Jeff Elkins Writing

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A BRIEF AND LIKELY INACCURATE HISTORY OF MODERN PUBLISHING

If you know the Strengths Finder system, then it probably won’t surprise you to learn that one of my strongest strengths is Context, which means, I can’t move forward without first looking back at where I’ve been. In my brain, the past impacts the future.  

So, to get us all on the same page, let’s start with some background on the world of publishing. It’s a world most readers don’t know about, and it’s currently going through a season of massive change.

To be clear, the following history is not well researched and the dates are all debatable. This is the history as I’ve pieced it together from my reading and from talking to other authors. 

From the 1950s to the early 2000s (all the dates in this essay are debatable), authors like myself were living by the “New York” or “Traditional Publishing” Rules. 

• Readers primarily bought books in physical bookstores. (Remember the Boarders that was in every mall in America?) 
• There was limited space on bookstore shelves, and to get your book on a shelf, authors had to be published by a major publisher. 
• This meant that major publishers (stereotypically located in New York) had all the power. They decided if your book could be seen by readers.
• A whole industry of professions grew up around this system – book agents, developmental editors, copy editors, book marketers, etc…   
• Publishers typically gave authors one shot. If the first book didn’t make back the money the publishers had spent on it, the author didn’t get a second chance. 

In summary, to get a book in front of readers and have a career as an author, you had to write a story the big publishers wanted to see, get selected by the publishers’ specialized experts, then hope and pray your book made the investment money back so you could write another one and potentially have a career.  

For an author, this meant the quality of the first book had to be amazing. Authors would spend years (sometimes decades) working on their first novel in hopes of producing something that would earn them a golden ticket that would allow them to have a career. 

There were outliers who refused to play by these rules, but the vast majority of authors were beholden to this system.

Then, in 2007 Amazon released the first Kindle and launched Kindle Direct Publishing. This allowed authors to publish their own books and get them in front of readers without a publisher’s approval. It began what has been dubbed “The Kindle Gold Rush.” 

• The Kindle eliminated the scarcity of bookstore shelf space. A reader could fit hundreds of books in their Kindle.
• Ebooks were also being sold cheap. A paperback in a bookstore would sell at $12 because of the publisher’s need to pay their teams. The author might make $0.10 off that sale. A self-published ebook could be published for $0.99 and an author would walk away with $0.40 off the sale.  
• Also, most books bought by Kindle owners were never read. The owners wanted to stuff this new device they got, so they bought more cheap books then they could ever get through. 
• If a book was downloaded by a reader, Amazon developed an algorithm that showed that book to other readers. 
• They also put a list of books under every book and after every purchase called “Also Boughts.” 

In the Gold Rush era, quality became less important. Self-publishing became a quantity game. If an author had one perfect book (what the New York system demanded), it would get bought and maybe read? Maybe. And then, that author was out of products to sell. 

But if an author had 15 books, a new Kindle owner might get all 15–especially if the cover and description were good. And then, the Amazon algorithm would show all 15 of those books to other authors in the “Also Bought” lists.  

In this system, authors who could write books fast, create strong marketing copy, and play the algorithm made lots of money. 

By 2014, Amazon decided to escalate this game and they launched Kindle Unlimited. This was a subscription service that allowed readers to pay a monthly fee and download as many books as they wanted. Amazon counted the number of pages read in every book downloaded, and they paid each author a percentage of the giant pot of subscription money based on the pages of their books that were read. Authors who got lots of pages read, got bonuses. 

This began the “Write to Market” era of publishing. (This is also called the “Write Fast, Publish, Repeat” era by some, or the “20 Books to 50k” era, or the “Pay-to-Play” era.)  

Authors began to intentionally target readers that read lots of books each year. The normal reader knocks out 3 to 4 books a year. Wendy is one of these. A “big” reader will read 12 to 20. I fall into that category. A “whale” reader will read between 50 to 300+ books a year; and these readers like to read in the same genre. Science Fiction Whale readers read a lot of Science Fiction. Romance Whale readers read a lot of romance novels. 

As an author, if you could get the whales in Kindle Unlimited to read your books, you were going to make a lot of money. 

The hard part of this system for authors became feeding the whales. If you had 10 books on the market, you might have a few good months of sales, but then the whales would move on. In response to the demand, authors began trying to push out a book a month or a book a week. These books were focused on meeting whales’ expectations of the genre they wanted to read. Writing the book “to market” meant writing a book that looked and felt like the other books the whales in a specific genre enjoyed. 

