Finding Comfort Amid Chaos

[This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

It’s not your imagination—building a writing career is getting tougher. Recent statistics estimate that two million new books a year are offered on Amazon. Competition grows stronger, the market grows more crowded, advances are decreasing, and more and more authors are competing for eyeballs—including against an onslaught of AI-generated books. 

Increasingly, publishing houses focus on debut authors, the tradition of nurturing and building an author’s career over years and multiple books seemingly a relic. If a single title’s sales don’t measure up to expectations, you may not get a shot at a second one—and yet much marketing and publicity is, more than ever, up to most authors to shoulder. 

Regardless of their publishing path, authors assume ever more costs associated with publishing, as well as ever more of the risks. They do the bulk of the labor of creating the product on which our entire industry is based, yet often benefit least from the commerce of it. 

In a time when it can feel daunting or even pointless to try to pursue a writing career, how can you find a calm and confident center from which to free yourself to produce your best work and create a fulfilling, long-term, sustainable writing career no matter what current madness is swirling around you in the industry?

One reason we can feel as if we don’t have control over our own careers is that our goals are based on factors over which we have very little of it. Making order from chaos starts with reframing the way we think about our careers and what constitutes success for us. 

That coin has two sides: the business and the art of your career. 

Relative to the business side, despite how much may be beyond your ability to influence, there is much that you do have a say over. You get to decide what publishing path you want to pursue—if any. (There is no shame or value judgment if your writing career means you write for your own enjoyment, or for a small group of readers like family or special-interest groups.) You get to determine when you send your work out, and to whom—and there are more avenues than ever to be published. 

Writers have unprecedented access to hire top-notch professionals once available mostly only through big publishing houses; more ability to find and reach readers directly; and more ways to market and even distribute their own stories. You have control over all those choices relative to the business of writing. 

What you don’t have control over is the outcome. You can’t influence whether agents or editors will accept your work, whether readers will buy it or how they will review it. No matter how brilliant your writing may be, art is the most subjective and mercurial of businesses, and often what makes one book a smash bestseller and another lost on the slush pile is no more than chance or timing or luck or the right contacts. 

But you can control your own efforts and output, shifting away from defining your success or worth based on outside attainments—the process, not the product. You have complete control over what you write, how you write it, when, how often—all creative decisions about your work itself that you get to make. 

But, like characters in our unedited stories bumbling around in circles and into dead ends, because they don’t have clearly delineated goals and motivations, authors may flounder in their careers because they fail to concretely define what they want or look at their true reasons for wanting it. Identifying your own motivations and goals hinges on three core elements:

Established authors I work with often tell me that the freest they ever felt as writers, the most they ever enjoyed it, was before they published or when they were between publishing contracts. That’s when they didn’t worry about deadlines or expectations or their platform or marketability; they just worked from the pure creative impulse that made them want to become writers in the first place. 

But amid the chaos of the publishing world, it’s easy to lose sight of that initial spark, our passion for the art and craft of writing: creating stories and worlds we dream of, exploring our fullest imaginations, learning and honing our skills, expressing our inner selves on the page. 

Those satisfactions come from within you, rather than hinging on outside forces or opinions, and are attainable through your efforts. Staying connected to that core “why” lays the foundation for agency and autonomy as an author, so you never feel like a beggar at the table hoping for scraps to be tossed your way, but rather a working artist at the helm of your own creative career.

But most of us didn’t get into this field because we wanted to sit in our attic retreats and write for the sheer love of it, for no one’s eyes but our own. It’s human nature to want to share our creative work and find an appreciative audience. It’s human nature—and practicality—to want to be paid for it. 

Finding comfort within the chaos starts with defining what that specifically means for you. For instance: 

Whatever your goals, what does that mean or practically look like? For instance, how much money do you need to make from your writing to do it full-time? What are the current traditional publishing advances like, on average? How likely is it you will sell through and make additional royalties? Or how much can you reasonably expect to make on a small-, hybrid-, or indie-publishing track, where advances may be even smaller or nonexistent? How many books will you need to publish each year given those estimates to make what you need to make to sustain a full-time writing career? 

What does that look like? How much time is required for writing each book? How much for editing and revision? How about marketing? What does that look like in practice—a 40-hour workweek, broken up into writing one manuscript while editing another, and also marketing and publicity and platform building? Fifty hours? Sixty? And are you factoring these expenses, where you must carry them yourself, into your net yield? 

When books become your main product that provides your income, your business model requires churning them out regularly, without fail. And market fluctuations are out of your control: Does your business model allow for “dry spells” if one book doesn’t sell well, or advances drop, or you lose a publishing contract, or you fall behind in production of your stories? 

When you consider what your goals actually mean and entail, do they still sound enjoyable to you? Is this what you had in mind when you dreamed of making your living writing? 

Maybe it is. But maybe it isn’t, and you realize that actually, when you say you want to write full-time, what you really mean is you do want to be Emily Brontë writing in her attic aerie, untroubled by the chaotic realities of the business or the world, simply living as a pure artist. Or that it’s enough to write part-time, buying yourself creative freedom with your “day job”—the way so many authors do, even bestsellers. 

And maybe that’s already within your reach. 

This is why it’s crucial to pinpoint goals and motivations concretely and fully—for ourselves just as with our characters. Your stories will never come together if you don’t … and neither will a rewarding writing career.

Even though it may feel like it, art is not life. 

Besides the joy of pursuing your writing, and the potential of making money from it if that’s among your goals, what else do you value for a full and meaningful life? What—and most important, who—matters most to you? Your partner? Children? Pets? Your family of origin? Your family of friends? Your community—writing and otherwise? 

