Yeah. THAT.

That feeling is what “rich” feels like for me.

Knowing that I have the freedom to be creative every day, to change things at the drop of a hat (like renaming this Substack—hello, Author Life Project!), to get a great idea and immediately act on it, to be able to choose what I write about and where and how I write about it… all of that makes me feel abundant. It makes me feel like I won the life and career lottery.

But so often we take our lives for granted. We think we have all the time in the world to live, and so we wait.

We wait for the “right” moment. We wait for better timing. We wait for perfect conditions. We wait until we achieve the next big goal. We wait, and we wait, and we wait... and sometimes we wait so long we miss out on all of the beautiful moments that add up to the life we’ve been dreaming of.

Example: It has always been my dream to live by the water.

And I had that opportunity in my early 20s when I was living in Southern California. I was renting a house that was two blocks from the ocean. I could’ve been walking every morning to see the water and listen to the waves crashing on the shore. I could’ve spent my weekends at the beach, reading and writing while sitting on a blanket on the sand.

But I didn’t do any of that because I was way too focused on the future. I was constantly trying to figure out how to get to the next milestone or thing that I wanted. So much so that I missed out on an opportunity to live my dream life.

Two years later, I relocated to Texas. And when that happened, I finally realized what I’d done.

I had my dream life right in front of me, and I completely ignored it and took it for granted because I thought I had all the time in the world with it. Because I thought I had to be focused on the things that society deems important in your early 20s: climbing the corporate ladder, finding someone to marry, and spending the weekends drinking and partying with my friends.

I had no idea life was going to interrupt that dream and take me away from it two years later.

After that, I ached for California. I wanted nothing more than to be living in that house, two blocks from the beach, and taking full advantage of it by walking to see the water every morning and spending my weekends on the sand.

That never happened. And I haven’t lived that close to the water since.

Living on the water is still a dream I intend to fulfill, and I know that when I do, I will enjoy it to the fullest. Because now I know what I’m missing, and I know how much it matters to me. But it took losing it for me to see that.

I don’t want you to miss out on your dream life. I don’t want you to wake up one day and realize you have regrets about things you didn’t do or didn’t try.

I want you to make the most of every single moment, because that’s what life is actually about.

It’s not about achieving the goals, or making a lot of money, or finally arriving “there” (wherever “there” is for you). All of that is nice, but it’s not the point.

The point is the journey.

The point is all of those days between here and there, where you decide to stop waiting until you arrive and just make the most of what you’ve got and where you are right now.

That’s what I live for. Those in-between moments.

For me, the process of writing a book is always more exciting than launching it. Sure, I enjoy that part too.

But I live for the process.

Yesterday, I was working on final revisions for How To Feel Rich (Even If You’re Not Yet) so I can get it uploaded to Amazon KDP by my pre-order deadline, and I was feeling so fucking good. I was feeling so proud of how this book came together. I was absolutely loving the words I wrote and how natural it felt to write them.

I was feeling so excited about the last-minute idea I had to write an 8-day challenge into the book, so it’s easy to implement all of the feel-rich practices I talk about. So the book is tangible and not just something you read and then put on a bookshelf to collect dust.

Whether I live by the water yet or not, I am already living my dream life.

I write books for a living. My day job is putting words on the page and turning them into a published book that can entertain, educate, and/or help someone transform their life.

That, to me, is as rich as it gets.

And that’s what my upcoming book, How To Feel Rich (Even If You’re Not Yet), is really all about.

It’s not about having a lot of money—that’s just a side effect. It’s about knowing that you get to create your life however you want it to be, no matter how much money is currently in your bank account.

It’s about realizing that you’re living more of your dream life right now than you’ve maybe ever allowed yourself to notice.

A dream life isn’t something you achieve one day. It’s something you create in the everyday moments, on an ordinary Wednesday, when nothing special is happening.

And How To Feel Rich is a guidebook to help you do that. To help you make the most of every single day.

pre-order the ebook

Whether you read my book or not, I hope you’ll take this message to heart and start looking at your current life through a different lens. I hope you make the most of every moment you have. And I hope you learn to enjoy the ride more.

Because that’s the whole point.

Author Life Reflection

• Journal prompt: How can I make the most of my day today?

• Micro-action: Choose one action from your journal response and do it today.

And tell me in the comments—what are you going to do today to make the most of it?

~jennifer

That workshop? How To Feel Rich (Even If You’re Not Yet):

The idea for the workshop came to me when I was brainstorming ideas for different trainings I could do to help paid subscribers grow and expand in their author careers.

And one of the ways I wanted to help them do that was by talking about money.

I wrote a bunch of articles that month all about money:

• The Problem Wasn’t Money, It Was Me

• Money Triggers and How To Neutralize Them

• Clean Up Your Inner Money Programming

• No Longer Available To “Stick My Head In The Sand” Around Money

Money is one of those topics we’re told not to write or talk about. Because it’s triggering for people, or it’s “disrespectful,” or it’s “not appropriate.”

But writing about and talking about money has been an interest of mine for nearly two decades as I’ve gone on my entrepreneurial journey and built my author career.

I find money fascinating—especially the energy of it and the mindset behind it.

So there I was, uploading the How To Feel Rich workshop to my Substack, hoping it would make a difference for anyone who watched and implemented it.

Then when I was finished, it was like a bolt of lightning hit my brain—THIS IS MEANT TO BE A BOOK!!

But while I was totally fine writing about money on my Substack and recording videos for my paid subscribers about it, I was not as comfortable with the idea of going public with it.

And turning that video workshop into a book would be going very public.

So even though the idea sparked excitement in me and I knew with 100% certainty I was meant to write it, I didn’t. I put it off for months. For most of this year, actually.

I kept thinking about it. The idea kept nudging me, reminding me that it was there. I kept feeling inside myself that I was being called by the Universe and my higher self to write it.

But I still procrastinated.

I let fear… of judgment, ridicule, criticism, haters, and online trolls stop me. I let the “noise” in my head from society make me believe I wasn’t qualified enough to write it.

I kept saying to myself, who the fuck am I to write a book like that?

I almost let all of that win. I almost didn’t write the book.

And then mid-summer, a deeper part of me—the part that more than a decade ago made the rule that when I receive a divine download, I trust it and I act on it—reminded me who I am.

I’m not someone who lives her life by fear. I’m someone who feels the fear and does it anyway.

But I wasn’t doing that… and I knew it was time for me to.

Trust Your Inner Nudges

I really thought the Universe got it wrong. Like it gave the idea for this book to the wrong person.

But as the idea stayed with me, I knew the only way it was going to leave me alone was if I just wrote the damn thing.

So I did. I sat down, and I wrote it. And what happened next surprised me.

I discovered that this book was about SO MUCH MORE than money.

It’s about giving yourself permission to stop waiting until... until you have more money, until you retire, until you lose the weight, until you have more subscribers, until you get the book deal, until your kids graduate, etc.

So many of us are putting our lives on hold until. This book is a permission slip to stop doing that!

It’s also a book about understanding how you define the word “rich” and accepting that it’s okay to define it your own way, and to let go of all the other definitions you’ve been hanging on to. It’s about discovering the ways your life already feels rich and indulging in more of that.

It’s about creating a rich-feeling life, no matter how much money is currently in your bank account.

And when I realized all of that??? I couldn’t not write this book and put it out into the world. It would’ve been selfish for me to hold this back from anyone ready to create more of the life they want right now.

So How To Feel Rich (Even If You’re Not Yet) is making its debut on September 9.

Pre-Order the Ebook

I chose this date because in numerology, 99 (or 9/9) represents the end of a cycle and a transition into a new phase.

For me, it’s ending the cycle of holding back with my message and my writing, and with believing anything other than positive things about myself, my books, my purpose, and my life. For me, it’s about closing the chapter on the limited, lack-feeling woman I used to be, and stepping into the rich-feeling, abundant woman and author I know I’m meant to be.

It can be a transition point for you too. An opportunity to shed what no longer fits who you’re becoming, so you can step into being the version of yourself you’ve been waiting on.

And How To Feel Rich (Even If You’re Not Yet) can be the catalyst to help you do it.

The ebook is available for pre-order right now—the paperback lands on September 9, and the Audible will be out in October.

How To Get Over Yourself and Do What You’re Feeling Called To

Whether it’s a book you want to write, a trip you want to take, a job you want to leave, or anything else, there are things we’re all being called to do.

The problem is, it’s not always easy to do those things. Especially when they come with any kind of unknowns or sunk cost.

But what kind of lives would we be living if we always just played it safe and never made ourselves do things that we’re afraid to do?

So I’ve made you an audio that walks through the 7 specific things you should do when you’re feeling called to do something but are feeling afraid to do it, including:

• Understanding that your desires are lighthouses

• Making a decision for real—no more negotiating with any other option

• Giving yourself permission (to consider it, to trust it, to go for it)

• Working through the mental “noise”

• Taking one small action… every day

• Staying connected to your deeper “why” to stay motivated

• Trusting and continuing forward

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompt: What am I feeling called to do that I keep putting off?

• Micro-action: What’s one thing I can do this week to start moving in the direction of that calling? Do it right now (before you can talk yourself out of it)!

If you have any questions, drop ‘em in the comments below (or send me a direct message on Substack), and I’m happy to help!

~jennifer

Subscribe now

And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

Experimenting. Pivoting. Sharing the lessons I’ve been learning. Using writing as a tool for moving through my grief. Finding my motivation again. Giving you a behind-the-scenes look at building a self-publishing career.

It’s been a really fun year of writing and creativity!

But somewhere along the way, I realized something… It’s about more than that.

I don’t just want a successful author career. I also want to create the life I dream of living.

With a career that gives me more freedom, not less. A business that supports my creativity rather than consuming it. Money that expands what’s possible for me. Time for the hobbies and people that I love. Space for romance, adventure, beauty, rest, and reinvention.

And the freedom to change my mind about what success looks like as I become different versions of myself.

So as The Career Author Project enters its second year, I’ll still be talking about writing, publishing, books, marketing, and building an author career.

But I’m also going deeper into the things underneath all of it: Desire, creativity, money, identity, mindset, ambition, reinvention, manifestation, and the messy process of creating a life on your own terms.

Because it’s not really about becoming a successful author. It’s about getting clear on the kind of life you want your author career to make possible for you, and then figuring out how to design your career to support that life.

So that’s the experiment I’m stepping into for Year Two. And you’re invited to come along for the ride.

If you’ve been here for the past year, thank you, truly, from the bottom of my heart. And if you’re new here, welcome! I’m so glad to have you join us.

The Career Author Project is for authors who want to build a career—and a life—on their own terms.

I can’t wait to see what Year Two brings! ❤️

~jennifer

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompts: What kind of life do I want my author career to make possible for me? How can I design my career so that it supports the life I want?

Subscribe now

Take the Survey Here

And the majority of the people who responded said they’re worried about burning out as an author. Burning out on marketing, burning out on writing books, and burning out before they’ve created the career success they desire.

So I wanted to address this. Because I get it—being a self-published author requires a lot.

You aren’t just the one writing the books; you’re also the one who has to publish the books, launch the books, market the books, sell the books, provide customer service for the books, all while thinking up and writing new books.

It can be exhausting. But it doesn’t have to be.

Over the course of my 16-year author career so far, I’ve found ways to make things easier on myself. So even though I’m pretty much doing everything (besides editing my books and designing my covers; I hire people to do that stuff), it feels like a flowing system and not like something that’s hard to do.

The caveat to this would be if you also have a day job. That can make a lot feel like even more. If you do, you have to figure out a schedule for yourself that works with your day job and still allows you to do what you need to for your author career, whether that means using PTO days when you’re on a deadline or skipping the Netflix binge after work so you can put words on the page.