Amazon loved this system and fed it in whatever way they could. They gave greater weight to reviews (because whale readers review books), they bought Goodreads (a place where whales hung out), they started sorting books differently and consistently niched down genres to help whale readers find what they wanted, and they emphasized the use of keywords in helping readers find books. 

The biggest change Amazon made to this system was the introduction of pay-per-click advertising. This was launched in 2014 but didn’t become accessible to most authors until 2018 when the platform was redesigned to be easier for individuals to use. 

Authors were encouraged to create ads that Amazon would run at the top of each search page, that would pop up on Kindles, and that would appear on each book’s page under the description and before the “also boughts”– making the Also-Boughts far less effective. The author would “bid” on keywords. When a reader searched something in Amazon, the author who bid the most for those words would show up at the top of the list. As long as an author spent less than they would make on a sale, they could make money. 

Selling books became more of a numbers game than it had ever been before. 

Unfortunately, as the Write to Market style gained more notoriety, the market became saturated with books. As more and more authors began jumping into play, the cost of bids on ads went through the roof, genres began to niche down into tiny segments, and less and less authors found success by playing by these rules. 

This year at the 20 Books Vegas conference (a huge conference for indi authors), a leader in the industry named Becca Syme officially declared that this era of publishing was coming to an end. With the arrival of AI written books, the markets will continue to be saturated and difficult to compete in. 

Here’s the fun thing that complicates all of this. 

Systems never completely die. 

Today, at the end of 2023… 

• The New York Publishing Rules are still going strong. They don’t have as much power as they used to, but the big publishers are still cranking out books and there are lots of authors still fighting the good and hard fight to get through those gates.. 
• There are lots of authors who firmly believe the Kindle Gold Rush is still going strong. They focus on getting a large number of books out for Kindle readers. 
• There are lots of authors who are making good money playing by the “Write to Market” or “Pay-to-Play” rules. Even though supply has surpassed demand, they are finding ways to surge toward the top.  

Then there are other authors who are working hard to figure out what comes next. 

• Some are experimenting with moving away from the Amazon system through selling direct to readers, struggling to find ways to break through the constant noise of our current digital ecosystem,
• Others are trying to escape the flood of AI written genre books for the whales competing for the algorithm’s attention by focusing on local sales, hoping to build a small and more dedicated audience that know them personally,
• Others are experimenting with different types of storytelling, focusing on creating intellectual property over books, hoping to find new ways for us to consume stories.
• And some are partnering with AI, using it as an assistant, hoping it will give them an edge in story creation.   

No one knows what the market is going to look like, but everyone is working hard to try and figure it out; and, to be honest, I’m excited about it. As you’ll see, I could never get the old systems to work for me. I’ve always been a bit of a square peg trying to fit into round holes. An unknown future feels like a horizon of possibilities.

BLOGGING AT “YOU SEE KIDS…” – THE START OF MY PUBLISHING JOURNEY

When I started writing in 2007, I didn’t know anything about what was happening in the publishing world. 

My journey started with a blog. I had lots of ideas about what the church should be and I needed a place to process them. Two or three times a week, I would stay up an extra hour and post my thoughts to a blog called “You See Kids…” The title came from something Clack Griswald says in Christmas Vacation right before he delivers a big speech. It’s an inside joke from my wife’s brothers; but most readers thought I was referring to the fact that I had three kids at the time.

I really enjoyed blogging. It was exciting. People engaged with the ideas in the comments. I did some fun things (like the time a friend of mine and I both pretended to be other people and wrote debates with one another), and some of the things I wrote got picked up by national blogs. I was featured on the Catalyst website (shout out to any other old timers who know what that is) and was hate-referenced once on The Gospel Coalition. It was great. 

I enjoyed it so much that in 2008, I started writing articles for a Baltimore-culture/humor focused blog called The City that Breeds. I wrote an article or two a month for them under the moniker, “The Bishop of the CTB.” Those never really went anywhere, but I loved provoking thought in a fun way. It was the first place I wrote fiction. I published a fictional account of Sally Utz and Natty Boh (two Baltimore cartoon figures) meeting at an addicts anonymous meeting and falling deeply in love. I’d like to say there was some deep meaning behind the story, but I was really just messing around. It was fun. 

