hook for the rest of the day so that I don’t spend the whole day staring at blank screen in existential despair.

I actually think this is an issue for everyone, neurotypicals as well as neurodivergents. I recently watched Your First Months as a Full-Time Author, Kevin McLaughlin’s session at 20BooksTo50K Vegas. He said that you can actually expect your productivity to drop in the first few months after you quit. When your full-time job goes away, so do all the habits and structures that enabled your writing time, and then you have to figure out new ones.

So we could all benefit from learning to compress our writing time!

2. Weekly Goals, Not Daily Goals

My daughter’s school does something genius. The teachers don’t assign homework every day. They assign homework every Monday, and students have a week to do it. That way, they can work it around soccer practice or choir or whatever else.

I do the same thing with my writing. I tried daily goals for a while, but it sent me into a panic spiral if I fell short or missed a day: “I’ve already screwed up and what’s the point of even trying yada yada yada (cue negative self-talk here).” But having a weekly goal allows me to take a night off for dinner with friends or read a book or spend my evening going up and down the stairs 8000 times because my kids refuse to sleep. I will be able to pick up the slack the following day.

It doesn’t really matter what time frame you give yourself. A week works for me, but you can do whatever you want. You just have to find a way to make it stick, which brings me to…

3. External Accountability

Let’s face it, we ADHDers are not the best at internal accountability. At least, I am not. Whenever I set a goal for myself, it immediately falls out of my brain if I don’t share it with someone who will hold me accountable. Here are three ways I’ve accomplished this.

Accountability Partners

I have several accountability partners who are also indie authors, and we touch base regularly. I don’t want to let them down, which forces me to set more realistic goals and to better plan how to achieve the, especially when something comes up.

This is generally enough for me, but when it isn’t, I break out my next strategy:

Body Doubling

This is when you work alongside other people. They may or may not be doing the same thing as you, but their mere presence is enough to help you stay on track. Personally, I find this only works for me if the other person and I explicitly discuss our goals at the beginning and end of the session, whereas some find that simply working in a public place like a library or coffee shop provides the full benefits.

If you’re looking to try this, there’s no shortage of hosted writing sprints out there. For my needs, however, I have a paid subscription to FocusMate, a platform that lets you sign up for body doubling sessions of 25 minutes, 50 minutes, or 75 minutes. You’re matched with a partner, you discuss your goals, and then you work synchronously online before reconvening at the end to discuss your progress.

I like that FocusMate is a quick, efficient process with friendly people, but minimal extraneous chitchat. I use it for my day job as well as for my writing.

Negative Reinforcement (aka The Nuclear Option)

I’ve written about this one before. When I first started my book, I gave my husband $100 and a list of writing goals for the month. If I didn’t reach said goals, he would donate the money to an organization that promotes book bannings.

Obviously, since I’m a librarian, this lit a fire under me!

This is definitely not a strategy that would work for everyone. Many people, for example, like to pre-select rewards they’ll receive when they hit certain benchmarks. I wish I was like that, but it takes more extreme tactics to get me moving.

Fortunately, now that I understand my own brain better, I find that the other strategies above serve me well. But I won’t hesitate to break out The Nuclear Option again though if my writing progress goes south.

What do you think of these strategies? What other strategies have you tried? Drop them in the comments so we can build a big community toolbox!

Self-publishing is like trekking through the Himalayas. You could figure out the route yourself, but you’re definitely better off with a guide. So after I realized I was wandering in the dark, I decided to take a class and found Publish & Thrive.

What is Publish & Thrive?

It’s a six week self-publishing course taught by Sarra Cannon, bestselling indie YA author of the Shadow Demons Saga and many other books. However, the course is for indie authors writing for all genres and audiences.

Why pick this one?

There’s no shortage of self-publishing classes out there, but Publish & Thrive was the only one I could find that specifically mentioned strategies for slower writers (aka me).

The other reason is that in the self-publishing industry, you’re constantly getting bombarded with messages about All The Things You Must Do Right Now—rapid release, Facebook ads, social media, AI, no AI—it’s easy to get lost.

