The Importance of Knowing
Oh my, it’s almost December.
Originally, this blog was supposed to be a monthly thing. Hopefully, I’ll stick to that schedule in the future, especially with the newsletter actually being a thing now. (By the way, you should totally sign up for my once-monthly newsletter.) We may have missed October’s blog post, but we managed to sneak in under the line for November, at least. Hooray for the ADHD superpower of last-minute focus.
Anyway, since it’s been a while, here’s a bit of an update. Book one of Rise (full name tbd) is drafted. Edits are coming along, and I should hopefully have it out to the beta team by the end of this coming week. The idea soup for book two is coming together, so that means outlining begins once I’ve got book one out for beta reads. So we’ll be starting on book two in December, which puts us on schedule for an early March release on Royal Road. It’ll be nice to get back to releasing material again.
Legend of Ascension: The Shrouded Peaks will be featured as a Kindle monthly deal for December. So if you haven’t jumped into my first ever series yet, now is a great time to do so. I’ll be making all the usual posts on Bluesky and Facebook when the deal actually goes live, so make sure you’re following me on your doom-scroll platform of choice for more frequent updates.
With all of that nice housekeeping out of the way, let’s get to the actual blog post, shall we? There’s a lot of reasons I want to talk about this particular subject. Some petty, some immediate to my recent experiences, and some just represent me reflecting on things people a bit further along in their career have said to me. Initially, I wanted to make this a post about gratitude, and I’ll definitely touch on that, but I think a bigger theme I want to look at here is basically the title. It’s the importance of knowing. Knowing what you want, what your goals are, how you get there, and what you’ll do when you arrive.
Among other things.
The Roadmap
In the inaugural post of this very blog, “Taking a Walk Down the Royal Road,” I wrote about the divide between my expectations and the reality of this whole “be a self-published author” thing. What I didn’t really write about, however, were my goals. I sort of mentioned how Legend of Ascension was meant to be my learning project. Now, I think, is a good time to talk about what that means exactly.
As I mentioned in the above post, Legend of Ascension wasn’t my first foray into writing. Far from it. What eventually became The Shrouded Peaks was my ninth novel. But Legend of Ascension was a first in a lot of other regards. It was my first ever series. My first ever web serial on Royal Road. And most importantly, my first ever self-published book.
Going into this project, I knew I had a lot to learn. So Legend of Ascension was meant to show me the ropes. I wanted to learn how to navigate the web serial space. How to maintain a consistent posting schedule. How to run a Patreon. And how to do all the things I’d need to do if I wanted to make the jump to being a “real” indie author. (Side note here: publishing on Royal Road IS publishing. Web serial authors ARE very much real authors. So are indie authors. Despite what some might say or think.)
So, to all those ends I just mentioned, Legend of Ascension was very much a success. That said, it basically couldn’t fail so long as I followed through. All it needed to do was to exist. Get written and then get posted. A very low bar, to be certain, but an important one. The point of Legend of Ascension was to be the beginning. To be the story, the series, that moved me one step closer to my overarching goal of being a career author. Anything beyond that was a bonus.
Goalposts
A short time before I published through KDP, another, more experienced and established, author said something that’s stuck with me. The goalposts start moving real fast once you start making money. And damn, were they ever right.
Now, I’m not going to go on and whinge about things not going as well I may have liked. First, I find that to simply be in poor taste, and second, things have gone far better than I’ve had any right to expect. By every conceivable metric, Legend of Ascension has been a success. Especially for an indie author just starting out, with no industry experience and only a tiny audience of mostly free web serial readers.
That said, it’s been a bit of a roller coaster, seeing the curve of sales since launch, and now that the initial surge has died down. Which is sorta where my point about “knowing” comes in.
Publishing, like most creative fields, doesn’t have the same kind of easy roadmap to “success” that something like being a doctor or a lawyer does. With other, more well-defined, professions, there are clear markers that tell you when you’ve made it. Graduating with your degree, getting hired for your first professional position. But in a profession where everything is so self-directed and self-defined, you really need to have a clear idea of what you want if you’re to have any hope of getting there, let alone realizing it once you arrive.
Having a “dream” of being an author is fine and good. I encourage it, in fact. But dreams don’t provide you with any sort of useful guidance. Dreams are a good starting point, and we should allow ourselves to have them. Once we understand what they are, I think we ought to step away from them, clarify what we want, and make concrete plans. That’s the only way we’ll ever really achieve them.
Then, once we’ve figured out what our plans and conditions for success are, it’s equally important to stick to them. It’s far too easy to say, “Well, I sold ten copies of my book, so that means I should sell one hundred.” It’s far too easy to shift your goalposts, and fail to allow your previously defined success condition to “count” now that it’s been achieved. And that’s the trap that I think is far too easy to fall into.
Anyway. It’s just a short thought.