Unfortunately, back then I was carrying a massive amount of crippling self-doubt and insecurity. So, when someone from a church I was working at, or another pastor I was friends with reached out to tell me they were concerned for me or worried about something I’d written, I was crippled. I’d be filled with anxiety and would stop writing for a week. I was constantly combing through the posts I’d written, pulling things down I thought might upset people. It was hard. 

I wish I could grab that twenty-year-old now and coach him. I wish I could put my arm around him and help him see that the push-back means he’s making an impact. I wish I could encourage him and let him know from an older man’s perspective, that he was onto something and just needed to push through the dip. I wish. Sadly, there wasn’t anyone like that in my life at the time. 

In 2009, I took a job with a different church. The hiring committee expressed concerns about my blogging. They worried how it would reflect on the church, so I stopped. I closed up the blog and put my mind into the work. 

I was completely unaware of the Gold Rush happening in the publishing industry. 

MY PATREON FAILURE AND THE BIRTH OF SHORT FICTION BREAK

Then, there was this moment that pulled me back into writing. It was 2013. I was in a deacons meeting (the board that oversees the church) and we were talking about the concepts of “sin” and “holiness.” I was getting a bit ranty in the meeting, so one of the deacons said, “Jeff, this is all very interesting. Why don’t you go write it down so we can absorb it more?” 

In hindsight, I now see that he was mostly trying to end the meeting; but, at the time, I didn’t see that. So the next day, I went to a coffee house and I cranked out 10,000 words on the concepts of sin and holiness. 

I came home supercharged with energy. I knew I needed to find a way for the congregation to read it, so I started researching. That was when I found Kindle Direct Publishing. 

That night, my family went to a church activity and I was left alone. The opening illustration of the book was about drinking alcohol, so I set up some red solo cups in my living room and did a photoshoot. I then used Powerpoint to create a cover and posted the book to Amazon. 

It was the first thing I ever published. 

But more importantly, I’d caught the bug. 

The next night I went online to look for advice on writing. That was when I discovered “The Write Practice,” a website for writers led by Joe Bunting. At the time, they were focused on writing short fiction. I jumped in with both feet. 

I started writing a short story every night. After the kids and Wendy would go to bed, I’d stay up for a few hours and knock out a couple thousand words. If I hadn’t been inspired by anything during my day, I would use a random number generator to pick a Grimm’s Fairy Tale to rewrite. It was a lot of fun. 

After I had around 20 stories I thought were readable, I threw my favorite into a short story collection called B-More Stories. Publishing my first book had been easy enough, and I wanted feedback. The stories I’d been writing were eclectic. There were some horror, some comedy, some that were more literary. There were several that were dialogue only, and a few that read more like poems than short stories. So, in the back of the collection, I put a digital survey for readers to fill out telling me what they liked and what they didn’t. 

I was shocked that it worked! I got about fifty replies. I was also surprised to learn that my darker stuff was the most popular. 

I knew from listening to Seth Godin that I needed to build a tribe and then find some way to empower them to pay for my work. 

When I asked Google about short fiction, I found articles about how to submit short stories to magazines. They all told stories about wading through rejection after rejection, about the importance of building relationships with the magazine editors, and about the need to figure out what each editor wanted and how to produce a story that met their expectations–that was my first introduction to the Traditional Publishing world. 

If I had been childless and in my twenties, that probably would have been an adventure I was excited about embarking on; but with four kids to care for and a fulltime job, scheduling time to court editors felt improbable. But, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. 

I knew how to build a blog, so I opened up a new website called Short Fiction Break and called it a “literary magazine.” I figured if I couldn’t submit to the existing ones, I’d just build my own. 

At first, I was only publishing my own stories on it; but after a month or so, another author found the site and asked if I took submissions. I figured if I published him it would bring more eyes, so I said, “Sure do.” 

Word got around fast and three months into the project I had seven regular contributors. In March of 2014, I put out our first collection of stories. It was the third thing I published, and I was really excited about it. 

The other authors were great too. Their stories were fun and different and quirky. We were all just trying to figure it out together. 

Right around that time, a new website launched called Patreon. I also heard about it through Seth Godin’s blog. It was a sight designed to help creators get paid for our work by people who benefited from it, and was the clear second part of my plan.  

I jumped in with both feet. My wife and kids got in on the act too. They helped me build videos for the welcome and the pitches (it worked more like a Kickstarter back then). Those videos are still online: https://youtu.be/rj3jwLyoaWc, https://youtu.be/mOEMmHhfxOI, and https://youtu.be/KiN4y7qKzZg.