Sarra is all about sustainability. The very first exercise she has you do (before the class even starts), is to sit down and figure out what your ideal writing life looks like and your values as an author. Once you know that, you can make decisions for your business based on those values rather than frantic trend-chasing.

So what does it cost?

As of this writing, the class is $499 USD, which worked out to $700 CAD for me. You can pay all at once, or in six or twelve month installments.

That’s a fair chunk of money, but I had decided to take this seriously as a career. If I were becoming an electrician, for example, I wouldn’t just go out and start drilling holes in walls. I’d get some training, and it would cost me significantly more than $499. (Fortunately, as an indie author, I am unlikely to electrocute myself.)

This course covers so many topics that I think the cost is very reasonable. It makes it accessible to authors while still compensating Sarra fairly for the HUGE amount of work she’s put into it.

How does it work?

The class runs for six weeks every February and August. (Enrollment for the next round opens on July 18th, 2026!) Every week has a module with about five hours of videos:

• Module One: Foundation for Success

• Module Two: Publishing Your Novels

• Module Three: The Business of Writing

• Module Four: Intro to Indie Marketing

• Module Five: Marketing Tools and Strategies

• Module Six: Thriving as an Author

Every Saturday during the course, Sarra hosts a live Q&A on YouTube from 2-4PM Eastern. Students can leave questions on the course platform or in the Publish & Thrive Facebook group.

As Sarra herself says, “You can’t fall behind.” The modules stay open after the course ends, and the Q&As are available for replay afterward. She even makes all the videos available as podcasts so you can listen while doing other things (though certain topics, like Creating Marketing Images, are obviously better if you watch them).

Personally, I’ve found the videos are best the first time you go through, but I listen to the podcasts after if I need to review something quickly.

Who is this course best suited for?

Publish & Thrive is best for authors who are either just starting their indie author journeys or who are further into it but never built a broad foundation of knowledge. If you are looking for content about how to do Facebook ads it may not be the best course for you, as Sarra uses organic marketing techniques and hasn’t run ads herself.

For someone like me, who was just starting out and who wanted to grow my career steadily and sustainably, it was exactly what I needed.

Is it worth it?

One hundred percent!

First, the course content alone is really just great value. Sarra covers so much ground in those six weeks. Once you’re in, you’re in for life too—you can take the course as many times as you want, and she updates videos as the industry evolves.

But for me, the most valuable thing is the incredible sense of community Sarra cultivates. I didn’t go into the course expecting to make friends, but the excitement during the livestreams is contagious, and I was soon chatting and cracking jokes with other students. At the end of the course, Sarra will place you in a Mastermind group if you wish, so that you can share your progress and goals with others. (Optional, but great!)

Sarra is so generous with her time and really strives to give back to the indie author community. She hosts writing sprints and Rough Draft Challenges on her YouTube channel, along with an annual conference called HeartieCon. She even has a bookcase in her background where she keeps the books her students have written, and makes sure to buy a copy of every book her students publish! I’ve enjoyed my time in her community so much that I’ve taken every other class she offers, including HB90 Bootcamp and Your Path Forward (I’m a Sarra Cannon completionist, hahaha).

Any downsides?

For non-American students, I read in some older reviews that Module Three: The Business of Writing used to be very US-centric. Sarra must have taken that feedback to heart because when I took it in August of 2025, she made sure to provide business information for every country her students lived in. She also made sure that we could connect with other students from our respective countries to share resources. I was very impressed by the effort she put into that, so if it was ever a downside it isn’t anymore.

The only other downside I can think of is that it can be a long wait if you only find out about it between sessions. (I was checking the website every couple of days to see when enrollment would open!) But what I got out of the course more than made up for that.

In short

If you are looking for a thorough self-publishing class that will give you a solid foundation to build a real career on, you can’t do better than this!

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available early 2027.

You’d be wrong.

It was a bit like embarking on a journey but not being able to find the road.

How did one become a self-published author? Obviously there were people succeeding at it—I’d heard tales of seven-figure incomes—but their means of accomplishing it felt vague and mysterious. Something to do with “marketing,” a word that struck terror into my heart.