Here’s a post I wrote about how to structure your work week even if you have a day job:

Being an author and a writer is my day job. So that makes it a little easier for me.

But even still, there are ways to avoid burning out, whether you have a day job or not.

Here’s what has helped me to keep writing books and building my author career for the past 16 years—and what will help me continue to do it for the rest of my life:

1. Create Foundational Beliefs To Support You

The number one belief I created early on in my career is that my books sell themselves. I knew I wanted to spend more time writing books than I did marketing and selling books, so creating that belief has helped me be able to do that.

These days, I rarely promote my books unless I’m launching a new one, and yet every month I consistently make royalties from Amazon and Audible.

Why? Because my books sell themselves.

If you want to move the needle without having to work super hard, I highly recommend creating some foundational beliefs that align with the results you desire to achieve.

Here’s how to do that:

2. Know Your Why

It can be tough to stay motivated 24/7/365 to keep moving forward on your goals. That’s why it’s so important to know your why.

As in, why are you an author? Why do you want to sell books? Why does any of this matter to you?

Why are you doing this?

When you’re clear on your why, it will be much easier to push through when you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or want to quit.

Many authors are just writing books but without any bigger vision or reason for why they’re doing it. And that’s what makes burnout an option to begin with.

But when you know why you’re doing something, that why will overpower everything else, including burnout.

So figure out your why and use it as a North Star to guide your career journey.

3. Do What Works For You

As self-published authors, it’s so easy to get caught up in trying to follow what traditionally published authors are doing or what other self-published authors say you should do.

Be on social media. Start a Substack. Post five times a week. Market your books every day. Pay for ads. Make videos for BookTok. Send emails out every week. Collab with other authors. Run free book promos. Record an audiobook.

There’s an endless amount of potential things you could be doing or that other authors are doing. But that doesn’t mean it’s what you should be doing.

In my opinion, the only way to avoid burning out on being an author is to do what works for you.

And that means doing what you want to do and what feels good for you to do, and letting everything else go.

Don’t feel like making videos? You don’t have to. Don’t want to spend money on ads? Don’t do it. Have no desire to learn how to do email marketing? Skip it.

Burnout happens when you’re trying to do everything or comparing yourself to what other authors are doing and feeling like you’ll never measure up or get it all done.

There are no “musts” when it comes to being a successful author other than writing books, so find the marketing tasks you actually enjoy, and stick with those.

4. Prioritize For Real

Since there are so many things you could be doing, you have to figure out what you want to be doing. And then you have to prioritize doing it.

As I mentioned, I never wanted to spend a lot of time marketing. I prefer to write more books.

So that’s what I prioritize.

My entire work week is built around putting words on the page, moving the needle on my current book project, and getting it to the finish line by my set deadline.

If I have time for other stuff, like posting on social media or writing Substack posts, I do it. But if I don’t?

I don’t worry about it.

5. Commit To Doing What Moves the Needle

For me, writing more books is what helps me to sell more books. Whenever I launch a new book, sales for my backlist books start picking up too.

Example: when I published F*ck the How, it did okay sales-wise. But a year later, when I published Quantum Leap Your Life? Sales for F*ck the How took off.

And the sales increased even more when I published the audiobooks.

So in my career, writing books is what moves the needle, and that’s what I focus the majority of my time and energy on.

What moves the needle for you? Figure that out and then commit to doing it consistently.

6. Drop Everything When You’re On A Deadline

When you’ve got a deadline, you have to be okay with letting everything else fall by the wayside for a while. It’s only temporary.

That means focusing on getting the book done, or launching the new book, or whatever your deadline is for, and not worrying about your social media or Substack or anything else you usually do.

Trying to hit a deadline while also doing all of that other stuff at the same time is why authors burn out. It’s just too much to handle.

I’m a high-volume writer. I post on social media, I write posts on Substack, I send a weekly email out to my email list. I also have multiple book projects in various stages I’m working on simultaneously.

But when a deadline is coming up? I drop everything else.

I’m okay with not posting on social, skipping a Substack post, or not sending any emails for a couple of weeks, but I’m not okay with missing my deadline.

7. Throw Money At It

As a self-published author, you can learn to do everything yourself, but you don’t have to. You can also hire help.

Whether that’s a virtual assistant, someone to design your book covers and format the interior of your books, or just running some ads to sell your books so you don’t have to, hiring help is always an option.

This is tough for a lot of authors.

But if you want to do this long-term, you have to get better at asking for and accepting help, and setting money aside each month that you can invest in your author career.

By getting some help, especially for the tasks you either don’t enjoy, don’t want to do, or don’t know how to do, you can avoid wasting time learning skills that someone else already has and focus only on what you’re good at.

Authors who don’t do this are the ones who eventually end up burning out.

My Burnout Signs + How I Avoid Burning Out

While writing this post, I thought about what happens for me when I’m heading toward a feeling burned out/wanting to quit phase, and what helps me get out of it quickly.

I made you an audio where I talk through what my burnout signs look like, and what I do immediately to avoid burning out, so you can get clear on your own signs and what you can do to avoid landing in that phase yourself.

You can listen to it below:

Read more

Several years ago, when I was still doing freelance writing, a woman reached out to me about ghostwriting her book. She had just signed a traditional book deal, and she needed someone to help her write it. A writer friend of mine recommended she reach out to me.

And so she did. We got on the phone to discuss her project, and I gave her a quote for working on it with me.

At this point, I had written and published a dozen of my own books—three of which had become bestsellers and sold thousands of copies—and also completed developmental edits on dozens of client manuscripts. I knew what it took to write a book worth reading.

But she had a problem with the fact that I was “only self-published.”

She said she was concerned the book wouldn’t be good enough if she had a self-published author help her write it, since she had a traditional book deal. She also said because I was “only self-published,” she couldn’t pay me what I had quoted her, and that she had to pay me less so the fee “matched my level of authorship.”

The funny thing is, even though I had written and published 12 books, I still had some limiting beliefs about being self-published; that it wasn’t as good as being traditionally published. That my books would never be taken as seriously or be as successful as a traditionally published book would. That I wasn’t a real author.

And then this woman came along and mirrored those limiting beliefs back to me.

That’s how it works when you’re still holding onto limiting beliefs in your subconscious mind. You will experience those beliefs in your external life until you finally change them.

But I hadn’t made peace with choosing to be self-published yet. I was still holding onto those old beliefs and stories about what it meant to be a self-published author.

That was the real problem, not what some woman who didn’t even want to write her own book thought of me.

When I was finished with the phone call, I was pissed! How dare she say that I wasn’t good enough to be paid what I charge to help author her book, just because she had a traditional publishing deal? What made her think that getting a book deal automatically made her better than me? And she wasn’t even planning on writing the book herself!

That’s when I realized, shit. I still didn’t feel confident being self-published. Something in me was still treating self-publishing like it was a lesser-than way of getting a book out into the world.

But I wanted to self-publish. I chose to self-publish. I could’ve just as easily spent time pitching agents and publishers and gotten myself a traditional book deal.

That route just never appealed to me.

Why spend months of my life pitching a book to an agent or publisher, only to then wait another 18-plus months for the book to come out after they gave me a book deal, when I could just publish it myself and move on to the next book? And why should I give some publishing company ownership of my intellectual property?

I couldn’t make it make sense.

And then I remembered, oh yeah, I intentionally chose self-publishing. It’s not that I wasn’t good enough to be traditionally published; it’s that traditional publishing wasn’t good enough for me.

Once I remembered that, those limiting beliefs about being self-published fell away. I no longer believed them. I was solid and confident in my choice.

And I never questioned being a self-published author ever again.

It’s Limiting Beliefs, Not Lack of Confidence, That’s Holding You Back

Everyone has limiting beliefs about something. But the issue is that those limiting beliefs, if you don’t ever deal with them, will continue to create what you experience in your life and in your author career.

For example, if you believe marketing your books is hard or that it will lead to burnout, that’s exactly what you’re going to experience. It’s going to feel hard to market and sell your books, and you’re going to feel burned out on it pretty quickly.

Life is giving you exactly what you believe internally.

I don’t believe marketing books is hard. I believe that my books sell themselves. So I do very little marketing, and still manage to sell enough books every month to make decent royalties.

And on the months when I actually try? I make even more.

So, what have you been experiencing in your author career that you’re not happy about? And what limiting beliefs could be hiding under the surface?

Those questions are worth spending some time digging into.

Create New Beliefs To Increase Your Confidence

When I first started my author career, I knew I wanted to spend more time writing books than I did marketing books. So I decided to create a belief that “my books sell themselves.”

Because if my books sold themselves, I would get to spend more time writing books and less time marketing them.

I wrote that belief down over and over again every day. I repeated it to myself all day long. My books sell themselves. My books sell themselves. My books sell themselves.

I chose to believe that even when my books weren’t really selling or making me much money.

Any time my results showed that my books do not sell themselves, I chose to ignore the results and continued to focus on my belief that my books sell themselves.

What happened?

That belief eventually became planted in my subconscious mind. And then the “how” for my books being able to sell themselves started showing up.

I received inspired ideas for book titles where the title itself got people interested in the book (hello, F*ck the How!). I started putting teasers for my other books in the back of my new books and created an ecosystem where every book promotes another one. I made audiobooks for my most popular books, so I was reaching every kind of reader (people who like to read on Kindle, people who prefer paperbacks, and people who only want to listen to books).

I make hundreds of dollars every month in royalties from my audiobooks, and I literally never promote them except right when they first come out.

Why? Because my books sell themselves.

This belief has, of course, increased my confidence in myself as an author and in my books themselves.

I know my books are worth reading. I know they’ll change your life if you implement the stuff inside of them. And I know as I continue to add more books to my catalog, the books will sell themselves even more.

What new belief do you need to make it easier to get the results you want in your author career? Make a list of every new belief, and then choose the one that will make the most impact, and start programming it into your subconscious mind through repetition.

It doesn’t have to be any harder than that.

How To Reprogram A Limiting Belief

You can create new neural pathways in your brain by changing how you think and believe (and act). You can change the results you experience in your author career by reprogramming your subconscious mind and letting go of the limiting beliefs you’re currently holding onto.

My bestselling book, Quantum Leap Your Life, dives deep into how to change limiting beliefs and create beliefs that are more supportive of your goals and dreams.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Identify the limiting belief

The easiest way to identify a limiting belief is to look at the things in your author career that aren’t going how you want them to, and then ask yourself: What limiting belief could be hiding below the surface of this?

For example, if your book isn’t selling as many copies as you want, possible limiting beliefs could be things like: My books aren’t good enough, I don’t have what it takes to be a successful author, or I’m not a real author.

The limiting beliefs are usually the thoughts that cause emotional upset, or that trigger you in some way. So dig deep!

Step 2: Choose a new belief

Next, you’re going to take a look at the limiting beliefs you uncovered and determine what you’d like to believe instead.

You can do this by grabbing a piece of paper and a pen—on the left side of the page, write down what the limiting beliefs are, and then on the right side, come up with a new belief you’d like to believe instead. You can come up with something totally different or just flip the limiting belief from negative to positive.

Example: “My books aren’t good enough” could become “readers love my books.”

Step 3: Repeat the new belief until you actually believe it

You can reprogram multiple beliefs at the same time, or you can just choose the one limiting belief that would make the most difference if you changed it to something else and start there.

Using the example from above, if your new belief is “readers love my books,” that’s the phrase you’d repeat to yourself all day, every day. Most especially during the times when your subconscious is most active:

• While you’re asleep (you can record yourself saying the belief and then listen to it on repeat)

• When you first wake up

• Right before you go to sleep

• Right after you meditate

• While doing mindless activities that don’t require you to think about what you’re doing (like cleaning, washing dishes, etc.)