Excited about the potential of bringing more financial support for the family (we were very very poor back then), I put together some tiers and sent invitations to everyone I knew (about 800 personalized emails total). 

I got ten subscribers right away, which was exciting. I remember calling Wendy after each one to celebrate. 

I am forever thankful to those first ten people. I’m not sure I’d still be writing today without them. 

At the same time, for every subscriber I got, I had two people write me back frustrated emails. They almost exclusively came from church-people telling me it was inappropriate for me to ask them to give to anything that didn’t have to do with spreading the message of Jesus. Many of them expressed dismay about the type of fiction I was writing and told me they’d been praying for me because clearly my relationship with God was in trouble. Many of them also added that this wasn’t how writers made money and that I needed to do this the “right way.” 

I was crushed. A month after the launch, I discontinued my first Patreon. 

I kick myself now for my lack of resolve. Many of the other creators who’d gotten in on the ground floor of Patreon now have incredibly successful careers as artists. If I’d stuck with it, who knows what could have happened? 

But back then, in my professional life I was still catching a lot of push-back on my ideas about the Evangelical church, and I was plagued by intense self-doubt. I was terrified that I was doing something that would get me in trouble with God and bring some kind of divine wrath down on my family. I wasn’t strong enough and I didn’t have the perspective that would empower me to stand up to criticism from the Evangelical community I’d grown up in.  

So, I went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out what the “right” way to do publishing was. 

I started using two-to-three of my evening writing times to work on a novel, because I knew that was what “real” writers did. The book was a story that loosely reflected my time as a pastor in Baltimore city. 

The transition from short story writing to a longer narrative was harder than I thought, so I began studying story structure. It was a bit of an obsession. I read everything about it I could get my hands on from articles about play structure to books about how to layout a novel. 

While I was energized by my three projects: serving as the editor for Short Fiction Break, writing short stories, and working on a novel; I was also tired. It was a lot of work. And, financial pressure was mounting. We were just barely making it as a family and so far, my writing had only cost us money. 

In May of 2014, the contract for the church I was working for came to an end, and I went to work for an anti-human trafficking organization that had been courting me for six months. In my first official meeting with the staff team, they explained to me that my writing was a problem. They were concerned that my stories weren’t “Christian” enough and that my writing would reflect poorly on the organization. 

Sadly, I agreed. (Filled with crippling self-doubt, remember?) 

For the second time, I walked away from writing.  I stuck the novel in a folder on my computer to be forgotten, I stopped writing short stories,  and I used my evening writing times to focus on my day job.  

I assured myself that I’d never actually wanted to be a writer anyway, that it had just been something I was trying out, and that my personal experiment with story-telling was over. 

I held onto Short Fiction Break a while longer though. I felt an obligation to the team of authors I’d gather. I continued to edit and publish their work and I even put out a second anthology in August of 2014.

ROUND TWO – BOOKS, BOOKS AS FAST AS YOU CAN MAKE THEM

The anti-human trafficking organization asked me to leave after four months. They told me I lacked humility, they questioned my relationship with Jesus, and they said they felt threatened by me. It appears, in their eyes, my fiction had just been an extension of deeper issues. Cutting out writing hadn’t actually solved anything. 

What followed was a whirlwind. When I lost my job, Wendy was pregnant with our fifth child and we had just bought a new house. Thankfully, in less than a month, a friend called and offered me a job as a writer. Not only did it pull me from unemployment, it was the biggest paycheck I’d received so far, and the job came with health insurance, something I hadn’t had for a while. 

Even though professionally, the move turned out to be positive, I was enraged. All the past conflicts, debates, and rejections surged forward and I didn’t know what to do with them. 

So, I returned to writing. 

At the new job, I shared a desk with a “real” writer.  He had a masters in English and had several novels in a drawer. We’d spend our lunch breaks talking about the industry. He explained to me how the Traditional publishing world work and how the connections he’d made in school were supposed to launch him into his career, but hadn’t. To reciprocate, I started studying the independent author space in earnest. I listened to podcasts and read blogs, and I learned all about the Kindle Gold Rush and the new calls to “write to market.” 

At the same time, my best friend and I started kicking around writing a series together. We’d talk through plots and characters together. It was fun, and therapeutic. 