But it was that terror that had held me back from exploring self-publishing for far too long. Learned helplessness plagued me. I had simply accepted the idea that I wasn’t “good at” marketing, when in fact I had never made the slightest effort to learn it. I had to let go of the damaging belief that I was sullying my art, and that my book didn’t deserve to earn money.

I was choosing myself, so it was time to take myself seriously. And my book, too.

All right then. So yes, I’m a librarian. Time to do some research. I used the very advanced strategy of typing “How to make a full time income as an author” into Google. Here’s the first thing I found:

This book cut through years of noise and “I can’t do this.”

I didn’t know this when I found her, but Joanna Penn is a self-publishing powerhouse. I listened to her audiobook and found her a calming voice of reason.

Her message (I’m paraphrasing): “There’s never been a better time to be an indie author. You can make a living at this by setting up multiple income streams.”

Multiple income streams.

That was when I had a sudden moment of “Aha!”

I’ve arranged literally dozens of author visits, both with smaller local authors and big-name, high-profile authors. I know first-hand how much money there can be in guest speaking. Some of the bigger authors charge five figures for a talk, not including airfare, accommodations, etc. One author even asked me for six figures—for an hour! (Obviously that visit didn’t happen.)

With all my years of teaching experience, I knew I could do that. As I listened to Joanna Penn outline other possible income streams, it was like checking off a list. Crowdfunding, live events, professional speaking, online courses, webinars—all these were adjacent to my librarian skill set.

I was, however, bewildered by how all this was supposed to fit together. Sure, I could easily create a talk about my book, but if no one knew it existed, who would pay for it?

So my research continued. My romance-writing friend Tiffany (ever generous with her knowledge and time) turned me onto Tammy Labreque, another self-publishing powerhouse.

Tammy Labreque advocates for indie authors (and artists, musicians, and other creatives) to start their own mailing list. Here’s how it works. First, you create a freebie, like a short story, a prequel to your main book, etc. Then you find other authors to collaborate with. You feature their freebies in your newsletter; they feature your freebie in theirs. Everybody gets more subscribers; everybody wins!1

This sounded great to me. Collaboration! Authors helping authors! Except…where would I put my freebie? How would I find other authors to collaborate with? What if no one ever signed up? And where do you even get a newsletter, anyway?

I knew there had to be a path through all this confusion, but it was going to take me ages to find it on my own. It was time to find a teacher.

So I did. And she’s excellent. Here’s more about what I learned.

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available early 2027.

At forty-three, I was still waiting. And starting to do the math.

For years, my undiagnosed ADHD had made it difficult for me to stay with any project long enough to finish it. Well, I had finally figured out some neurospicy strategies to keep going with the romantasy novel I was writing.

But publication felt as far away as ever.

I write long books. I anticipate that my novel will be somewhere between 140,000-170,000 words when it’s finished. No problem, right? Outlander was 305,000 words from a debut author and she still got a book deal.

Unfortunately, it’s not the nineties anymore.

Publishers are increasingly unwilling to take a chance on authors whom they are not 100% confident will make them a lot of money. That’s understandable. People are reading less, indie publishing has eroded the once-profitable mid-list, and AI has thrown the whole industry into chaos.

The consequence? It’s now entirely possible to craft a well-written, compelling novel that aligns with current publishing trends, query it to hundreds of agents…and still get crickets.

Sitting down to write lit me up. It was (and is) the highlight of my day.

But the prospect of querying over and over again, gnawing on my fingernails while I waited for a full or even a partial request, did the exact opposite. It sucked my motivation dry. If I was going to spend years of my life on this novel only for it to end up in a drawer like all my unfinished projects, did finishing even count as a win?

Then my friend Tiffany said, “Why don’t you self-publish?”

At first, I said no. The fantasy I’d been carrying around in my head for thirty years was a strong one. I wanted it to happen just as I’d envisioned it. I wanted to be chosen. For some literary vanguard to say to me, “Yes, this is the book we want.”

I didn’t want to market either. The prospect of marketing made me want to flee to some remote cabin in the woods with no wifi.

