My number one tip for coping with life as a published author
Life as a published author is weird. It’s brilliant, exhilarating, satisfying, exhausting, nerve-shredding, anxiety-inducing and both satisfying and frustrating all at once. In my opinion, it’s quite unlike any other job out there, and no one really prepares you for it.
There IS no way to prepare for it. There are creative writing colleges and creative writing tutors, but they don’t teach you much about the realities of day-to-day life as a writer.
So what can you do to prepare yourself for this career? You can read blogs like this one and author memoirs and things like that, but there’s very little practical ‘training’ available on what it’s really like to be published.
I was very pleased to hear that Orion, an imprint of Hachette, has launched its Debut Author Academy, to help authors adjust to life as a published writer.
It’s a great idea because as authors, we spend SO long working towards our goal of finishing a novel, landing an agent and then getting a book deal, that we rarely think much about what will happen AFTER that. And yet, there’s a whole world of new stuff to deal with, and the publisher is often the one that has the answers to all the things you were wondering about, but were too shy to ask.
You can also download my Debut Author’s Survival Guide (more details below), which I put together during my own debut year, alongside my friend and fellow novelist Caroline Hulse.
We decided we’d like to write about what it was like to be published and we didn’t hold back on sharing our experiences, and all the things we wish we had known when we first got our book deals.
To date, it’s had more than one thousand downloads, which shows you just how many people are interested in this kind of information!
I really hope that by blogging here I can open up conversations too. I’m always happy to answer questions and you can always find me on Twitter if you want to ask something.
But there’s something you can do that’s better than all of the above.
It is, in fact, my number one tip for coping with life as an author.
Are you ready?
Find your author tribe.
I’ve mentioned this before in other blog posts.
But I thought it was worth a clickbaity title and a post of its own so that I can emphasise yet again just how important it is to have author friends to share the rollercoaster ride with.
Other authors are the only people who really understand what being published is like. They are the only ones who fully know how heartbreaking it feels when your editor contacts you to tell you that they haven’t managed to get your book stocked in a supermarket, or when you read your first really painful review (these aren’t necessarily the mean 1 star reviews, but the ones that highlight something you secretly worried wasn’t working yourself), or when your deadline is hurtling towards you at insane speed and you have no idea how you’re going to meet it….
Obviously friends and family will do their best to support you, but I’ll be honest - they won’t get it.
Everyone outside of the publishing industry who learns even a little bit about it thinks that the way it’s run is absolutely insane.
Because it is.
And of course you may have an agent and you will have an editor, and they should be there for you when you need them but even they will never fully understand what it’s like inside a writer’s head. How messy and contradictory and tiring and pessimistic it can sometimes be.
The only people who will truly understand are your brothers and sisters in arms!
Your author tribe.
So how do you go about finding people for your tribe?
It’s tempting to just befriend any author you come across, and I’m definitely not against this in principle.
I love meeting other authors, especially authors at different stages of their career or who write different genres from me.
However, when it comes to picking buddies for your author tribe, I do think it’s a good idea to be slightly circumspect (we all remember the Bad Art Friend article right?! 😆)
It’s not so much that I think authors can also be arseholes (although they certainly can!), but more that I think not all authors are made equally.
Why the size of your advance matters →
And I think it’s important to surround yourself with authors who are at similar stages in their career, or have had similar experiences to you thus far. Because they will be the ones who will really understand how you’re feeling.
Of course, a debut author will get a huge amount out of befriending a longstanding bestselling author, but the differences in their position may also make the debut feel intimidated and as though they can’t fully open up.
During lockdown, a friend and website client of mine, Emma Christie, set up a Facebook group / online festival called the Diary of a Debut, and she ended up getting together with a bunch of other authors who were debuting in lockdown, and they formed the D20 group of authors.
I wasn’t in their group because I wasn’t a debut but I looked on enviably from afar and watched as they all supported one another and posted about each other’s books. They are still firm friends to this day.
Since then I believe that each year there’s been a new debut author group formed in the same vein, and I think this is just such a brilliant initiative!
If you’re a debut, take a look on Twitter and see if there’s a similar group being set up for your debut year.
If you’re not a debut then you’ve probably already found your author tribe. The good thing is it does seem to happen pretty organically, as you make friends at events and through your agent or publisher and of course, from good old social media.
I wrote a bit about where to find author friends in this post →
I promise you that investing in building strong, mutually beneficial relationships with other authors will prove to be an absolute lifesaver as you navigate your career.
I don’t know what I would do without mine! You know who you are, and I love you all ♥️
Hey, I write novels, but I also build websites!
If you’re an author and don’t have one yet (or you have one that’s so awful you never tell people about it!) then check out how I can help →
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