Deciding to focus on novels, I turned Short Fiction Break over to my friend Joe Bunting. His team took it on and did far more with it than I could have. By running writing competitions, he was able to immediately monetize it. I watched in awe, trying to figure out how I’d missed that opportunity. 

In August of 2015, around the one-year anniversary of my departure from the nonprofit world, I was on vacation with my extended family at a cabin on the Delaware River. It was late. I was the only person awake, alone with my thoughts. 

I began to wonder what it was going to take for me to actually jump back into publishing. So, that night, I pulled the novel I’d written out of the file, I made a cover for it on powerpoint, and I published it. My first novel, Revolution Church, was born. 

It’s a good first attempt. It desperately needs a grammar sweep, and the plot has problems, but the characters are fun and there are some true emotional moments that sing.

I knew I needed to get out word about the book, so I started writing a newsletter the next month. Despite a few downtimes here and there, I’ve been writing it ever since. 

It felt freeing and hopeful to put my work in the world. It felt like the world was full of possibility, and I wanted more, so I went hard to work on the next novel. 

I still didn’t really know what I was doing, so the next book took me a year to write. It was the first in the series my friend and I had dreamed up together. Mencken and the Monsters, dropped in September of 2016.

It’s dark and quirky and fun. Again, the characters are great and there are some really wonderful moments in the story. The plotting is clunky and it too needs a strong grammar edit, but I was and I am proud of it. 

I thought I had written it “to market.” Right before I published it, I was excited to learn that a blossoming new genre on Amazon was Urban Fantasy. Without doing any homework on what that meant, I thought, “I’ve got monsters. In a city. And a group of homeless superheroes and an arrogant reporter join together to fight them. Fantasy. Urban. We’re good!” I thought for sure the book would fly off the shelves. 

Sadly, if I’d done my research, I would have discovered that at that time, Urban Fantasy were books that featured a twenty-something woman who used her newly discovered magic powers to assist law enforcement like the FBI. Every cover prominently featured a model-looking woman with a glowing hand. My cover featured a black man looking anxious and the Baltimore skyline in an orange hue. 

The book did not find breakthrough sales; but I pressed forward. 

To end that first year of publishing, I took some of my short stories and put them into a single narrative for fun. That short book is 7 Nights in a Bar. It’s whacky and entertaining. From time to time, it gets attention for being almost entirely dialogue. 

Some evangelical friends had complained to me about Mencken and the Monsters being too dark, so, because I was still wounded from my experience working for churches and nonprofits, I decided to make it clear that this second book was not for them. To do this, among other things, I filled the opening two-page conversation with more than thirty profanities.

Note for any authors reading this: intentionally pissing off readers is not a great way to sell books. 

The book is called The Twelve Commandments. Here’s another fun fact about it: a reviewer of Mencken and the Monsters questioned why none of the characters used guns. I hated guns (still do) and had designed the world so they would be useless against the monsters; but I forgot to explain that in the first book. So the Twelve Commands was a prequel intended to better explain the world of the series. 

Another note for authors: Don’t write books in response to reviewers. That is also not writing to market, and will also not sell books. 

I took a short break from the series and returned to a short story I’d loved writing. I beefed the story out and it became “Mark and All the Magical Things.” It was my first true experiment with character growth. I wanted to push a character struggling with anger to come to terms with who he is and become someone different by the end of the story. When I finished it, I thought the story was charming–although no reader ever seemed to share that sentiment.  

Later in 2017, still thinking I was “writing to market” but confused as to why the market wasn’t picking up what I was putting down, I wrote Mencken and the Lost Boys. In the series, this is the book of which I’m most proud. It weaves together multiple POVs, the characters are deep and they experience real change, and the plot is surprising. The ending is unpredictable and dark and fun. 

Unfortunately, by the end of it, I’d killed off so many characters, I was unsure where to go next with the series; so I wrote a book that was solely about restocking the series cast I’d descimated – Saving Deborah. This book drop in July of 2018, and it was a flop. None of my books had sold well, but most got enough reviews or enough advance-reader praise, or enough initial sales to make me think I was on the verge of breaking into the market; but this one barely sold at all, I couldn’t get any advanced readers to read it, and it got almost no reviews. 

Even though I find it delightfully weird and I think some of the strongest characters I’ve written were born in this book, very few people have engaged with it. 

Outside of my writing, in my real life, financial pressures were mounting. Things were tight. We were barely able to pay the bills each month, and as the kids were getting older, I was beginning to fear how I would help them pay for college. The added pressure made each book feel like a failure. It was like I was trying to empty a swimming pool with a fork. I was digging with all my might, but real progress evaded me. It all felt pointless.