But as I watched my friend put out book after book, getting five-star reviews and lovely e-mails from her readers, I found myself facing a difficult question:

What’s actually going to get my book in front of the most readers?

The answer was obvious then, and still is to me now. Even though I haven’t published my novel yet, the freebie novella I put out has been downloaded 351 times so far. That’s 351 readers who never would have seen my work if I hadn’t started down this path.

When I started to research self-publishing (like a true librarian), here is what I found:

1. Indie Authors Make More Money

A 2023 University of Glasgow study found that indie authors’ median income had risen 53% year-over-year, to $12,749—compared to $8,600 for traditionally published authors. There was also a notable reverse gender gap, with women and LGBTQIA2+ authors outearning their male and cisgender counterparts.

While neither of these is a sustainable income by itself, I know which one I’d pick.

2. You Get to Market Faster

When publishing traditionally, it can take between 2-4 years between the time the book is acquired to its actual publication date. And that doesn’t even include the time the author spends querying (and getting rejected) first.

With self-publishing, it only takes as long as you take to write and edit the book. You publish it whenever you want to, on your own timeline.

3. Creative Control

This was a big one for me. In traditional publishing, the publisher usually has the final say over the cover design, title, edits, release date, translations, and audio.

Self-published authors make these decisions themselves. That can be daunting, yes, but if your story is unconventional or doesn’t exactly match traditional publishing norms, you can position it yourself to get in front of the right audience. (Maybe one of the reasons why LGBTQIA2+ authors do so well with this publishing model?)

4. Ownership of Rights

This varies, but traditional print contracts grant publishers print rights, e-book rights, and sometimes audiobook and translation rights.

Indie authors keep 100% of their rights and have full control over these various formats.

And finally…

5. The Reality of Book Marketing in 2026

A lot of people choose to pursue traditional publishing because they think the publisher will do the marketing for them.

This might have been the case once, but not anymore. Traditional publishers now expect their authors to build online platforms, manage social media, and promote their books themselves.

In fact, we’re now seeing traditional publishers actively seek out indie authors who are good marketers. Romantasy author A.K. Mulford, for example, started out as entirely self-published, but went hybrid after publishers approached her due to her savvy marketing.

(There’s a point to be made here about how traditional publishers are now passing all the risk and expense onto authors’ shoulders by recruiting indies who have already done the work of promoting themselves…but that’s another post.)

If you have to do it anyway, may as well promote your books on your own terms!

Learning all this made the decision easier. At forty-three, I was done waiting to be chosen. I was going to choose myself.

I now knew for sure that I would get published—in my own way, at my own word count, and with full creative control.

There was only one problem. I’d spent decades convinced that finishing a book was the hard part. But it turned out, it was just the doorway. Self-publishing meant doing everything on the other side of the door: cover design, editing, formatting, distribution, marketing—and I had zero idea how to do any of it.

Good thing I’d gotten really good at figuring things out the hard way…

Like what you read here? Check out my free novella A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available early 2027.

At forty-four, I’ve become an indie romantasy author building a backlist and a business. And I used a little trick I call The Nuclear Option to get started.

In December of 2024, I slid into a significant burnout. While I loved my full-time job as a librarian, it had been an incredibly stressful semester. I was teaching a class on top of my normal workload, and it had proven much more difficult than I’d anticipated. At home, I had a seven year old and two year old twins. The twins weren’t sleeping, so I wasn’t sleeping.

My husband and I barely got to talk to each other, except to negotiate who would do daycare pickup and who would go for groceries. The demands of caring for three neurodivergent little kids had extended the isolation of the pandemic long past the lifting of lockdown restrictions. It still felt like lockdown to me. I never went out, and I never saw my friends.

I certainly wasn’t writing.

I’d dreamed of being a writer my whole life. As a child I’d absconded with the pads of engineering paper my dad brought home and scribbled stories all over them. I kept writing into adulthood, but I was trapped in a cycle of perfectionism. I needed to ensure that every last word was polished before I could put anything out into the world, which of course ensured that I never did. In my thirties I undertook a saga of a Christian woman’s deconstruction journey out of high-demand evangelicalism. It had ballooned to over 300,000 words, far beyond publishable length. I now believe this was a way to stop myself from completing it. If it never got done, I’d never have to take the risk of actually putting it out there.