The more you can repeat your belief, the faster your subconscious mind will get the message.

But there’s a little more to it than that, so don’t skip the next step!

Step 4: Get your nervous system on board with the new belief

You can repeat affirmations and belief statements all you want to, but if your body rejects them or feels emotionally triggered by them, they won’t stick.

So you have to make sure you’re also regulating your nervous system whenever it gets triggered by or rejects the new belief. For example, let’s say every time you tell yourself, “readers love my books,” your stomach gets a knot in it, or your chest feels tight. That’s your nervous system signaling you that it doesn’t believe and/or feel safe believing that readers love your books.

Whenever that feeling comes up, you can shift it by doing the following:

• Emotional Freedom Technique (aka EFT ←this is my top recommendation for nervous system reprogramming)

• Meditate

• Visualize

• Breathwork

• Or whatever other nervous system regulation method you prefer

The goal is to make sure your mind and body are both on board with your new beliefs.

Step 5: Look for and keep track of evidence

As you go along reprogramming your new belief, you’ll want to keep an eye out for evidence that it’s true. The more you can train the reticular activating system in your brain to look for what you want to see, the more you’ll see it.

So, for example, when someone buys your book, that counts as evidence of your new belief. If someone leaves a positive review, more evidence. If you receive an email from someone telling you how much they enjoyed your book, more evidence.

Evidence can also just be simple things like you’ve been feeling more confident, you didn’t get that stomach knot/tight-chest feeling when you repeated the belief to yourself, etc.

I like to keep a notebook by my bed and right before I go to sleep, write down at least 1-3 ways I saw evidence that day of my new belief.

Step 6: Don’t listen to the noise in your head

As you program your new belief into your subconscious mind, you may find yourself thinking things like, “that’s a lie” or “oh yeah, then how come you’re not making any book sales?”

This is just your brain trying to protect you from something it currently thinks is a threat—your new positive belief. So don’t let it take you down or stop you from believing it.

Any time those old thoughts spring up, notice it, thank your brain for trying to keep you safe, and then tell yourself that you’re still deciding to believe that readers love your books (or whatever your new belief is).

The more you can do this, the faster your brain will get the message that it’s safe to accept this new belief.

Step 7: Act like you believe your new belief

You can’t do belief reprogramming work without also including some practical action in the mix. Practical action is always required, and as you demonstrate your new belief through new actions and behaviors, you’re sending a really strong signal to yourself and to the Universe about who you’re now deciding to be.

So you can now ask yourself: If I believed that “readers love my books” (or insert whatever your new belief is), how would I show up in my author career today? What would I be doing that I’m not right now?

The version of you who believes your new belief is going to act and behave slightly differently than the version of you who’s still holding onto the limiting belief.

Belief reprogramming is a process, and it takes time and practice. So don’t be hard on yourself if it takes a while before you start seeing results from it.

You will see the results the more you commit to following these 7 steps.

In-the-Moment Reprogramming

The other really important—and powerful—time to reprogram a limiting belief is in the moment as it comes up. This is a huge opportunity to create an interruption in your patterned way of thinking, and change it immediately.

I’ve recorded an audio to explain what “in-the-moment” belief reprogramming is + how to do it.

You can listen to it below.

Read more

Essentially, I was building a safety net in case being an author didn’t work out.

I still built my author career, but it never compounded the way it should have. There was no space for it to. I was spread too thin with everything else I was doing.

The truth was, I didn’t really want the safety net. I just didn’t believe I could have the life I dreamed of simply from being an author.

But now I do.

So I’m done hedging. I’m finally all in on being an author. And I’ve never felt better in my entire life!

How To Stop Hedging

Let me start by saying this doesn’t mean you have to quit your day job or put yourself into a risky financial situation. You never have to do that, even if your goal is to be a full-time author eventually.

But you do have to understand the difference between hedging and locking in.

Hedging means you’re doing a variety of things in order to mitigate risk. You’re working a day job, and you’re writing books, and you’re trying to be a coach, and you’re offering services, and you’re taking on freelance projects.

All of that is actually fine, so long as it’s all focused on the same outcome. The problem is, it’s usually not.

If you’re like me when I was doing all of those same things, there was no focused outcome. I was just trying to make the money I desired to make, so I could finally go all in on being an author.

Nothing was growing vertically. It was only growing horizontally as I continued to add more things into the mix. None of the things I was doing were feeding into one place.

Here’s an image from that illustrates it perfectly:

If you want to stop hedging, you have to figure out what your one thing is—I’m assuming it’s to be an author, since you’re subscribed to and/or reading this post—and then you have to make sure everything else you’re doing is feeding into it.

Meaning what you’re doing has to either be supporting or funding your one thing.

If it’s not, it has to go. That’s the only way to stop hedging.

Step 1: Identify Your Hedges

You have to get clear on everything you’re doing right now, whether it’s supporting your author career, funding it, or not. Get out a piece of paper and make a list of everything you spend the majority of your time doing every day and week.

Yes, that includes the hours you spend mindlessly scrolling on social media or binging Netflix shows at night.

How To Lock In

To lock in, you need to have a clear goal and a set period of time that you’re locking in for. Six months should be the shortest amount, so you actually have the space for compounded growth.

If your goal is to be a full-time author, everything else you’re doing has to support that goal or fund that goal.

Example—you have a day job, and the extra money you make from it after you’ve covered your personal bills and life expenses goes toward you being an author. Whether that’s saving the money in an account to use for your author career needs in the future, or if you’ve got needs right now, like paying for book covers, editors, advertising, etc.

In that example, your day job is supporting and funding your one thing. (And if it’s not, that doesn’t mean quit your day job, but it does mean taking a look at what your day job is currently funding that isn’t aligned with your author career and making some tough decisions.)

Another example: you’re offering coaching services, and every client you sign gets a copy of your book and/or you sell your books directly to your clients. In this case, your coaching is supporting you in being an author.

If you find that you’re doing something that isn’t supporting or funding your author career, like making funny videos on TikTok or posting daily quotes on Instagram, those activities get benched. Doesn’t mean you can’t do them again later, but for now, you can’t spend time on them.

Or, if you want to continue posting the videos or quotes, they have to support your author career or sell your books. Now they’re a cog in your author ecosystem and not a totally separate task that isn’t helping you compound.

Locking in on your one thing may come with some grief. It may be hard to let go of the stuff you’ve been doing simply because it doesn’t fit the criteria for either supporting or funding your author career.

But that’s something you have to make peace with.

Step 2: Decide If The Hedge Is Supporting, Funding, Or Doing None Of That

Go back through the list you made from step 1, and honestly ask yourself: is this activity supporting my author career and/or funding it? Circle anything that is (or that could be), and cross out anything that’s not.

Now you know which activities get to stay and which ones get benched.

Reinforce Your Goal In All Ways

Now you’ve got to demonstrate to yourself and to the Universe who you are going forward from here.

You’re no longer someone who hedges. You’re someone who’s locked in on your one thing—being an author—and allowing it to compound.

Do whatever you need to do to reinforce that you’re locked in on your goal.

Change your social media bios. Unsubscribe from emails or Substacks that distract from your goal. Create a writing-first daily schedule so you do your writing before you do anything else. Practice introducing yourself as an author when someone asks you what you do. Brush up on or learn the skills you need to become the author you want to be.

From here on out, everything you’re doing is supporting or funding you being an author.

Step 3: Stay Locked In

Your old identity—aka the version of you who hedges—is going to try to come back into the picture at some point. So you need to practice staying locked in. If you come up with some goal-based guidelines, you’ll be able to lean on them every time that happens.

Grab a notebook and pen and write out your guidelines using the phrases “I am no longer…” and “I am now…”

Examples:

• I am no longer getting distracted by FOMO

• I am no longer scrolling on Instagram for an hour when I could be writing

• I am no longer waiting to feel ready

• I am now the author I dream of being

• I am now showing up fully for the books I desire to write

• I am now someone who finishes what she starts

Whenever your hedging identity tries to pop back up, lean on your guidelines and send it packing.

Every small action is a vote for your author identity. You become the author you dream of being through hundreds of tiny decisions that reinforce, "This is who I am now."

And if you want a copy of my Author Lock-In Checklist: 83 Tiny Ways to Align Your Life with the Career You Want, you can grab it below:

Read more

Which is why, over the last 15 years, I’ve tried pretty much everything.

I’ve been an author, a freelance writer, a coach, an editor, a book cover designer, a marketing support person, a social media manager, a charcuterie business owner, and a manifestation teacher. I’ve had a t-shirt line, an e-magazine, an online radio show, several blogs, and profiles on all of the social media sites. I’ve made thousands of videos, podcasts and audio recordings. I’ve gotten certified in holistic health and in interior design. And I’m sure there’s stuff I’m forgetting.

It’s been a fun era of my life.

But this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between hedging—what I’ve been doing for 15 years—and locking in on one thing long enough to see it compound.

Since I’ve been doing all of the things these last 15 years, I’ve been spread really thin, and nothing I’ve done has had the chance to grow vertically. It has all just grown horizontally.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I read this article from about hedging versus locking in:

Slay with finances

You Have 6 Months To Lock The F*ck In

Six months from today, you will either be someone who proved that locking in works, or someone who proved that hedging doesn't…

Read more

2 months ago · 406 likes · 45 comments · Jessica Onne

It really got me thinking. It forced me to finally take a hard look at what I’ve been doing over the past 15 years.

Since reading it, I’ve had to ask myself if what I’ve been doing is sustainable. And the truth I’ve come to is that it’s really not.

Not if I ever intend on actually reaching my goals in life.

Betting On My One Thing

No matter how many different things I’ve tried over the past decade and a half, there’s one thing that has always stuck around. There’s one thing that has stood the test of time. There’s one thing that I have never gotten bored with.

Being an author.

Writing my novels and nonfiction books (and screenplays) has been the joy of my life. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning and makes me eager to go to sleep and do it all again tomorrow.

And it’s also the one thing I’ve never really bet on. Not fully, anyhow.

Yes, there was a period of time—from January 2021 until June 2024—when I focused on being an author. When that was the one identity I was reinforcing, and the main activity I was spending my time doing.

During that same time, I was also making the highest book royalties I’ve ever made, and I was the happiest I’ve ever been.

But even then, I was still hedging.

I was also offering coaching, creating online courses, teaching classes, making videos, and running a podcast. And I still had my eyes on what everyone else was doing and how I was measuring up to them (talk about FOMO!).

I have never been fully all-in on being an author and only an author.

To be honest, I think I've always been slightly afraid to go all in on it for real. Because what if it doesn't work? What if I let everything else go and I still don't achieve what I want? What if I don’t have what it takes?

And, well, that’s the work.

The work is setting all of those fears aside and making the decision to go all in anyhow. The work is dismantling all of the limiting beliefs that pop up along the journey and continuing to double down on my decision. The work is choosing my author identity every single day and doing only what aligns with being her.

This is where faith, trust, and belief come in.

Faith in myself and in the Universe. Trust in the knowing I’ve had since I was 11 years old, writing short stories and novellas, and dreaming of being an author for real. And belief in what I have confirmed to be true in my life over and over again: that when you make a decision and fully back that decision in all ways, it will work.

Even if I don’t know how right now.

I believe that it’s always this or something better, and there’s really nothing better I could think of to spend my life doing. So I’m going all in on being an author. Finally and fully.

I’m betting on myself and letting the Universe surprise me with what happens from here.

Locked and Loaded

For the rest of this year, I’m focusing entirely on being an author. Everything else is either supporting that focus or it’s getting benched.

This decision hasn’t come lightly or without some grief. To lock in on being an author, I’ve had to make peace with the things I’m letting go of, which includes the second business I started last year.