If I was going to continue, I needed all my stories to start contributing to the family, so I stopped writing the series that wasn’t selling, and moved on to the next one. 

It was a hard decision. There are two books left to write before I can call the series done; and my friend and I had four others planned. Letting go of it only emphasized the pain of failure in my chest. 

To ease the agony, I returned to my roots and wrote some short stories. I threw them in a collection called My Top Five in No Particular Order and pushed it into the world. It was therapeutic. 

At the end of 2018, I started searching for advice from the experts who’s podcasts I’d been consuming. That was when J Thorn and Rachael Herron entered my life. They had a podcast in which they took authors’ questions and answered them on the show. I started slowly sharing my frustrations with my lack of sales and my misunderstanding of the market in the comments of their episodes. 

The industry was four years into the Write to Market/Write-Publish-Repeat era of publishing at that point. J and Rachael advised me to try again. They encouraged me to do my homework this time before I planned the series, and to try releasing two books in rapid succession. They also recommended that I started connecting with authors again. They explained that it was important to have a support system of people who were also striving to become financially successful authors.  

I did almost everything they recommended.

My imposter syndrome was too strong, so I put connecting with other authors on the shelf. 

I found a slowly building genre I liked – super powered detectives. I read several novels in the series and mapped out the tropes: unchanging detective, usually with a sidekick, powers the detective doesn’t fully understand, bad guys that are unquestionably bad. Ideally, the detectives were hot, in their twenties, and had on-again-off-again love interests. 

Easy, right? 

It was Charmed meets Law and Order. 

I was sure I could do that. 

Monetta Watkins and Stacie Howe were born. 

I wrote two books and outlined a two more before I released anything. In the first book, Grab, Moe and Stacie started working together and the reader was introduced to Moe’s ability to relive people’s memories as they dealt with a cat burgler. In the second book, Steal, Moe and Stacie took on art thieves and managed a kidnapping. 

The only problem was, I almost immediately started drifting from what the market wanted. As I wrote, 

• I gave Moe a complicated family of lost souls who had lost their way and were looking to redefine their purpose in life, (Write what you know, right?) 
• Moe’s power to relive memories became complicated as I probed the truth behind what we remember,
• Moe’s love interest quickly becomes sidelined for deeper plots about Stacie being betrayed by her father, rejected by her industry, and left to wallow in alcohol before Moe saved her. 

I couldn’t help but write how I felt about the world and the evangelical church. The finger prints of my unresolved past were all over the books. 

Still, I launched the books as the “write to market” system dictated. I put Grab up for free, I spent money we didn’t have on advertising, and I published it to Kindle Unlimited in February of 2019. Steal followed in March.

Grab got good reviews and won some awards. Spectrum audio even picked up the rights to create the audiobook; but the whale readers didn’t bite. The books got good reviews, but less than 10% of the people who read Grab went on to read Steal. 

I was devastated. I felt incapable of writing anything that would ever break through, and I was failing to support my family. 

Accepting defeat, I gave up on another unfinished series. 

Thankfully, the frustration drove me to therapy and I started working on my unhealed hurts from the past. 

Around that same time, Wendy’s parents started having health problems, and my writing time quickly vanished. I slowly churned on the next book in the series, but it felt like a lost cause. 

Wendy’s dad died in January of 2020. It was hard. He was a father to me. 

Scrapping to find some kind of hope, I took the final piece of advice J and Rachael had given me and I registered for a conference in Tennessee J was leading that was scheduled to happen in August of 2020.

Then came Covid. 

I could go into depth here about what Covid in a small townhome with five kids was like, but I won’t, because you can imagine it. We all lived through it. 

J’s conference was canceled.    

This ended up being a blessing in disguise. 

As an apology, he promised all conference goers a free one-hour consultation with him. I jumped at the chance. On the call, J and I connected, and he began coaching me in launching the Dialogue Doctor. I won’t go deep into the story because J did a whole podcast series about it you can hear here. 

Following that call, I went ahead and put out the third Moe and Stacie book in the series – Fight. It is a wild ride that pushes Moe to the brink. There is a kid in it who I found a joy to write, and there is a scene with one of Moe’s brothers in a stairwell that is one of the best fight scenes I’ve ever written. At the same time, it’s nonsensically outside of what the whale readers of the genre were looking for. 