So that December, I had a literary come-to-Jesus moment. I had yet to publish anything. Worse still, I had yet to finish anything. I had abandoned my deconstruction saga, which had become too unwieldy to manage. The literary fiction novel I’d attempted afterwards had ended up in a drawer too.

The other part? I was newly diagnosed with ADHD.

You’d think that, after a fifteen year career in education surrounded by kids with ADHD, it would have occurred to me that I might have it. It did not. I knew my executive functioning was terrible, but I didn’t think that had anything to do with neurodivergence.

Then I watched this Instagram reel from Ijeoma Uluo.

I recognized myself immediately. The hypervigilance, the constant worry that I’d make a serious mistake or let somebody down despite my best efforts, being scattered and disorganized while scrambling to maintain the illusion that I could function just fine—it was exhausting. While I had come far in my librarian career, I was unhappy that my inability to finish a writing project had kept me from achieving my author dreams.

I went for an evaluation and it was confirmed that I was a “high-functioning individual with ADHD.” (That’s literally how they worded it in the report.)

I felt like I’d been sprung from a cage. I finally had an explanation for all the things in my life that had never made sense. As I learned more, I found more and more people who said, “You don’t have to do things the way everyone says you ‘should’ do it. You can work in a way that actually suits your brain.”

I tend not to do anything by halves, so rather than attempting some of the gentler ADHD strategies like Pomodoro sprints or dopamine menus, I went for what I call The Nuclear Option: negative reinforcement. The only time in my life I ever got anything done was when I had an external deadline. My brain and central nervous system only cared when someone else was holding me accountable.

So I made a deal with my husband: I would start a new novel. A romantasy novel, which would be sweeping, epic, and political. A story about what it costs to love someone the other side of a system you’re trying to blow up.

Every month, I gave him $100. If I failed to meet the writing goal I’d set for that month, he would donate that money to an organization that promoted book bans, which went against my entire identity as a librarian.

The people I have told about The Nuclear Option have described it as “evil,” “diabolical,” and “genius,” (all in admiring tones). It was also effective. For eight months, I hit every single deadline.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t just starting a novel. I was finishing one.

Here’s that book:

A magicless serf named Eira is forcibly married to a powerful mage lord after he saves her from a brutal punishment—only for her to discover he’s sworn to destroy the very resistance movement she joins. As their unlikely marriage deepens into unexpected love, she’s caught between loyalty to her oppressed people and the man she never meant to care for. She must ultimately choose: betray him to free her people, or sacrifice that chance to protect the bond she never planned to form.

The only problem was, it was still shaping up to be longer than any publisher would accept from a debut author. Was I going to finally finish something, only to end up with yet another novel gathering dust in a drawer?

That was when my romance-writing friend Tiffany Bloom said, “Why don’t you self-publish?”

And that, my friends, is where we leave off for today. If you’re a neurospicy writer—or just someone who’s spending years starting projects and not finishing them—you’re exactly who I’m writing this for!

In future posts, I’ll break down why I chose self-publishing, how I’m approaching the business side as a slower writer, and what I’m building instead of the rapid release model.

If you want to follow along as I do this in real time, subscribe!

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available early 2027.

But I’ve also noticed that as it’s become more common to market books this way, there’s also been increasing pushback against it.

For example, in her 2025 article “Dying On The Trope Hill: How Tropes Are Affecting The Publishing World,” Rashmika Kumar says,

When a book’s value is boiled down to a trope(s) it takes away the nuance of the story. In fact, the focus shifts from the plot to the tropes and then the book becomes a checklist that one looks to tick tropes off of. This creates a vicious cycle that traps the authors, reader and publisher, wherein all three are feeding into the cycle. It’s one thing for an author to see certain tropes be loved by readers across the board, it’s a different ball game altogether when a book is loved only for its tropes not the storytelling.