I’ve unsubscribed from or unfollowed all coaches and coaching-related stuff. I’ve stopped opening emails with remote and freelance job alerts. I changed the paid tier of this Substack so it’s no longer service-providing and instead offers Bonus content that expands on what I write about in my free content.

I’ve changed all of my social media accounts so my handle is now Author Jennifer Blanchard, or so that my name on the account is. I’m learning how to post on Instagram and TikTok as an author and not as a manifestation teacher or coach.

I’m no longer honoring sunk cost for anything I invested in previously and have only continued to do because of said investment. I’m accepting that I got out of every investment what I needed to, and I’m moving forward.

I’ve been writing my ass off over the last couple of weeks to get my new nonfiction book finished this month, so I can prepare to launch it in September. I’ve been working through my revision notes and creating my index cards, so I can start revising the novel I finished in April, as soon as this nonfiction book is off my plate.

I’ve got another novel queued up and ready to be drafted as soon as I hand my other novel off to my editor and Beta Readers.

I’ve prepaid for the cover designs for the nonfiction book and novel, so I’m ready to work with my designers as soon as the time comes. I’ve got my editor waiting in the wings to hand my book off to her on the first day of August.

And I’ve been consistently doing my daily mindset practice immediately upon waking every morning, before I even get out of bed. I’m reprogramming and working through any and all limiting beliefs stopping me from believing that I can be the author I dream of being. Right now.

No more waiting. No more hedging.

Welcome to Author Jennifer Blanchard 2.0.

She’s a badass bitch with a take-no-prisoners attitude who will no longer let anything get in the way of her writing dreams and her desire to shake the world with her words and her stories.

And if you’re subscribed to this Substack, you’ve got a front-row seat.

P.S. In Thursday’s Career Author Lab post, I’m going to show you how to stop hedging and start acting like the author you dream of being—in practice, not just in theory.

Subscribe now

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompts: What would it look like for me to go all-in on being an author?

• Micro-action: Add “author” to your social media bios if you’ve published at least one book. If you haven’t yet, add “currently writing my first book” to your profile. Go ahead, I dare you.

Have you been hedging instead of locking in? I’d love to hear what your experience has been like—share in the comments.

~jennifer

There are a lot more words to come, and I’ve been writing them diligently. But I didn’t start from scratch.

I started with a transcript from a video I made. A video where I talked through a topic, gave my insights and processes, and shared my stories and examples.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this either.

A majority of my early books were written from content I repurposed from my blog, social media videos, and a membership site I used to run.

I’m all for writing an entire book from scratch when I need to. But when I don’t?

I’m all for being lazy and using what I’ve already spent time writing and creating previously to turn it into something new.

If you’re ready to make writing your first or next book even easier, keep on reading.

The Repurposing Process

Like I said, I’m all for writing books from scratch. All of my novels have been written from scratch, and so have most of my nonfiction books.

But not all of them.

And the ones that started with content I repurposed from something else I created followed this process:

Step 1: Review What You Have

First, you’re going to go through all of the previous content you’ve created and take a look at it. Read through your old posts. Scroll your previous social media captions (Facebook memories is great for this). Re-watch any videos you’ve created.

Get an inventory of what you have to work with.

Step 2: Find the Overarching Theme

As you look through everything, make sure to have a notebook and pen with you. Then, as you start to notice content you think would be good to repurpose, you can write down what it is, where it’s currently located, and what topic it’s on.

I’d also recommend starting a document where you can add links to any of your videos or copy-and-paste the actual blog posts or social media captions you want to use, so you have them all in one place.

As you do this, you may start to see an overarching theme coming through. Or a type of person who would be a good fit for the information.

For example, when I was putting together my very first book, after I pulled 50-60 blog posts, I noticed the overarching theme was “overcoming the stuff that gets in the way of sitting down and writing.” So that’s when I decided to make the book a guide for writers who struggle to get started.

What type of person or overarching theme are you picking up on with your content? And if you can’t see one clearly yet, just keep writing down the content that stands out to you. Later on, you can create an overarching theme and fill in the gaps.

Step 3: Organize The Content and Look For Gaps

Once you’ve pulled all of your content together, if you don’t already have a theme, this is the time to create one. Think about how all of that content goes together. Are there similar topics? Maybe steps in an overall process? Or a specific type of person who would benefit from it?

If you’re using content from a video you recorded, be sure to get the video transcribed so you can have the words written out in front of you. (I typically use Rev.com for transcripts.)

Now you’re going to start organizing the content so that it flows like a book would. Think about an intro, the different chapters you may have, and a conclusion.

Once you’ve done that, the final part of this step is to look for the gaps. Is there missing information? Are there processes or practices you’d like to include? Do you want to add journal prompts or exercises someone can complete to help them implement what they’ve learned?

Also think about whether you’ll need to write transitions between the posts/content so that it feels cohesive and flows well together.

Step 4: Fill the Gaps and Write Transitions

Now this is the part where you’re doing some writing, but you’re not starting from scratch. You have your video transcript, the text from your blog posts, and your social media captions.

You just have to put them together so they’re all in one place, like a Word or Google Doc, or in Scrivener (that’s the app I use to write my books).

Once all of the content has been copied over to the doc or app, you can begin actually writing what you need to so you can fill any gaps and add your transitions.

This part will take you some time, but not nearly as much time as if you’d started completely from scratch.

Step 5: Self-Publish Your New Book

Once your new book is put together and you’re happy with it, you can walk it through the self-publishing process, which includes:

• Hiring an editor

• Hiring a cover designer

• Hiring an interior formatter (or formatting it yourself if you have access to formatting software—I recommend Vellum or Atticus)

• Uploading your cover and book interior to Amazon KDP

• Filling out all of the information for the book sales page (title, subtitle, book page copy, A+ content, etc)

• Order a proof copy to make sure everything looks good

• Submit your book for publishing

Done and done! And in about half the time it would take you to write an entire book from scratch.

And if you’d like a copy of my “Your Next Book Starts Here” content repurposing planner, you can grab that below:

Read more

I had no idea how I was going to do it. Writing a novel had been my goal pretty much every year for all of the prior years.

But I was turning 25 in September of that year, and I felt like it was finally time to woman up and do the thing I kept talking about doing.

There was only one problem. I was a huge procrastinator.

At that point, my procrastination felt like a disease I had somehow been infected with, and I didn’t know how to heal it.

After a few months of trying and failing to write said novel, I made another decision. I decided to start a blog and write about my journey to writing my first novel.

I wanted to share what I was doing, what I was learning about how to overcome procrastination, and anything else that came up along the way.

Over the course of those nine months, I wrote one post per week on my blog. Topics included overcoming procrastination, how to find writing ideas, creating a writing schedule, and more.

And in September of that year, two weeks before my 25th birthday, I finished the draft of my very first novel.

I had also discovered that I really enjoyed blogging. So I kept it up. I began posting multiple times per week and loved every minute of it.

Two years later, I had hundreds of blog posts. And then I received a divine download (my phrase for an inspired idea from the Universe): I should turn some of these blog posts into a book.

Butt-In-Chair

I had been wanting to publish a book for such a long time. My novel was nowhere near ready (and neither was I ready to publish a novel).

But a nonfiction book? That had never occurred to me before that moment.

And I was ready for it.

So I went through all of my blog posts looking for a theme and found one: helping writers overcome the stuff that gets in the way of doing the writing.

I chose 50-60 blog posts that all fit this theme. I figured out what else I could add to make the book even more helpful. I wrote transitions between blog posts so the whole thing felt cohesive.

And a couple of months later, my very first book, Butt-In-Chair: A No-Excuses Productivity Guide For Writers Who Struggle To Get Started, made its debut.

Since I had no idea how to publish it, I ended up making it a paid downloadable PDF on my blog. I charged $19.99 per copy and sold hundreds of copies over the next couple of years.

I couldn’t believe it!

I made thousands of dollars from a book that was so easy to put together. From a book that didn’t require me to sit down and write the whole thing from scratch. One where I took what I had already created and turned it into something brand new.

I felt like I was onto something.

Stop Starting From Scratch

A couple of years later, I started publishing my books on Amazon, but I never stopped repurposing my writing. Most of my early books were repurposed versions of content I created for my blog.

And as it turns out, this is still a strategy that works for me.

I have a brand-new nonfiction book coming out soon, and it’s based on a video I originally created for The Career Author Project.

Right after I finished filming the video and posted it on this Substack, I received a divine download. It was like a lightning bolt hitting my brain—this is meant to be a book!

My personal rule is that I always follow the divine downloads I receive (when they feel good to me, of course). So I got to work on this book.

I’ve been quietly working on it for the last few months. And it’s almost ready to make its debut. More on this soon…

But for now, I’ll leave you with a question: What have you already created or written that could be repurposed into a book?

Whether it’s Substack articles, blog posts, email newsletters you’ve sent out, or simply a collection of content you’ve created for your social media, there is gold to be mined.

Writing a book doesn’t have to be hard work. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, and it doesn’t have to be something you create from scratch.

You can use what you already have. You can take what you’ve already spent time writing and creating and repurpose it.

Your first (or next) book could really be as simple as that.

In Thursday’s Career Author Lab post, I’m going to show you how to repurpose stuff you’ve already written and created into a book. I’ll be teaching you my specific process for how to do this and what to consider as you’re doing it.

Subscribe now

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompts: What have I already created and/or written that could be repurposed into a book?

• Micro-action: Go through your Substack posts, blog posts, random writing projects, social media content, etc., and see if anything sparks inspiration. See if anything stands out as “this could be a book.” And then come back here on Thursday, and I’ll show you what to do with it.

What previously created content would you like to turn into a book? Share in the comments.

~jennifer

When you begin to identify as—and then act like—the version of you who already has what you want, it can and will show up in your life. And you don’t have to know how.

In fact, the how will begin to reveal itself to you the more you close that gap with your identity work.

As I mentioned in my post the other day, all options, outcomes, realities, and possibilities exist all at the same time, which means there’s a possible reality where you already have what you want.

But how do you turn that reality into your life? Through your identity (aka how you see yourself).

Subscribe now

Choose The Reality You Want

Since every option, outcome, and possibility exists all at the same time, you have a lot of potential realities to choose from.

So the starting point is getting crystal clear on what you want for your author career (and life)—either specifically or in general. And you have to be honest with yourself about it.

For example, I am so clear on my desire to be a successful romance novelist whose books get turned into movies. It’s been my dream since I was 11 years old, and it hasn’t ever gone away.

Even though I’ve done everything to try to push it away over the years, it just keeps coming back. That’s how I know it’s the reality I truly desire and am meant for.

If you’re not sure what you want—or if you’re still stuffing your true desires down—there’s a journal prompt I created that I recommend you try.

It’s not a prompt for the faint of heart, but it will change everything for you if you do it and are completely honest with yourself when you do.

I call this prompt: Fast-Forward to the End.

Here’s how it works:

• Grab your journal or notebook and a pen (it’s best to do this one by hand)

• Sit in a quiet, comfortable place

• Close your eyes and imagine that it’s the final day of your life as who you are right now. You’re about to take your last breath, and you’re looking back on everything in your life that you lived, created, achieved, became, did, had, etc. BUT--and here’s the part that matters most--based ONLY on you having stayed on the path you’re currently on right now.

• Then open your eyes and, in your journal, answer the following questions: Am I happy with what I’m looking back on? With what I’m seeing? With the outcomes I got? With what I achieved and created in my life? With what I did or didn’t do? And, most importantly, what would I change and/or do differently given the chance?

This kind of journal prompt can be VERY confronting, but it’s also an opportunity to get really clear on the author career and life you want for yourself.

Before you can choose the reality you want, you have to be clear on what that reality is. Once you’re clear on the reality you want to create for yourself as an author, then you actually have to choose it.