For the rest of 2020, I focused solely on launching the Dialogue Doctor. The money it brought in, plus a raise from my day job and a pay increase from a new job Wendy took put us on better financial footing. This created enough mental space for me to continue working on myself. I spent time grappling with my self-doubt and feelings of failure, learning to see the positive things I’d created along my journey and the people I’d been able to help. 

I also joined several writer groups and started connecting with other authors online. I realized that J and Rachael had been right. Writing is better when it’s being played as a team sport. 

In December of 2020, I needed a project to work on with the new Dialogue Doctor community that was forming, so I returned to the first book I’d written – Revolution Church.  

I’d changed a lot since I’d first penned the book five years before, which allowed me to see the story in a completely different light. I rewrote it publicly, using it as an example of the kind of work I wanted to do as the Dialogue Doctor. 

It was emotional work that forced me to probe deep into my thoughts about my past and the evangelical church. It took me a year to finish, but it is the best thing I’ve written. The characters are dynamic and changing. The story is comprehensive yet accessible, and it has some honest big emotional moments. It’s the first book I’ve finished, published, and been proud of. I launched it in May of 2022 under the new title, Inside Outside.    

Around that same time, an author named JP Rindfleisch IX who I’d met through J Thorn approached me about writing serialized fiction. I was excited for a new opportunity. Using a short story I’d written as the foundation of the story, we plotted together and started publishing weekly episodes of the story. In March of 2023, we compiled the first 66 episodes into a book called NRDS. I love the story. It’s fun and weird and the characters are awesome; and writing with JP has been a joy. 

After NRDS hit the world, two big things happened. 

First, I was approached by a publisher to write a nonfiction book about the American Evangelical church. I’d gone on a podcast and talked about my experience when I was trying to pump Inside Outside. The publisher had heard me and was intrigued about what I’d shared. He offered me a contract for a book and I went to work. 

The writing has been hard. Nonfiction is a different beast from fiction. Even though I’d started off as a nonfiction blogger, it was difficult to get my legs back under me. I’ve written three different versions of the book this year. Finally, I found a version I like. It’s part-memoir, part-scriptural-study, part-examination-of-the-church. I think it is going to bring hope and excitement to people who are currently struggling with the evangelical church. The publisher said I’ve captured a unique balance of mournfulness of what was and celebration of what can be. It will be published by Lake Drive Books in July of 2024.  

Second, I published my first nonfiction book on writing. It’s about writing dialogue. It sums up everything I learned in the first years of working as the Dialogue Doctor. It’s a solid primer for writers on the rules of character creation. It’s called, The Dialogue Doctor Will See You Now.  This is the first book I’ve written that has consistent sales. It is currently doing well and continues to rise organically to the “best seller” lists of Amazon.

So now, here I sit. 

It’s the end of 2023. 

I’ve been writing on-and-off for 16 years and publishing fiction for 8. In that time, I’ve created:

• A nonfiction book about sin,
• A handful of short story collections,
• An abandoned series about homeless super heroes who fight invisible monsters,
• An abandoned series about a detective who is fighting with her past and her relationship to memories,
• A book about a dude talking to people in a bar, 
• A book about a guy dealing with anger issues, 
• A book I wrote twice about my experience in the American church,  
• A book about writing dialogue, 
• And a forthcoming nonfiction book about the evangelical church.  

That’s 21 books in total. 

But my “fiction writing small business” still isn’t bringing in any real revenue. 

I’ve never truly been a candidate for Traditional Publishing, I blogged through the Kindle Gold Rush, and I fumbled the Write-to-Market era. 

So, where do I go from here? 

That’s the big question I’ve been struggling with all year. 

2024 AND BEYOND – A FUTURE OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES

There are a few guarantees in coming year because they are either finished and waiting to be published, or mostly finished: 

• As I mentioned before, my return to nonfiction/theology writing is scheduled for July.
• NRDS Season 2 will happen. It’s half written. JP and I just need to get on the ball and wrap it up. 
• The Dialogue Doctor Team has written an 80 workbook we are calling “The Dialogue Dash.” It should drop in January. 
• In May, a different version of it will come out that helps authors write stories with multiple main characters. 
• I am also about 80% done with a book of 100 writing prompts that will help authors write stronger dialogue. 

Unless something bad happens to me, all five books will come out in 2024. 