This argument is closely related to sentiments I have heard indie authors make when they first enter the indie space:

1. I wish I didn’t have to market my books.

2. I don’t know how to market my books.

3. I shouldn’t have to market my books.

These feelings are completely valid, especially as we authors tend to be introverted types who would rather hide in a cave than promote ourselves. But I think the third item on this list reflects a common cultural belief:

Art is pure, and commercial considerations sully it.

For bookish people in particular, there is a tendency to look back on literary classics like Great Expectations or Wuthering Heights as pinnacles of literary achievement (which they are) entirely untouched by commercial influences (which they aren’t). There is a lot of nostalgic longing for some halcyon era when authors could just write “for their art” and didn’t have to dirty their hands actually selling books.

Now, it may be true that the era of authors writing in a secluded garret while publishers take care of all the marketing has come to an end. But it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that as long as the publishing industry has existed, every book has been a commercial product.

When I was studying English Literature at university, one of the most interesting classes I took was 19th Century Popular Print Culture. That was where I learned about genres of popular fiction that were devoured by Victorian audiences, such as the Sensation Novel.

Sensation Novels contained many familiar tropes like crime, mystery, scandal, and adultery. Because they were so popular with Victorian readers, of course they elicited cultural anxiety. Henry Alford, the Dean of Canterbury, had this to say about them in 1864:

In considering the perils to which a language is exposed, the constant influence of corruption from colonial sources must not be overlooked. […] Two or three years ago nobody would have known what was meant by a Sensation Novel; yet now the term has already passed through the stage of jocular use [...] and has been adopted as the regular commercial name for a particular product of industry for which there is just now a brisk demand (p. 53).

My first quote from Rashmika Kumar above obviously lacks the racism of Alford’s fear of “corruption from colonial sources.” But they have other similarities. While Alford isn’t talking about tropes like Kumar does, he is discussing the crystallization of a marketing tactic that he felt was not only too commercial, but demonstrated a “want of social refinement, the absence of literary men of a high class, of universities” (p. 53).

One hundred and sixty years apart, both quotes reflect the belief that mass commercialization debases literature.

However, market forces inherently shape literature.

For example, most members of the Victorian middle class got their hands on books by purchasing a subscription to Mudie’s Lending Library. These were not public libraries as we think of them today, where signing up for a free library card allows you to borrow. Mudie’s and other lending libraries operated more like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, where you purchased a subscription to access their full catalogue.

Obviously, since Mudie’s was only dealing in print books, they could not provide the instant access that Kindle Unlimited does today. But Charles Edward Mudie certainly tried. As scholar Guinevere L. Griest states, “[B]y the end of the [19th] century he had acquired more than 7,500,000 books, according to a Times estimate” (1965, p. 108).

Books were still extremely expensive, and only the upper class could afford to purchase titles for their homes. The Victorian middle class needed lending libraries to satisfy their book cravings in a time where print was the primary medium. If you were a Victorian author and Mudie’s didn’t stock you, your chances of commercial success were low. While George Eliot commented that he “puts in very trashy and obscure books” (p. 107), the inclusion of her own books in his lending libraries was a major factor in her authorial success. The same was true of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James (p. 126).

Just as Victorian authors were beholden to the favour of the lending libraries, present-day authors are beholden to the algorithms of Amazon and other digital platforms. Since readers have literally millions of books at their fingertips, how can indie authors cut through all that noise and get their books in front of people?

The answer is to make it 100% clear to the reader precisely what they’re getting. An author who wants the Amazon algorithm to push their books is therefore incentivized to make them as “hooky” as possible.

That means stuffing tropes into the blurb. It means putting a trope list on the Amazon listing. It means cramming tropes into any marketing copy you share on social media.

And of course, once traditional publishers saw how much success indie authors were having with this strategy, they started using it too. Hence the “tropeification” of book marketing.

I don’t personally have a problem with trope marketing. What I want is to see tropes well-executed or even subverted, and I don’t think including them on a book’s marketing really affects how successfully an author does that. However, I do take issue with the idea that trope marketing is somehow a debasement of the book industry, when in fact similar market forces have shaped that industry from the very beginning.