Meaning whenever you start doubting yourself, whenever a limiting belief comes up, whenever you feel afraid that it won’t happen, you have to set all of that aside and choose the reality you want.

Over and over and over again until it feels inevitable for you.

And you do that by no longer entertaining any other reality (with the caveat that it’s always this or something better—knowing what you want, but not gripping so hard to it that you don’t allow something even better to happen).

You decide, and you decide again.

In making the decision, on repeat—that you will have what you want—you claim the identity of that version of you.

Release, Reprogram, and Let Go

This is probably one of the most difficult steps in the identity up-level process, because it’s hard to let go of who we used to be and who we’ve been up until now, for a version of ourselves that isn’t here yet.

But here’s the thing: your past does not define you. And it’s also not evidence of what you’re capable of doing or who you’re capable of being.

You can always become a new version of yourself at any time.

Knowing that, who do you now choose to be? What version of yourself do you want to become?

And who do you need to be in order to align yourself with your author dream/goal?

Because the version of you who has achieved it? She’s different than who you are right now.

She thinks and believes differently. She acts differently. She shows up for herself differently.

So who is that version of you? What does that version of you:

• Look like?

• Dress like?

• Walk into a room like?

• Make decisions like?

• Have habits like?

• Believe about herself?

• Believe about being a successful author?

Most importantly, what do you now need to:

• Stop doing?

• Put an end to?

• Let go of?

All of this is how you figure out who that version of you, the one who has already achieved your goal, would be.

Become That Version of Yourself Now

And finally, to bridge the gap between who you are now and who that dream-reality version of you is, you take your answers from the previous section and start acting on them right now.

For example, if, as that version, you would stop spending three hours a night binging Netflix and use two of those hours to work on your writing, that’s a simple habit you can now implement.

If you would stop dressing like a slob and actually care about your appearance, you could act on that right now. If you would no longer let your family tell you your dreams are impossible, now’s the perfect time to set that boundary and let them know what you’ll no longer tolerate.

As you consistently do so, you’re shifting your identity and becoming the version of yourself who is aligned with achieving that dream/goal.

Career Author Lab: Implementation

This week, go through all three steps in this identity up-level process and choose at least one gap-bridging action to implement starting now.

And if you want my author identity shift journal—that you can fill out and use every day—you can download it below:

Read more

For me, that’s a successful romance novelist whose books get turned into movies.

This is the dream I’ve had and the vision I’ve seen inside myself since I was 11 years old (I’m almost 43 now). It’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted with my whole heart, soul, and being.

It’s my North Star in life.

It’s also something I’ve run from, procrastinated on, and minimized simply because I don’t know how I’ll make it happen.

And it’s funny, too, being that I’m the author of a bestselling book called F*ck the How.

Yet even I still get caught up on the how when it comes to my big writing dream, the one that matters to me more than anything else.

But the truth is, the how really doesn’t matter.

What matters is this:

• Being clear on what you want for your writing life/career

• Being clear on who you need to be in order to align with achieving that outcome

In the quantum realm, all options, outcomes, realities, timelines, and possibilities exist all at the same time. That means there’s a reality that exists in which you’ve already achieved your goal, and that’s already who you are.

How do you bring that reality into your current life?

By choosing it over and over and over again. By releasing, reprogramming, and letting go of anything that doesn’t align with it. And by becoming that version of yourself now, in whatever ways you currently can.

At 11 years old, I knew exactly who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with my life. But before I could fully do it, I had to become the kind of person for whom that outcome was inevitable.

And that took a lot of trial and error over the last almost 15 years.

I had to try allllllll the things I was interested in. I had to learn a lot of necessary skills. I had to have the tools to overcome the things that were going to try to get in my way.

These 15 years were just a series of pivots leading me right back to where I started.

Now I’ve got the skills, the mindset, and the identity to actually make it my reality.

Bringing my big writing dream to life—to be a successful romance novelist whose books and stories get made into movies—is going to be part mindset, part manifesting, and part taking real, everyday actions.

That’s why I’m glad you’re here right now, reading this. Because that means you’re on the journey with me.

You’re going to have a front-row seat as I make that dream a reality.

And in Thursday’s Career Author Lab post, I’m going to share how to bridge the gap between who you are today and who your North Star writing dream requires you to be.

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompts: What is my writing dream North Star? Who do I need to become to make it a reality for myself? If you’re not clear on it yet, be sure to read this post:
  

• Micro-action: What’s one small action you can take this week to move closer to being the version of yourself for whom this dream is inevitable? Go do it!

What’s your North Star writing dream? Drop me a comment!

~jennifer

P.S. If you’re not already subscribed to this Substack, be sure to subscribe below so you don’t miss a thing!!

Subscribe now

In Tuesday’s post, I talked about why you can’t just reprogram a limiting belief in your mind. Limiting beliefs, old emotions, old negative memories, and more get “stuck” in our bodies. And then they program our nervous systems to have a fight-or-flight response, even though you’re not actually in danger.

That’s why, along with mindset work, you also need to use nervous system regulation tools to release any old, stuck, negative thoughts, beliefs, emotions, energy, etc., that you may still be holding in your body.

I’m going to make some statements in this post. I want you to read through each one and see what comes up for you.

See what thoughts, beliefs, and/or memories pop into your head. And see what emotions and/or sensations occur in your body.

Are you ready? Here we go…

Self-published authors are not real authors.

I’ll never be the author I dream of being.

Being a full-time author is a pipe dream.

Writers and authors are broke.

I’ll never write that book I keep talking about.

I’m fooling myself if I think I’ll ever be a successful author.

I’m never going to be a successful author.

No one will ever buy my books.

Self-published books suck.

I’ll never make any money from my books.

I don’t have what it takes to be a successful author.

Have I triggered you yet?

Now I want you to go back through that list of statements and choose the one that is the most triggering for you right now. Most triggering = it causes the most mental and/or emotional upset in your mind and in your body.

Got your statement?

Okay, now let’s talk about what to do with it.

Nervous System Regulation

The thing about statements like the ones I made above and other statements like them is that they live deep inside of us.

Maybe someone told you growing up that writers are broke. Maybe you mentioned to someone close to you that you wanted to write a book, and they laughed and said you’d never do it. Or maybe you saw a video on social media where someone complained that no one is buying the book they wrote.

And what happens with moments like that is they become stored memories in our bodies and subconscious minds.

We take them as truth, and they become a limiting belief that we then begin to operate our lives from.

So all of these years later, even though you desperately want to write and publish a book, you still haven’t done it. Because that one time someone laughed at you or told you that you couldn’t do it, you believed them, it made you feel bad, and then you accepted it as truth.

Now your nervous system and your subconscious mind are doing everything they can to protect you from that pain. To keep you safe from what it perceives as danger.

And the way they protect you is by stopping you from writing and publishing your book.

So even though you really, really, really want to write that book and be the author you dream of being, you’re still holding back. You’re still not showing up for yourself. You’re still not doing the work.

But you don’t have a motivation problem; you have a dysregulated nervous system.

My favorite way to regulate your nervous system and reprogram any old limiting beliefs, memories, or negative thoughts is using Emotional Freedom Technique, also known as EFT or “tapping.”

Freeing Yourself From the Nonsense

For example, just because you’ve always believed that being a writer means you’re going to be broke, that doesn’t make it true. Or at least, that doesn’t make it the ultimate truth.

Yes, it may be true for you right now. But it’s not true for every writer.

And if it’s not true for every writer, then it’s just a limiting belief, and you can choose something else instead.

In order to do that, you have to regulate your nervous system, so when beliefs, thoughts, and memories like that pop up, they don’t take you down. You can recognize them for what they are, shrug them off, and keep moving forward.

That’s where Emotional Freedom Technique comes in.

EFT is a practice that combines cognitive therapy with acupressure. By tapping on specific meridian points on your face and body, you can release stuck emotions, stress, and tension, and reprogram old limiting beliefs and memories.

A lot of practitioners have their own versions of how they do EFT, so if you’ve ever used it before, my version may be different. And if you’ve never used it before, I ask you to be open-minded and give it a try before deciding that it won’t work for you.

I will also add that I am not a certified EFT practitioner, just a huge fan who has used it for over a decade in my own life and daily mindset practice. The version I teach is the one I learned from my EFT favorite, Brad Yates (you can find him on YouTube; he has videos on literally every topic).

EFT works with any topic (money, love, success, relationships, anger, fear, doubt, etc.), limiting belief, limiting thought, old memory, or negative emotion. But for this post, we’re going to be applying it to being an author.

First, watch this video to see where to tap and how to do it:

Next, pull out that statement from the beginning of this post, the one that triggered you the most, and let’s work on releasing it. For this example, I’m going to use the statement: Being a full-time author is a pipe dream. But you can use whichever phrase was most triggering for you—just replace my phrase with yours as you follow along with the video.

If you liked this video, I’ve made you a few more below that you can use to overcome and reprogram these statements:

• I will never write that book I keep talking about writing

• I don’t have what it takes to be a successful author

• I will never be the author I dream of being

• Plus, I’m showing you how to use EFT with your own statements, so you can reprogram and release them as things come up along your journey

Read more

I made talk-to-the-camera videos about topics I was passionate about. I created dozens of outfit-of-the-day videos showing people what I was wearing that day. I even made some where I talked about being an author.

Then one day, someone left me a comment that said: If you’re self-published, you’re not a real author.

At that point, I had written and published 12 books, and I had been doing a daily mindset practice for years. I should’ve been bulletproof to a comment like that. It should’ve rolled off my shoulder and made me laugh.

But instead?

It nearly took me down.

After arguing with the person in the comments for a few hours (and getting nowhere), I had to stop. My whole body felt like it had been jolted. My nerves were jittery, my hands were shaking, and I couldn’t let it go. No matter how hard I tried, my mind kept playing it out over and over again.

Let’s be honest, that wasn’t the first time someone said something along those lines to me.

Over the years, I’ve heard everything from “authors are broke” to “self-published books aren’t as good as traditionally published books” and everything in between. And through my daily mindset practice, I thought I’d dealt with all of it. I thought I’d made my peace with those types of comments.

Turns out, there was more to it than that.

Sure, I may have changed my mindset around what I believed about self-published books and being the author of them.

But my nervous system never got the message.

Subscribe now

The Mind Forgets, The Body Remembers

Before that comment on TikTok, it had been years since someone said something like that to me. My mind completely forgot opinions like that even existed.

And when that comment popped up on my video, it hit something deep inside me. But not in my mind.

I was able to rationalize in my mind that, of course, I was a real author. The literal definition of “author” is someone who creates or writes an original piece of work. I had 12 published books, three of which hit number one on Amazon and sold thousands of copies.

Of course, I was a real author.

Yet, my nervous system didn’t agree.

That comment sent me down a physical spiral that ended in me no longer making videos about being an author. I still made my outfit videos, and I still shared things about manifesting and creating your dream life.

But I stopped talking about being an author.

The fear in my body of receiving those kinds of comments was so strong that I couldn’t bring myself to mention it again.

While my conscious brain believed I was a real author, my subconscious mind and nervous system did not. Those parts of me believed I was a fraud, an imposter, someone who was pretending to be an author but actually wasn’t.

Why?

Because when I received comments like that growing up, and when I was first starting out writing my self-published books, I never dealt with them. I shoved them down and pushed them away. I pretended like they didn’t exist.

My conscious mind forgot, but my body never did.

So when that TikTok commenter said I wasn’t a real author, it retriggered all of those old feelings and limiting beliefs that I never dealt with early on.

Turns out, I still unconsciously believed them to be true.

I still believed that I wasn’t a real author, and that self-published books weren’t as good, that they weren’t real books.