The future of my fiction/theology publishing strategy is less clear, and this is where I’ve spent most of my year thinking through. 

Here is what I know for certain: 

• The Kindle Gold Rush is over and getting big payout by publishing to Kindle Unlimited is going to get harder and harder as authors partner with AI to write faster. 
• I’m not equipped to pursue Traditional Publishing. If I have success in that arena, it will be because they come and seek me out, much like what happened this year with Lake Drive Publishing. 
• I’m not a good fit for the Write-to-Market approach. I don’t like sticking to the script. More efforts in that arena feel like they are going to end in more abandoned series.  

I’ve tried a few things this year to test out different strategies and see how they worked for me: 

I held a few local author events to try and start building a community of local readers. While I successfully connected with more local authors, I wasn’t able to find a strong audience here outside of my immediate friend group. I learned a lot by putting these events on and I’m going to continue doing it (because it is fun), but I don’t see myself becoming a local legend anytime soon.

I spent time writing with Chat GPT and other AI programs to see if that could empower me to do a better job of Writing to Market. I really enjoyed writing with AI and I can see how it could help me better Write to Market, but I also got bored by it real fast. I can see that trying to do this long-term will only lead me to self-destruct the plot like I did with Moe and Stacie. It’s like Jim Collins says in Good to Great: new technology accelerates what you are already doing. It isn’t great at turning your ship in a different direction. 

I also gave real consideration to just giving up on publishing anything but Dialogue Doctor stuff. 21 is a good number to go out on. I’ve earned my stripes as an editor. I don’t need to keep publishing to prove myself to anyone. Quitting would allow me to focus more energy on the business that’s working. It makes sense on paper. But the minute I began to concede to this idea, my brain started churning with the next novel I want to write. (It’s a story based in the future about four young people who live together and survive an oppressive social society through their friendships with one another, and it’s narrated by an all-knowing AI who watches the friends because they are his favorite.) So…yeah. I don’t seem to be capable of quitting. 

Not knowing where else to go, I went back to my old leadership books. (Remember, I’m a Context thinker.) Specifically, Jim Collins’ Good to Great came to mind. 

Collins says there are three questions great companies have to try and answer: 

1. What can we do better than anyone else in the world? 
2. What fuels our motivational engine? 
3. What brings in money? 

I thought I knew the answers to 1 and 2, so I asked around and other writers confirmed it. 

1 – I write engaging casts of quirky characters and vulnerable moments better than most. 

2 – I love helping people think through things. It’s why all my books drift toward deeper themes. 

I haven’t figured out #3 yet. 

What I do know is that, because of how the publishing industry is changing, there’s opportunities to do cool things right now and try new stuff; but doing this requires that I think of my stories less as books and more as intellectual property. This shift in thinking will free me to story-tell in different forms. Ideally, trying new things will encourage me to search for new ways to power my economic engine. I’m hoping that my answers to 1 and 2 will help me create a strong enough voice as a story-teller, that I’ll be able to play with the form and attract people to my work through the experimentation. 

It’s a long shot, but the good thing about not having made any money on publishing so far is that I have nothing to lose. 

Unfortunately, right now, when I tell people about my initial work, I always have to caveat it. 

• The story has real potential, but it needs another edit, 
• The characters are great, but there are plot problems,
• I think you will really like it, but I never finished it.

Thinking through all of this, it became clear to me. I have to go back and finish what I started. 

So, I’m starting with the Mencken series. In 2024, I hope to produce new versions of all four books. When I wrote them, I imagined them as comic books. I even engaged some artists to draw images for them, but I didn’t have the money to pay them, so I wrote the books and moved on. Now, with the power of Midjourney on my laptop, I can partner with AI to illustrate the works. 

Since writing that first book, I’ve learned so much about editing and story-telling. I’m also excited about applying those new skills to my old work. 

If I can get through the first four books as quickly as I hope, I’ll be able to start the final books in the series at the end of this year. 

If I can keep that schedule, in 2025 I’ll apply everything I’ve learned to the Moe and Stacie series. 

I’m also going to be changing how I write newsletters. Instead of the weekly formula I’ve been sticking to for the past few years, I’m going to start writing smaller and more frequent notes. I’m going to publish them as both newsletters and blog posts I can share. 

I’m excited about what is coming. It’s going to be a great year that’s transformative. I’m hoping that next December, I’ll look back on this essay and laugh at how short sighted it is. 

2024 is almost here. 

Let’s go!