Since nearly all the Kickstarter fulfillment has taken place (for the card decks... the overwhelm book will be on its way sometime this spring), I'm finally getting a breath. Once we see how the decks are getting used, we can finally do those Live Calls and then the whole project will be fully done.

I'm also getting ready to do a pretty aggressive slate of travel in the next eight weeks, starting just after Easter. In addition to private events, I will be at the Idaho Writer's Guild, Florida Star Fiction Writers Conference, Nebraska Writers Guild, Toronto Indie Author Conference, and Inkers Con.

We also host CozyCon (for cozy mystery authors) in July. Here's that link if anyone is interested.

Otherwise, it's the monthly time to remind everyone that I am still offering individual coaching through the Quarterly Coaching program. We do a combination of synchronous and asynchronous coaching, and while the website says I'm closed to coaching, I open the quarterly interest form every month so people from the newsletter can get on if they need to.

​Here's that link.​

It's been great to see some former clients, and also some brand new clients, and both are welcome. Being on the Quarterly list also gives you scheduling priority in case you need spot coaching in an emergency, in between your coaching slots. We've found it to be great for both development and for accountability (setting goals, etc.), and I'm hopeful that we'll eventually run this program for more than just Becca. I think it would be a beneficial program for all our coaches to consider. But we have to run the pilot year first, just to see how the asynchronous coaching goes.

If you have any questions, you can email manager@betterfasteracademy.com and Angela can help you navigate those.

Without further ado, we have a doozy of a Dear Becca Letter today, so let's get into that! Hope everyone has a productive week, if that's the week you want to have.

(Oh, and if you want to join my NCAA Bracket Pool... for bragging rights only... here's the link for that. Be forewarned, there will be trash talking involved...)

Dear Becca,

Help! I used to be a voracious writer. I could sit for sometimes five hours and write nonstop. It consumed my life, and I loved every moment of it. After becoming published 2 years ago, I put out five books, but after releasing the fifth, I feel like I lost all my momentum. I'm currently trying to write the sixth and final book of my series, and I just can't seem to motivate myself to write. I'm not connecting with my characters and story with the same passion I used to, and I keep allowing myself to get sidetracked with social media and emails and other silly procrastinations.

I feel like a lot of the pressure of being a published author has gotten to my head, and I don't know how to find that original joy of writing just for me that I used to have. I refuse to give up on my career as an author, I really believe it's my passion in life, but I don't know how I can keep slogging on trying to write and feeling like I'm failing every single day. I want to find the joy I used to have!

- Emily

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Dear Emily,

First, let me say that I'm sorry for this and I feel this pain. Having been in this place myself, I have some personal solidarity to offer, but beyond that, I also want to say... this is something that happens to a lot of us, and I want to talk about why.

Without being able to ask you some more specific questions about what happened with book five, I'm going to make some assumptions, based on patterns I've seen in coaching.

Depending on the timing, the first thing I like to check in on is always burnout. (If it wasn't "I stopped writing in March of 2020" because that happens more often than we talk about...) If you're in burnout, especially if you tried to "do all the things" for the publishing and releasing of those five books, then it's natural that the momentum will go away.

If that's the case, the hardest part about burnout recovery is how much time it takes to get through it, and back to a place where you feel like you're at 100% again. So if this is you (whether you're Emily or not), know that as long as you continue to do the work to recover, making those energy pennies and building the ladder out of the pit, you will eventually recover.

Whether you burn out again or not is a different story. But your recovery will happen because we have to recover to survive, or we'll keep cycling in and out of the bottom of the pit for a long time (which, of course, some of us do, but here's hoping you change what you need to change to not let that happen).

​Also, just recently, Gallup put out a report on burnout using Strengths. I haven't looked at it yet, but in case you want to check it out, it's here.​

If it isn't burnout, then the next most likely thing is expectations.

For many of us, when we do something like rapid release, we have internal expectations about how the process should go. Unfortunately, we often create expectations that "if I do all the things" then "the books should sell. And we don't realize we've created a dependency in our heads.

"This is a business and I'm treating it like a business, therefore the books should sell." As though all books that are marketed well and covered well and released well should just sell.

So if we do all the things right, and the books don't sell, it can de-motivate us. Because if we did everything right, and the book isn't selling, then clearly there's something wrong.

The problem is, of course, books selling isn't a dependency. It isn't a given that just because things are marketed well or advertised well or even written well that they will just sell. Especially not in the saturated market we live in.

Yes, you're giving yourself a better chance if you do the marketing "correctly" in a sense, or if you have smart release practices, or a good trope or hook, etc. Yes, you are giving yourself a better chance. But it's still chance. It is not a given.