Heal the Nervous System to Heal the Limiting Belief

Yes, you can and should reprogram any limiting beliefs you’re holding onto in your mind. You should work on digging out anything that goes against you having what you want, and change it. You should rewrite your inner BS until it aligns with your dreams, desires, and goals (my bestselling book, Quantum Leap Your Life, goes deep on the topic of reprogramming limiting beliefs).

But you also need to reprogram and heal those beliefs in your body.

Otherwise, every time one comes up, your mind may disagree, but your body will go into fight-or-flight mode.

That’s exactly what happened to me with that TikTok video comment. My mind said, yeah, right, of course, I’m a real author. My mind argued back and forth with the hater in the comments of my video (and as it turned out, that commenter was also a self-published author—talk about needing to reprogram your mindset and nervous system LOL).

But my body went into fight-or-flight, and I stopped making videos mentioning that I was an author.

It wasn’t until I started addressing those same comments and limiting beliefs using nervous system regulation tools that things really started to change for me.

A year after that, I wrote my 13th book, F*ck the How, and I launched a new TikTok channel with the same name, which grew to over 10,000 followers within 7 days, and now has over 18,000 followers. I talked about my book constantly, and thousands of people went to Amazon and bought it.

Today, if someone told me I wasn’t a real author because I’m self-published, I wouldn’t even engage with them. I’d laugh. I’d think about my 18 books and all of the money I’ve made and still continue to make from them, while many traditionally published authors can’t even outearn their advance.

And I would no longer go into fight-or-flight mode.

My subconscious mind and my nervous system have been healed with regard to comments, thoughts, and beliefs like that.

But it didn’t happen overnight. It took intentional work and being consistent with that work until those beliefs no longer lived in my body.

If you’ve ever been triggered by someone saying self-published authors aren’t real authors, or self-publishing isn’t as good as traditional publishing, or you’ll never be a real author, or anything along those lines, your subconscious mind and nervous system very likely need healing too.

In Thursday’s Career Author Lab post, I’m going to share with you my number one tool for regulating your nervous system, so you can shed and reprogram any old limiting beliefs you may be holding onto that are keeping you from being the author you dream of being.

Subscribe now

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompts: What comments, opinions, and/or limiting beliefs still trigger me? Freestyle journal on this for at least a few pages to see what comes up.

• Micro-action: For this week, just notice what occurs in your mind and body when you get triggered by an external stimulus (a comment, an opinion, a limiting belief, etc.). If you can remember to, write it down. And then come back here for Thursday’s post, and I’ll show you what to do with it.

What comments, opinions, or limiting beliefs about being an author trigger you? Share in the comments.

~jennifer

Sure, the love story between Tessa and Hardin was compelling, and there were definitely a ton of very hot sex scenes. But as far as story structure, character arc, craft, or well-thought-out storytelling choices?

Not so much.

And as a writer and storyteller myself, there’s nothing that drives me crazier. Especially when I spend money on a book (or book series), only to be disappointed by how it all plays out.

Thankfully, the movie series remedied all of the things I hated about the books, which is why I said the movies are better than the books (and I stand by that!).

But what kind of author and writing mentor would I be if I didn’t also tell you how to not make the mistakes the majority of self-published romance novelists make?

And so, for today’s Career Author Lab post, I’m going to teach you how to structure a romance novel—or a romance subplot in another story genre—so you can have a leg up, whether you’re self-publishing or going the traditional route.

First: The Foundation

Before we dive into romance story structure, you should first have a foundation for all of this.

The starting point is understanding general story structure. Without this understanding, it will be challenging for you to turn any of your ideas into stories that work.

So if you’re not already familiar, be sure to read this post:

And for additional reading, check out these books:

• Story Engineering by Larry Brooks

• Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes

Both of these books are foundational for anyone who wants to write novels, and especially romance novels or stories with a romance subplot.

I learned everything I know about storytelling from working with Larry Brooks as my story mentor long ago, and I refined that learning for my specific genre (romance) when I found Gwen Hayes book.

Plus, I spent five straight years watching 1-2 movies per day and attempting to break down the structure and exposition. I basically gave myself a master’s degree in story structure from doing this, and it has changed everything for me as an author.

Whatever you do, don’t skimp on the foundation!

Having a thorough understanding of story craft and, most especially structure, can be the difference between a successful book and one that no one ever reads.

Next: Structuring A Romance Novel

If you read or have read Gwen Hayes’ book, Romancing the Beat, you’ll see that romance structure is a bit different from general story structure.

The general plot of a story is: A Protagonist who wants something, an Antagonist who opposes what the Protagonist wants, and a journey that ensues because of it.

Whereas in a romance novel, the entire plot is focused on two characters meeting and falling in love.

In my opinion, the best, most well-done romance stories combine both general story structure and romance structure. I will show you how that works later in this post.

But for right now, let’s talk about the specific structure of a romance novel.

All of what I’m about to explain comes from what I learned from Gwen Hayes:

Part 1: The Set Up

This is when you’re setting up everything that needs to be included to make the eventual love story believable. This is important because so many romance stories mistake lust for love. Anyone can lust over someone else, but love requires a deeper connection.

In the setup of a romance novel, you must introduce both love interests (aka the hero and heroine), give the reader a look into their current life, show their inner demon(s), and the two characters must also be introduced to each other via the Meet Cute moment.

When the hero and heroine meet, sparks must fly. But that doesn’t mean they have to like each other. One of the biggest tropes in romance is enemies-to-lovers.

So the “sparks” just have to be a strong emotional reaction, whether good or bad.

In the setup, one or both protagonists must admit—out loud or in their internal dialogue—that they’re not interested in love. This “no way” moment is what gets challenged across the entire story until they finally give in and fall in love.

Part 1 of the story ends with the First Plot Point, which Hayes calls the Adhesion Plot Thrust. This is the moment when the two protagonists are “stuck together,” even temporarily. Neither of them can walk away from the other.

Examples include: a marriage of convenience, a fake relationship, a partnership (like in The Deal), stranded somewhere, running from a bad guy together, etc.

The First Plot Point—aka Adhesion Plot Thrust—happens between 20% to 25% of the way into the story.

This moment ends part 1 and moves us into part 2 of the story.

Part 2: Falling In Love

This is the part of the story where the two protagonists start falling in love, even though neither of them has any desire to do so (and both of them have stated it). The goal of this part is to show the reader that the two characters are made for each other—even if the characters don’t see it yet—and also to build up the sexual tension.

The next plot point is called the Inkling. This is a moment in the story where one or both protagonists get a hint that maybe they’re wrong about love.

After that comes Deepening Desire, when one or both protagonists can no longer deny they’re interested in the other person.

The plot point after that is Maybe This Time. At this plot point, the protagonists give into their desire. Depending on the type of romance you’re writing, this could be a kissing scene, a sex scene, or just a moment of true intimacy between the characters.

The final plot point of part 2 is the Midpoint—Hayes calls it the Midpoint of Love Plot Thrust—and this is the moment where the two characters are riding the high of falling in love and are really feeling that love. Unfortunately, it’s a false high, and things are about to come crashing down, but they don’t know it yet.

The Midpoint happens 50% of the way into the story (hence "midpoint”).

This moment ends part 2 and moves us into part 3.

Part 3: Retreating From Love

The first plot point in part 3 is also an inkling, but this time, it’s an Inkling of Doubt. One or both characters are starting to feel like maybe they made a mistake, and like their reason for not wanting to fall in love is still valid.

Next comes Deepening Doubt. One or both characters have to be feeling the doubt. They don’t have to admit it just yet, but there should be an inner dialogue going on about it.

After that comes Shields Up. A moment that reminds one or both protagonists why they don’t want to fall in love/why they don’t believe in love. And it causes them to put a wall back up around their heart to protect themself.

And the final plot point of part 3 is probably the most famous, and that is: The Break Up (also known as the Second Plot Point). The characters must break up and separate from each other’s lives.

The Break Up occurs between 75% to 80% (max) of the way into the story. Any later than that is way too late.

This is the final moment that ends part 3 and moves us into part 4.

Part 4: Fighting For Love

The first milestone of part 4 is the Dark Night of the Soul. This is when one or both protagonists hit rock bottom and think they should feel better about the breakup than they actually do.

Next comes the Wake Up, which is the moment when one or both protagonists realizes the breakup was a huge mistake. They overcome their inner demon(s) and decide to fight for the love they want.

After that comes another very famous milestone: The Grand Gesture. This is when one or both protagonists must step up and do something to prove their love to the other person. Think: chasing them to the airport and stopping them from leaving, or rushing into their wedding and confessing their love before they marry someone else. Romance movies are great at the Grand Gesture.

And the final milestone is Whole-Hearted. This is the moment that shows the two protagonists back together and how they’ve overcome their inner demons in order to be together.

This is where the story ends.

Then, if you want (not all romances have this, but most of them do), you can have an Epilogue, which shows the protagonists in the near future and where they’re at in their life together.

And that’s how you structure a romance novel.

Now, if you’re not writing a romance novel, but are using a love story as a subplot for another novel genre you’re writing, you can still use the romance beats to bring your love story to life.

You just want to make sure to combine them with general story structure (more on how to do that below).

And Finally: My Take On How To Best Structure A Romance

While I love Hayes’ version of structure for a romance story, as I mentioned before, I much prefer writing—and reading and watching—stories where they combine general story structure with the structure beats of a romance.

For example, in general story structure, the first plot milestone is called The Hook. This is the moment that happens within the first chapter of the book, and hooks the reader into the story by hinting at the Antagonist and/or the story problem that’s to come.

In romance structure, the “hook” is called the Meet Cute—the moment when the two love interests meet. This moment hooks you into the love story that’s to come.

One of my all-time fave romance movies is Just Like Heaven (with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo—look it up!).

The Hook in that story is when Elizabeth is driving in her car, in the rain, on the way to her sister’s house for a blind date she’s being set up with, and she’s hit head-on by a truck speeding out of control. This is a hint at the story problem—aka Antagonist—that’s to come.

We’re then introduced to David, a recluse who is looking for an apartment. He soon finds one that’s available to sublet, and he decides to rent it.

On his first night living in the sublet, he gets drunk and runs into Elizabeth—right inside the apartment. She insists it’s her apartment, and he insists that it’s his. This is the Meet Cute moment where the two love interests are introduced to each other.

Notice that the story has both general structure—the hook moment when Elizabeth is hit by the truck—and the romance structure hook when Elizabeth and David meet-cute.

In my opinion, this is what makes the story so successful.

It’s not just a story about two people meeting and falling in love, but there’s an actual bigger plot going on. Elizabeth getting hit by the truck hints at that bigger plot to come later in the story (when we arrive at the First Plot Point).

When I’m writing my romance novels (and screenplays), I always follow general story structure, but I also include the romance structure beats.

This brings the love story to life in a much bigger way. It also makes it about more than just two people meeting and falling in love, which can get boring after a while if you don’t have an actual plot going on beyond that.

And not having proper structure is often why you’ll read romance novels (mostly self-published) where there are so many random sex scenes with no real purpose other than hooking up. This is bad storytelling, even if it makes for a sexy read.

All scenes must have a purpose and move the story forward, or they should be removed from the novel.

To give you an even better look at romance story structure, I’ve created a cheatsheet that dives much deeper into each of the romance plot points, what needs to happen at each one, and why it needs to happen.

This cheatsheet is a perfect accompaniment to Gwen Hayes’ book, Romancing the Beat, which you should definitely pick up a copy of.

You can download the cheatsheet below:

Read more

But lately, I’ve found myself saying that… a lot.

The cause?

All of these viral self-published romance novel series that somehow found an audience despite being a story-craft shit show, got picked up by a traditional publisher who put the books out exactly as is (why? just why??), and have then somehow turned into a movie or TV series.

