Four years ago I stopped working to write. I have written seven books since. They have earned me almost nothing.
That is not a complaint and it is not unusual. It is the ordinary arithmetic of this, and almost nobody says it out loud, which is why people keep walking into it with the same expectations I had.
The part worth writing about is not the money. It is how long it took me to believe the numbers.
We all plan for the best case
I knew the odds. Anyone who looks this up knows the odds. Most books earn very little, most manuscripts do not find agents, and the ones that succeed took longer than the story suggests.
I knew all of that and I still assumed it would work out, because that is what everybody does. We read the statistics and quietly file ourselves outside them. Bad outcomes happen to other people. For ourselves we model the best case and then plan as though it were the expected one.
So the realisation was not a moment. There was no rejection that changed anything, no day where I understood. It arrived gradually, the way these things do, as the gap between what I had assumed and what was actually happening got too wide to keep explaining.
That gradualness is the dangerous part. A sudden failure forces a decision. A slow one lets you keep going on an old plan for years without ever formally admitting the plan changed.
What I stopped
I am not writing new books at the moment.
Given that writing is the thing I took the break for, that sentence took me a while to be able to say. But it is the correct decision and it took me too long to make it. I have seven finished books. Writing an eighth does not improve that position. Publishing the ones that exist does.
So the new work is on hold until what I already have is out in the world. That is a queue problem, not a creative one. I had more work in progress than I could finish, which is the same mistake I have seen teams make with software, and the answer is the same. Stop starting. Start finishing.
I am also looking for work that pays. Not as an admission of defeat, as arithmetic. The writing has to be funded by something and it was never going to fund itself this early.
What I kept
I still write every day.
That has not moved and I am not going to move it. It is the only part of this I control, and the days I do it are the days everything else feels manageable.
I have also kept writing across genres, which is arguably a bad commercial decision. Memoir, realistic fiction, fantasy, non-fiction. Every piece of career advice says pick a lane and build an audience in it. I have not managed to do that, because the creative side does not take instructions from the strategic one. Something arrives and it arrives in the shape it wants.
I have made peace with that being a cost rather than a mistake. Some things you do because they are optimal. Some you do because otherwise you would not be doing this at all.
What I would tell someone starting
Plan for the median, not the best case.
That is the whole thing. Look at what actually happens to most people attempting this, assume it applies to you, and build a plan that survives it. If you would not accept the median outcome, do not take the risk that produces it.
Practically, that means three things.
Keep an income. Write in the time you have. The version where you quit and the book saves you is a story told afterwards by the people it worked for.
Set a date to review, not a hope to hold. I did not have one. Without a date you drift, because there is never a specific day on which it becomes obvious.
Finish what you started before you start more. Seven manuscripts and no publication route is worse than three and a plan.
None of this has made me want to stop. I would make the same decision again, with better arithmetic.
The books will get out. It will take longer than I thought, which is the one thing about this I should have predicted, because it is the only part everybody agrees on.