When we assume it's a given, we create dependencies in our head ("if I do X, then Y is sure to happen") and dependencies create expectations. So when our expectations aren't met, we can often struggle to know what to do after. "Why aren't my books selling?" we ask. But sometimes the answer isn't, "because you did X wrong." Sometimes, the answer is, "because most books don't sell, and because luck and timing weren't on my side, even though hard work and talent might have been."

But this isn't a natural thing to think, so many of us can get demotivated because we have a "need" to sell books (for many reasons... check out Claire Taylor's current Kickstarter on Sustain Your Author Career if you want to know more about why some of the things we "need" in our author career can change how we should make choices).

If this is a place where you're feeling particularly called out, I'm going to encourage you again to come and talk to me or to one of our coaches about this. It's common that this particular issue is one you need to process with someone who is objectively looking at your personality and how you function, so we can help to figure out whether there's anything to be done or not. I don't like suggesting this, because it's a money spend, and I always prefer to do free stuff whenever we can in this economy. But there are some things I just don't think you can do on your own. And processing your books not selling is one of them.

One of the hardest things we have to do in coaching is to talk to people about their books not selling. Because so often, there's nothing that can be done to fix it. There's not always a lesson to learn, other than, "lots of books don't sell." (People who came of business age in the Gold Rush will say different, of course, and people who have some investment in you believing all your books should sell will say different. But the truth is, at volume, I see too many people who are doing everything right and still not selling to believe anything else.)

But if this is the case, re-forming expectations is really important.

I have a couple of TikTok videos on this (pinned to my profile and early in my current list) about how when success is unpredictable, we need to understand that it's not out of our reach just because we've done, say, a bad series release, or a couple of books that haven't performed to our expectations.

Some of us need the re-set of expectations so we don't think not-selling is a cue to quit. We don't need to quit if we don't sell. The market being unpredictable is handy because it means we don't "need" to quit if we don't sell. But that doesn't make it any easier, of course, to contextualize not selling from an emotional standpoint. But again, this is why I often encourage coaching for this space.

So those are two options. Burnout and expectations changing. But let's talk about the third and most likely option, which is.... writing now has stakes attached to it, in a way it didn't have when you were first writing and enjoying writing.

For some of us, when we start writing for publication, and we start attaching "shoulds" to the writing, we rob ourselves of the fun and the passion because we've now made it necessary to think about what we should and shouldn't do. (We "should" write to market, we "should" write to trope, we "should" be on TikTok, we "should" do direct sales, etc.)

If you're the type of person who was primarily interested in writing for passion because it allowed you to be immersed in the manuscript, and then you started letting everyone else's voices into your writing process, that's going to naturally change how you experience the immersion.

This doesn't always mean we can't try to make money off the writing (although that stake, in and of itself is sometimes something that can hamper our ability to immerse in the writing the way we could when it was primarily for fun), but it often does mean that we have to stop listening to the shoulds. It often means we have to disconnect the part of ourself that believes other people to be the seat of truth when it comes to our career. We need to reform the expectation that we have to listen to anyone else.

It's hard for me to discuss because I see so many people trying to change their process to listen to people who aren't wired like them. (And it's why the "Write to Market" archetype continuum exists.) So here's what I'll say...

If you haven't watched the four Write to Market Archetype videos yet, go here. Watch them. See where you fall. If you are anything other than a Drafter, you might need to change who you listen to in your writing. You might have to go back to listening to your own intuition.

Changing something like that can, on its own, change your ability to be passionate about the process of writing. Additionally, if you're not wired like a Drafter, trying to write "to market" isn't going to help anyway. And the way each of the archetypes listens to advice needs to be contextualized based on what happens inside the manuscript.

Ultimately, whether the pressure to write-to-market is the problem or not, you might need to go back to listening to your intuition about who/what/how to write, and the good news is... plenty of people are successful that way, too. So just because you go back to listening to your intuition doesn't mean you're going to fail. It's the way many, many people succeed.

Ok. That's a wrap. Those are the three main reasons I see for people who lose their passion (unless it's biological, which I would categorize along with burnout because it's so often either a doctor trip or time that will solve that, if it's solvable). Hopefully that helped not just Emily, but all of us.

I know this life is complicated and can be a mess sometimes, and just remember, we have not only individual coaching for full sessions, but also 10-minute sessions that are much more affordable on our Patreon. We do this because we want this business to be sustainable, and sometimes, we need just a little bit of help, and not a huge amount of help. So if you need a little help, please come and join our Patreon at the Microcoaching Level or the Coaching level, and get some help. But I hope the letter was enough. That's always my hope.

Thank you so much for asking this question. You are very much not alone here.

<3 Becca <3

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