What does that look like to you in your ideal life? Do you want time every day to devote to those people, to nourish yourself and these relationships? What does that mean—specifically: Twenty minutes of meaningful conversation? Shared activity and enjoyment? More? 

What about your other passions and interests, where do they fit in? Is regular exercise important to you, or being in nature, or hobbies like gardening or cooking or rock-climbing or glass blowing? 

Based on all your values, what does success mean to you? What would feel like enough: time well spent; life thoroughly enjoyed? 

Once you define these parameters, what do you do with them? They become the basis for how you build your writing career. They allow you to make decisions and create a life that fulfills you.

You know the setting—the realities of our industry. You know your motivations—your why. You know your goals—your “enough.” You know the stakes—what you value. 

Now you have to create the plot—the actions you will take to reach the goals you desire, within your control. That means treating your writing as a business and as a career—and honoring your right to pursue it whether or not it’s “profitable”:

Now that you’ve defined what you hope to achieve in your writing career, determine what you need to do to attain those concrete goals. 

Create a mission statement and business plan—an actual written one that you keep. Make a flowchart, a bullet list, a spreadsheet—whatever works for you to delineate the steps on the path that are necessary to achieve your particular defined goals. 

That likely starts with creating a writing routine and treating it like any other firm commitment—like a job. Writers write; they don’t just talk about writing. Schedule your writing time and honor that. Keep learning your craft to hone your skills, as you would in any other field you want to master and succeed in. 

If your goals involve your stories reaching readers, pinpoint the avenue(s) you want to pursue and learn the steps involved—and then put them into action, creating a step-by-step, concrete plan for that too. 

You wouldn’t dream of trying to launch any other business without a researched market plan and budget—treat your writing career the same way and have a budget for your time as well as your finances. What are the markets for selling your work? What do you have to do to be competitive in those markets? What do they pay—is it enough to live on, or how much of it will you have to do to make your desired income? Is that feasible/sustainable? How, exactly? If not, how will you supplement that income, if you need to? Make a specific, concrete plan for soliciting and attaining paid work—and follow it.

Periodically revisit your mission statement and business plan, and tweak as your situation, the market, or its requirements change. Regularly revisit your goals: You are not stuck in the rut of the things you may have wanted in the past—people evolve and grow, and their goals must evolve with them. 

Even with exacting planning and diligent execution, there are no guarantees in any creative business. Publishing is a subjective industry and a mercurial one. Do everything you can to set yourself up for success, but always coming back to your goals, your motivations, the realities, and your values—your definition of success, on your terms—is your safe harbor in any storm. 

That doesn’t mean you don’t dream. Our dreams can sustain us and help motivate us, but it does mean shifting away from defining the attainment of those dreams as success. From valuing our success or worth based on outside attainments rather than internal satisfactions. 

Define your success not as what will make you happy, but as what you can be happy with. It’s a subtle shift in thinking that keeps you from waiting for the holy grail before you can actually enjoy your life or your career.

It’s such oft-repeated advice for writers that it’s a cliché, but the secret of creating a successful writing career is persistence. And the main tool to be able to persist in this chaotic, challenging business is resilience. 

And the way to create resilience is to remember that we are not our writing. We are not our writing careers. Our worth is not dependent on the performance or popularity or perfection of our creative output. 

It can be hard to hold on to that in those literary dark nights of the soul, when we may be beset by self-doubt, discouragement, even despair. But our creative output has inherent value because we instill it. We don’t exist for our writing—our writing exists because of us. As long as you pursue it—on whatever level is meaningful to you—you are a writer.

In any creative industry, where the person who often benefits the least financially is the creator, it’s up to every artist to be their own advocate and champion, even if you’re lucky enough to have a support team behind you. 

That means taking yourself seriously as a writer; valuing and respecting your creative work, no matter where you are in your growth as an artist; and knowing when to say no—and saying it. Even in an industry rife with rejection, where too often the remunerative elements aren’t remotely commensurate with the effort and energy the work requires, and artists are sometimes treated as disposable, interchangeable manufacturers of “product,” you get to decide your work’s worth. 

Don’t be afraid to ask to be paid for your writing. Don’t be afraid to negotiate for more money or to retain more rights. Don’t be afraid to walk away if someone else doesn’t value your work the way you realistically believe it should be valued. If one of your goals for your writing career is to make money—which is fully legitimate and valid—then you have to approach selling your work like the business it is. 

Advocating for yourself and your career also means consciously creating the career you want; protecting yourself and your intellectual property; and speaking up for yourself to make sure you have a seat at the table. You don’t have to follow others’ lead or wishes for your career: If you don’t want to use a pen name, you don’t have to. If you don’t want to switch genres, don’t. If you feel your agent or publisher isn’t a good fit for you anymore, don’t be afraid to end the relationship. 

Our reluctance to advocate for ourselves is often rooted in fear: fear that our work really isn’t good enough, or that no one else will want it. Fear that we’re being greedy or arrogant for asking for more compensation or better terms, or that if we have the temerity to do so, whoever is offering for our work will change their minds or offer to someone else instead. 

But if we don’t value our work and champion our writing, who will? And why would anyone else value it? If we don’t take the wheel of our own careers, then we’re putting someone else in the driver’s seat, a passive passenger in our own lives.

Here’s a little mental check-in to begin to reclaim your own career on your terms: If somebody told you that you will never hit the heights you dream of, would you continue writing? 

If you can answer yes—right now, wherever you are in your career—then you already have all the ingredients for forging the writing life you want, no matter how chaotic the industry.  

With all the challenges of a creative life, it’s still one of the noblest of human pursuits. Writing sheds light where there is darkness. It brings people a greater understanding of themselves and each other and the world. It connects them and brings them together. It makes our world warmer and brighter and more hopeful. 

And that’s the true comfort amid the chaos.

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