And so, of course, the movie or TV series is better than the book(s) because the movie/series is being written by a writer who actually understands storytelling, craft, and most importantly, structure.

My biggest annoyance with these viral self-published romance novels? An excessive use of steamy sex scenes to cover for the fact that the author knows nothing about romance storytelling, structure, or craft.

Bleh.

Not that I have anything against sex scenes. I’m not only a romance novelist myself, but a romance reader and movie lover. So obviously I’m not opposed to sex scenes (although I don’t write them in my books, I prefer writing heat but no fire).

I am fully opposed to authors who write books that have no structure or adherence to the principles of craft. I spend 90% of the time rolling my eyes when I read books like that and feeling appalled that so many people like them.

Sure, the hot sex scenes keep a reader turning the page. It may even make them say they love the book.

But from a story perspective? Total shit show.

Now, some authors don’t really care. And that’s fine for them.

I’m just not one of those authors (and you shouldn’t be either).

I do care about craft and structure. I spent nearly a decade of my life studying it and mastering it as much as possible. I’m still a student of story to this day and will be for all of my life.

It matters to me that my stories are well-written and well-crafted.

And those same traditional publishers also would’ve cared about it if those same books had been pitched to them through the usual methods, and not some viral hit they picked up and published as-is.

I won’t name all of the specific series I’m referring to (cough-cough, After, My Life with the Walter Boys, the Off-Campus books, cough-cough), but if you know anything about craft, you can tell by reading them.

And lately, I’ve just read way too many of them.

So I’m remedying that by teaching you how to structure a romance novel. The right way. The way those books should have done it.

No excessive sex scenes just to write steamy sex scenes. No episodic stories that have no goal and no point. No cast of characters so large that you start to forget who everyone is or why they even matter in the story.

As they say, you have to first learn the rules if you want to break them. So in Thursday’s Career Author Lab post, I’m teaching you the rules of writing a romance story.

That way, if you do decide to write a story like this in the future—or add a love story subplot into another genre of story you’re writing—you’ll know what to do, how to do it, and why to do it.

Subscribe now

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompts: How can I improve my knowledge of general story craft?

• Micro-action: For this week, if you’re not familiar with general story craft and/or structure, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Story Engineering by Larry Brooks and reading it from cover to cover. More than once.

What movie or TV series do you think is better than the book(s) it was based on? Share in the comments!

~jennifer

Before that, I had 12 books published, but I still wasn’t considering myself an author.

I mean, technically, I was an author after writing my first book. But it took me years before I called myself an author, especially out loud.

So F*ck the How is a very special book for me.

It’s not only my top-selling book, but it’s also the one that made me feel like a real author.

That’s why I decided it would be fun to do a fifth anniversary edition and relaunch it.

Grab the Anniversary Edition

The Mindset Behind the Relaunch

I’ve never added new content to an old book before. My thinking has always been, why add new content when I can just write a new book?

But honestly, over the last five years, as I’ve learned more about manifesting and deepened my own processes, I’ve felt like F*ck the How was a little incomplete.

Not that there was anything wrong with the original version—not at all!

There was just one small nuance that I’ve learned since writing it, which I wrote about in my other manifesting books, but that I felt also needed to be in F*ck the How.

So I decided to write a new chapter.

The day I finished the new chapter and added it to F*ck the How, I got full-body chills! And that’s when I knew the book was now complete.

Yes, the book was good as it was, but with the new chapter? Now it’s great. And I’m even prouder of it than I was before.

To Change the Cover? To Not Change the Cover?

This one I went back and forth on for a while.

Should I create a new cover? Make it more like the other personal development books that are on the market today?

Most personal development books have large text and no images on the cover. F*ck the How has a picture of me on the cover (it feels along the lines of a Gabby Bernstein book cover).

I couldn’t decide what to do.

If I got a new cover design, it could help me sell more copies. But if I changed the cover that readers have been used to for five years, it could also confuse people.

After thinking about it for far too long, I reached out to my soul sister accountability partner and asked for her opinion.

And what she said was: if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.

Meaning that F*ck the How is already selling consistently and making me consistent royalties every month. Why change it?

So I searched Amazon for ideas on how I could use the same cover while still showing it was an updated version. And that’s when I came across The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

For the 30th anniversary, her publisher relaunched the book with a brand-new note from Julia, and they put a “30th anniversary edition” sticker on the cover.

Same cover, but with a simple way to show readers the book had been updated.

So I took inspo from that and had my cover designer add a “5th anniversary edition” banner. Now it’s the same cover, but with a message letting readers know it’s an updated version.

And having that banner also signals to new readers that this book has been around for a while and is worth paying attention to.

When To Relaunch A Backlist Book

I don’t ever see myself doing anything like this again. I would much rather write new books than go back and add to old ones.

With F*ck the How, I made an exception. And I’m glad I did.

But I don’t think that’s always the right answer.

So, how do you know when to relaunch a backlist book? Here are the questions I asked myself:

1. Is there significant information that would be worth adding to the book?

As I mentioned, there was a small nuance I felt needed to be added, and I had a few new manifesting stories that I thought it would be fun to include in the new chapter as examples of how this nuance changes things.

2. Does the book feel outdated in some way that requires an update?

While the book definitely didn’t feel outdated—I wrote it so that it would be evergreen and useful for life—I liked the idea of adding a new chapter.

3. Would adding new content to an old book increase the value of the book for the reader?

In this case, I felt adding the new chapter would definitely increase the value of the book. It would also help the process I teach in it work even better. And that, for me, made it worth the effort of relaunching.

4. Does the book feel incomplete if this chapter didn’t get added?

When I first wrote it, the book felt complete to me. But five years later, I definitely felt like adding the new chapter could be a game-changer for the reader. Now, it truly feels complete, and I wouldn’t touch it again.

5. How easy would it be to relaunch it?

Relaunching F*ck the How was pretty easy—adding the new chapter didn’t cost me anything but my time, and the cost to have changes made to the cover was only $10.

What did cost me additional money ($125) was adding the new chapter to the Audible version. That required me to book studio time and record the new chapter with my sound engineer. This was something I budgeted for months in advance, so it wasn’t a problem when the time came.

6. Is it worth dealing with the potential Amazon headache?

The only thing that made me question the relaunch was having to deal with Amazon. Once the book is reuploaded to KDP, anyone new who buys it will get the updated version.

But anyone who bought the ebook previously would still have the old version.

To make the new version available to everyone, including people who already owned the ebook, I had to go back and forth with Amazon KDP customer service. I had to convince them enough of the book had been updated that it was worth pushing an update out to all previous buyers, and then they had to actually do it.

The problem is, Amazon KDP customer service doesn’t typically push updates for books unless a significant change has been made (and sometimes they don’t consider new chapters significant). So I had to make sure they understood how important it was for old readers to have the update.

For me, it was worth the headache.

Now people who bought the ebook previously can get the update for free, and so can anyone who purchased the Audible version (for instructions on how to get the update, read this post).

Career Author Lab: Implementation

This week, consider if you have a backlist book that would be worth relaunching, and be sure to answer the 6 questions I gave you in the post before deciding.

And if you’d like to have a relaunch planner, so you can know exactly what you need to consider and take action on when relaunching a backlist book, you can download mine below:

Read more

Five years later, that book is an Amazon bestseller, having sold thousands of copies and being read by thousands of people all over the world.

When I was writing it, I had no idea the reach and the resonance it would have with readers. I just wanted to share my story. And I’ve been blown away by all of it—from the hundreds of positive reviews to the emails and social media messages I’ve received, sharing how you’ve applied F*ck the How in your own lives and gotten amazing results.

So many of us have big dreams and huge goals, and no idea how we’ll make them happen. But now you no longer have to let that stop you.

To celebrate the five-year anniversary, I created a fifth anniversary edition of the book—with a brand-new chapter!!

Grab Your Copy of F*ck the How

Already Own the Ebook or Audible?

If you already own the ebook or Audible of F*ck the How, you can get the updated version—with the brand-new chapter—for FREE!!

Here’s what you need to do:

For the ebook

1. Log in to your Amazon account (the one you use with your Kindle device/app)

2. Go to Content Library (under “Your Account”)

3. Click on Books

4. Find F*ck the How, and there will be a blue “update available” link below the book info

5. Click Update, and then confirm update, and the new version will be sent to your Kindle and devices with Kindle apps

If, for some reason, you don’t see the update link, you can reach out to Amazon customer service and ask them to push the update to your account.

For the Audible

1. Go to your Audible app

2. Delete the book download from your app

3. Re-download the book, and the new chapter will be there

Enjoy!!

New To F*ck the How?

If you’re new to me and/or my personal development books, I would highly recommend starting with F*ck the How. It’s the most foundational and yet expansive book I’ve ever written.

And with the brand-new chapter, it now feels complete.

This book has more than 200 five-star reviews, and here are some of my favorites:

Grab The Anniversary Edition

In Thursday’s Career Author Lab post, I’ll be sharing more about what goes into relaunching a backlist book, including the mindset behind it, plus a relaunch planner (for paid subscribers only).

Thank you so much for supporting F*ck the How over the last five years. Here’s to the next five years, and beyond!!

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompts: How can I revive and relaunch one of my backlist books?

• Micro-action: For this week, choose one of your books and share it on social media with a new post, picture, and/or video.

What backlist book do you want to relaunch? Share with us in the comments.

~jennifer

This post isn’t about that.

But it is about recognizing when you’ve built a shadow career or business.

Let’s start with my story.

Back in 2012, I decided to quit my day job to become a full-time author and entrepreneur. I had only written and published one book at the time, but I had another book itching to get out of me, and more on the horizon.

So I jumped.

I quit my job, cleared out my 401(k) account, and trusted that the net would appear. It went really well at first.

Within a month of quitting, I had written and published my second book.

At this time, I was selling my books exclusively as PDFs on my website, and sales were going great. People were buying them every week.

But then, my 401(k) money started dwindling, and that’s when everything took a turn for the shadows.

Subscribe now

What’s A Shadow Career/Business?

If you’ve read Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield, you’ve heard the term shadow career. Basically, it means a career, job, or business where you’re doing something that’s similar to what you actually want to be doing, but without any real risk or skin in the game.

For example, you want to be an author, but instead, you build a business where you coach other authors.

Or you want to write music professionally, but instead you teach guitar lessons.

Or you want to be an artist, but instead, you teach painting classes.

You’re operating in the shadows of what you actually want to be doing.

Back to my story. When the money started running out, I started freelancing and doing story coaching to make ends meet.

I will mention that I was already doing these things—I had been freelance writing since 2007, and I was coaching writers on their stories since 2010—but that was never supposed to be my main focus. That was supposed to be a supplement to my author career.

The only problem is, it took over everything.

I stopped writing books… for years. And instead, all of my time, energy, and money went into figuring out how to build a successful coaching business.

I invested upwards of $100k on coaches and coaching programs. And it worked. I built a story coaching and book editing business that, at its peak, made me $82,000 a year.

And I was totally miserable, and my author career was suffering.

Yes, I had somehow managed to write and publish a few more books during that time. My first novel debuted in 2015, and in 2016, three of my nonfiction books became bestsellers on Amazon. I was selling thousands of copies per month (I was only charging 99 cents per book, so I wasn’t making much in royalties).

But being an author was still an afterthought, not my focus.

Owning My Author Identity

Truth be told, I had written and published 13 books before I ever said out loud that I was an author.

I was comfortable hiding in the shadows. I was comfortable coaching writers. There was no risk in it.

If it didn’t work out for me, it really didn’t matter because I had no skin in the game.

Being a coach was just my way of sticking my head in the sand to avoid the one thing I truly know I’m meant to do on this planet: write books.