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available early 2027.

Now let me ask you a question. Was that book…genre fiction?

Chances are that it was.

I didn’t grow up this way, but while majoring in English during my undergrad, I internalized the idea that there were two kinds of books. The more significant of these was Literature, the reading of which established you as a person of superior intellect, taste, and refinement. Then there were the Other Books, which might be entertaining, might keep you turning pages until 3AM, but were pedestrian and proved you to be a banal, unoriginal sort of person. Romance books were even worse because they also made you a frivolous sort of person. (The misogyny of this tacit assumption was not obvious to me at the time.)

These were the books you read over winter break when you were far from campus and nobody could see you. Or if you did let others see you, you’d have to put up with a lot of ribbing (aka mockery) about why you’d choose such a book in the first place.

It will come as no surprise to you, Reader, that I was pretty insufferable as an undergrad. I did continue to read romance novels in public when I should have been reading Samuel Beckett, but felt I had to apologize or make excuses for it when a classmate caught me out. (Related: I also felt like I had to apologize for not enjoying Margaret Atwood.)

Fortunately, I’ve had three bookish careers since those days (high school English teacher, school librarian, and now fledgling indie romantasy author), and each of these has eroded my elitism around genre fiction in different ways.

My three years as an English teacher were spent at an international school in South Korea. The students were sharp, perceptive, and quite fluent in English, but it was still their second language and they didn’t always pick up on Western cultural references (which made teaching Shakespeare a real challenge!). So, when looking for a novel study for my ninth graders, I decided to forego the usual suspects like To Kill a Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men and teach the YA dystopian novel Uglies by Scott Westerfeld.

If you haven’t read it, it’s set in a dystopian future society where everyone undergoes a surgery on their sixteenth birthday that will make them “Pretty” and match their society’s beauty standards. However, the main character, Tally, is denied the surgery when a friend joins a resistance movement. To get the surgery, Tally has to infiltrate the movement and expose their whereabouts. But when she finds out what’s actually going on, she must decide where her heart really lies.

I chose this novel because there is a lot of cultural pressure to get plastic surgery in South Korea, and my students were definitely feeling that pressure. Now, I’m not here to opine about their personal choices, nor about the beauty standards of a culture that’s not my own. But I did think they’d relate to Tally’s desire for the surgery that would make her Pretty, and we could spend our limited instructional time addressing the actual book rather than me going over historical background.

I had a parent question why I was teaching that book and not a classic, but I hope that I made a valid case as to why Uglies was a better choice. I knew this dystopian genre novel could be just as effective a teaching tool as any novel of the traditional Western literary canon. That moment became a sort of proto-librarian lesson for me about the value of selecting the right book for a specific community.

(Of course, studying more recent, commercial novels at the secondary level is no longer revolutionary; my current seventh graders study The Hunger Games in their English classes every year. But it was groundbreaking at the time.)

When I got to library school a few years later, one of the first classes I took was Organization of Information. We learned about library classification systems to categorize and track any text or object. All this was confusing enough to my ADHD brain, which tends to focus more on big picture stuff than finicky details, but what really threw me was how democratic metadata could be. Within the various classifications, the most commercial thriller carried the same weight as the most highbrow literary fiction novel. There was no difference whatsoever in how their records were structured. Anything could be important in any given library or archive, depending on the mandate of the institution.

Now, as an fledgling indie author writing a romantasy novel, I’ve seen the gulf-like divide between the traditional publishing industry and the self-publishing industry, especially when you consider how good indie authors have gotten at marketing highly specific tropes. (Any romance marked “Slow-Burn, Touch Her and Die” is an auto-buy for me!) There is a sense that this “trope-ification” is a dumbing down of fiction, an idea I deconstruct here by showing how trope-y fiction is as old as the publishing industry itself.

But for now, time to work on my actual novel! I can’t be a romantasy author without, you know, a book.

Like what you read here? Check out my free short story A Kiss Among Ashes and be among the first to get updates on my upcoming novel, Realmcrosser, available early 2027.