But then in January 2021, I couldn’t hide any longer.

I was burned out on coaching. I was sick of creating new coaching programs and offers every month. I was fed up with the entire coaching industry—it had become something totally different than what it was when I started coaching back in 2010—and I was no longer interested in being a part of it. Even the word “coach” made me want to vomit.

All I wanted to do was write books and finally fully be the author I knew I was meant to be.

So I planted my flag. I decided that I was now going to be the author I dreamed of being.

I shut down my coaching business. I stopped editing books. I stopped doing everything that was making me money at the time, and I focused exclusively on my books instead.

I wrote F*ck the How that year, and it has become not only a multi-day, multi-category bestseller on Amazon, but it’s my top-selling book. I’ve sold thousands of copies of it over the last five years.

Thanks to that book and the two manifesting books that I’ve written since then (Quantum Leap Your Life, and Manifest Everything), I’m now making a real income from being an author.

And it all started with finally deciding to own my true destiny and my true desire.

I was never meant to be a coach. I was always meant to be an author.

And now I am.

All of this to say: You DO NOT need to be a coach or a service provider in order to be successful. It took me more than a decade to figure that out; don’t make the same mistake I did.

Writing and publishing books IS providing a service. And being an author is enough.

So if you’ve built yourself a comfy shadow career or business, this is your reminder that you get to be an author, and only an author, if that’s what you desire.

I’m not saying it won’t take work—it will take a lot of work! But it will be worth everything that it takes, and you’ll get to wake up every morning feeling proud that you’re finally doing the thing you know you’re meant to be.

Subscribe now

P.S. F*ck the How is celebrating its 5-year anniversary on Sunday!! And I’m relaunching it next week with a brand-new chapter. Stay tuned for more in my coming posts!

That means I’m not allowed to read it, work on it, revise it, or do anything else with it. So once I’ve called the first draft finished, I save it to my Dropbox, I close my writing program (Scrivener), and that’s it.

I’m not allowed to touch it again for 30 days. Sometimes, depending on the number of writing projects I have in the works, I may not come back to it for months (or, in rare cases, years).

Once I’m ready to work on the draft again, here’s the revision process I go through:

Step 1: Read the draft as a reader

This is one of the most important steps in my process—and my favorite step. I first start by reading my draft straight through in one sitting from the perspective of a reader.

My goal with this step is to appreciate my story just as it is right now, even if it’s not perfect.

During this part of the process, I do not allow myself to make any revisions or changes, or even to write any notes down while I’m reading. In fact, when I read the draft, I read it as a PDF on my iPad, and I don’t have anything else near me.

This is intentional—and yes, sometimes a challenge—but reading it as a reader, and not as an editor, reconnects me to the story and reminds me of why I wrote the novel in the first place.

Step 2: Read the draft again (usually multiple times) with a pen and notebook nearby

This is one of the most crucial steps in my process, which is why I usually read my draft multiple times, and in multiple versions—on my iPad, on my Kindle, and sometimes also on my laptop. I haven’t done this in years, but on occasion, I will print the draft out and read it that way.

The more times I read it, and the different formats I read it in, help me to catch as many of the changes that I want and need to make.

At this stage, I’m not worried about misspellings, typos, or grammatical errors. I’m also not worried about descriptions, dialogue, or the writing itself. That all comes later.

For now, the goal is to get the big-picture story craft on point, which means the:

• Story structure

• Character arcs (including emotional arcs and strengthening backstory)

• Plot

• Scene execution (including gaps or missing scenes to add)

And anything else that needs to be improved. I will also check on whether there’s anything I need to research in order to write it more accurately.

My current novel is a sports romance, and that has required me to do research and learn a lot about the behind-the-scenes of a sport I usually just watch as a fan.

I will also separate my notes into four sections: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. If you prefer 3-act structure, that would instead be: act 1, act 2a, act 2b, and act 3.

If you’re not familiar with story structure, read this:

By dividing up my notes, it helps me know where within the story the changes need to be made.

And I will also mention that I do a ton of pre-planning of my story before I write it. That in itself helps me to have a better first draft, one that’s a revision and polish away from being publishable (as opposed to something I have to totally reconstruct and rewrite; I hate writing multiple drafts and refuse to do it).

Here’s how I do that:

Step 3: Create a scene-by-scene post-draft beat sheet

This might feel like an extra step, but it helps keep me organized, which is needed when you’re revising tens of thousands of words.

I go through my notes as well as my draft and create a bullet-pointed beat sheet that lists out every scene in the story, including any new scenes that I want to add.

Having a clean beat sheet to work from keeps me from feeling overwhelmed and gives me a bird's-eye view of the story. Both as it currently is, and with the new scenes added into the mix.

Step 4: Re-read your favorite parts just for fun

Revising a novel can be tedious and draining. So I like to keep myself motivated by re-reading the parts of my draft that I really love. I always have one or two scenes that came out just right.

I do this several times throughout the whole process—especially when I’m feeling burned out or need a break—but I’m only including it once in the listed-out steps.

Step 5: Review my post-draft beat sheet one final time

Before I dive back into rewriting anything, I review my post-draft beat sheet again to see if there’s anything else I want to add or change.

Do I need to move a scene around? Do I need to add anything else?

This doesn’t take long, but I still like to include this step in my process so that I can go into my revision with as much information as possible.

Step 6: Use my final post-draft beat sheet to make index cards for each scene

This may seem like extra work—and maybe for some people it is—but for me, it’s how I stay organized and make sure I don’t miss anything.

I like to make each scene from the post-draft beat sheet into an index card, and then I go through my revision notes, and I add them to whichever index card they go with.

That way, as I’m writing, I don’t have to keep glancing through an entire document, and can just work one index card at a time. This is also helpful because I prefer to skip around when I work, and not write or revise the scenes in order.

Having the index cards, along with using Scrivener (writing app), allows me to do this.

Step 7: Begin rewriting using my index cards

Now it’s finally time to dive into my revisions! The whole process from steps 1 through 6 usually takes anywhere from two to three weeks, sometimes a full month, but that’s fine with me. I’m not trying to rush anything.

Although, to be honest, I’m definitely trying to work on cutting down my time between the completed first draft and the finished revised draft. I would like to write and publish more than one novel a year going forward, and that will require me to collapse the timeline a bit more.

Using the index cards, I work through each scene—not always in order—revising, rewriting, and changing or adding whatever I need to.

This is also the step where I improve the writing itself, the dialogue, and the descriptions.

Since I do a ton of pre-planning before I write a single word of my first draft, this allows me to keep 75 percent or more of the original draft, and then the rest I rebuild during revisions.

This is the only way I can do it. If I have to write multiple drafts to nail my story, I won’t finish. I know this about myself, and that’s why I work so hard to figure things out ahead of time before I spend any time writing.

Step 8: Send the revised draft to a developmental editor and/or Beta Readers and a line editor

At this point in my career, I’ve written a lot of stories (both novels, screenplays, and short stories), and have studied craft like my life depended on it. For this reason, I feel confident in my storytelling abilities, and I no longer require a developmental editor.

I now use a group of Beta Readers who read my story and give me feedback on what, if anything, needs to be changed or improved upon. The majority of notes I get back from my Beta Readers are grammatical errors, typos, or small changes that are easy to make.

I also send the draft to my line editor, who helps me improve the writing itself and fix grammar, spelling errors, and any inconsistencies within the story.

But when I was first starting out, I always hired a developmental editor. It was a non-negotiable in my early writing years.

Don’t skimp on this step! It really can be the difference between a novel that feels traditionally published and one that people know is self-published (and not in a good way).

One final note: if you’re using a developmental editor, hold off on line editing until after you’ve gotten their feedback and have made their suggested changes. Line editing should be one of the final steps in the process. I only do it along with my Beta Readers because I have so much experience writing stories and know my story won’t require any major overhauling.

Step 9: Implement any changes from my Beta Readers and line editor (or developmental editor, if you’re using one)

This, for me, is the final polish of my novel. It’s where I fix all of the grammatical and spelling errors and any inconsistencies that I missed while revising.

I implement most of the changes suggested by my line editor and Beta Readers, but I also trust myself to know when it’s right not to listen to something they’ve suggested.

Step 10: The final read-throughs

Yes, read throughs, plural.

During this step, I re-read the draft on multiple devices—my Kindle, iPad, laptop, and sometimes my iPhone. Reading it in multiple formats helps me catch things I missed in another format.

I can’t explain why this works, other than the formatting is different for each device, and that makes the story read differently to the eye.

I also read through each scene when I’m formatting the book interior in Vellum (the formatting software I currently use).

It’s not possible to catch every single grammatical, spelling error, or typo. But I do my damndest to try.

And when I read the book after it’s published, if I catch something I can’t let go of, I just make the change quickly and re-upload the book to Amazon (yet another reason why I love self-publishing!).

So that’s my 10-step revision process. It may seem like a lot, and it is, but it’s how I end up with the best possible final product that I can. One that I am so damn proud to put out into the world.

Career Author Lab: Implementation

This week, consider your personal revision process and whether or not adding something from mine would enhance it for you.

And if you’d like to have a revision checklist of this process + a checklist that walks you through everything you’ll want to think about and consider when you’re making your revision notes, I’ve given you my checklists below:

Read more

I set it aside, I didn’t look at it again, and I went about living my life.

It’s so easy to want to immediately jump right back in, convincing yourself that you have to start revising right away. But my rule is this: I’m not allowed to review my draft for a full 30 days after finishing it.

Taking at least 30 days off gives me fresh eyes to go back and revise later. But—and this is the crucial thing—when the 30 days have passed, I don’t just start revising.

The very first step in my revision process is reading.

I set aside a few hours, and I read through my draft, from page one to page done.

I don’t make notes. I don’t make changes. I don’t figure out what needs to be fixed, improved, or made better.

I just read.

During my first read-through, I’m not allowed to have anything near me except my iPad (it’s what I read the draft on). Even if I’m itching to make changes or think I should grab a notebook and pen, in case I want to jot down anything I think of as I’m reading.

Nope.

I just read the whole draft. Straight through. In one sitting.

That’s what I did this past weekend with my novel draft from April.

And honestly, this is my all-time fave part of the revision process. Getting to read the draft and see what I have to work with.

Most of the time, I’m surprised by how good the draft already is, even if it still needs a lot of work (and this one definitely does).

I find myself loving my dialogue, laughing at things I’ve written, getting reacquainted with my characters, and feeling so proud of how hard I’ve worked over the last two decades to master the craft of storytelling.

And that motivates me to want to revise it and make the novel even better.

I think what makes the difference for me is that my revision process starts with appreciation versus criticism. I read the draft first as a reader, to appreciate the story just as it is right now.

If I started by being critical, making notes and changes right away, I wouldn’t feel as excited to complete the revision. I would be feeling bummed about how much has to be fixed and how much work the story still needs.

And even though, of course, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be changed, fixed, and revised in this novel—including an entire scene where I accidentally used the wrong character name the whole time—I’m not intimidated by it. I’m feeling good about what I’m starting with, and I trust my skills to improve on it and turn it into a novel that I’m so damn proud to publish.

Next time you finish the draft of something, whether it be a novel, a nonfiction book, or even just a Substack post, before you dive in and start revising, I encourage you to first read with appreciative eyes. It really can make the difference between something you finish, and something you end up setting aside and letting collect dust.

In Thursday’s post, I’m walking you through my specific novel revision process, including my go-to checklists that will only be available to paid subscribers.

Upgrade to the Lab

Career Author Reflection

• Journal prompts: How can I add appreciation to my writing revision process?

• Micro-action: For this week, whenever you write something, before you revise it or make changes, just appreciate it for what it is. You may surprise yourself.

What’s your revision process like? Share with us in the comments.

~jennifer