Creating the Writing Career You Want

By Tiffany Yates Martin

Four years ago, in April of 2020, my first book for authors released right as the world shut down in the acute initial panic of a global pandemic.

The book, Intuitive Editing, felt like my life’s work, the culmination of my decades working in the publishing industry as an editor: a practical but creative guide for authors on how to edit their own work, based on writing and storytelling skills and tools I’d spent my entire career mastering in my work with authors and major publishers.

Having the book slated to launch amid all that upheaval, uncertainty, and fear sapped much of my joy and anticipation, and I found myself beset by worries and doubts about what this global crisis might mean for this long-held dream I’d worked so hard on.

I wrote my very first blog post about the self-doubt and fear I was experiencing—and was stunned when I heard from countless authors sharing their own concerns, fears, and doubts about their writing amid the unprecedented turmoil in the world (and the terrifying lack of toilet paper and hand sanitizer).

Taking the Helm of Your Own Career

Writing isn’t like other careers, where you may have a clear and established path to steady expansion of and success in your chosen field. It’s filled with challenges, a never-ending roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, many of which aren’t within the author’s control, no matter your publishing path:

• If you hope to traditionally publish, whether an agent or publisher will sign you or your stories. 
• What kind of marketing push you may get, and what the current market even is for your work. 
• In every publishing path, how the work will be received and reviewed, and how it sells. 
• Whether you’ll be offered the opportunity to publish again—or find the wherewithal and resources to persist if your indie-pubbed books don’t sell well—and if you do, whether you will successfully navigate all these same challenges over and over, your career dependent afresh each and every time on how well your last story did.

Over my years in this industry I have seen countless authors navigate their writing careers. Some have ridden these endless waves and managed to stay afloat for years, decades. Some drift back to shore early, before they ever really get their career off the ground, daunted by the difficulties that face every author. Some sail smoothly along right out of the harbor, but sink fast as they face the rough seas a writing career can be riddled with.

I began to pay attention to what set those who endured apart from those who did not, and over and over it had much less to do with their writing itself, but rather their mastery of what I call the “squishy skills”: their ability to adapt, endure, reinvent, and re-create.

Those authors who are able to build and maintain a steady and satisfying career are the ones who learn how to navigate it on their own terms. Who take ownership and agency in their career and put themselves firmly at the helm, rather than allowing themselves to be buffeted about by the waves like a dinghy adrift on the water.

Changing Course with Shifting Seas

I had been working on what I intended to be the follow-up book to Intuitive Editing for some time, a deep dive into character development for authors. 

But as the publishing industry continued to rapidly evolve and grow ever more complex and challenging, I saw more and more authors struggle to stay afloat. To be resilient and persist.

I heard authors speak of being disheartened, discouraged, daunted by a market where advances seem to be going steadily down, and it’s getting harder and harder to market and sell books.

I heard them worry whether their book would find readers, whether they’d be offered another publishing contract, whether they could sustain the often punishing pace (and costs) of publishing and marketing required for them to maintain an income. 

I heard them despair of a publishing market where it felt as if only the shiny new debut author had value—and even if they somehow were anointed as that Chosen One, if their book didn’t perform to expectations they might never get another shot. 

I heard them—too often—wrangle with hopelessness. Contemplate whether it was worth it to keep going.

And gradually I began to realize that the book I wanted to write, the book I felt was most needed by authors right now, was one that helped them develop the essential tools and techniques that would help them develop and hone the “squishy skills” so foundational to growing and sustaining a successful and satisfying career, but that rarely were written or talked about in an industry where the appearance of success often seems paramount.

I put the character book aside and set my sails where the Sirens were calling. And The Intuitive Author: How to Grow & Sustain a Happier Writing Career was born.

Culled from my years a blogging and speaking on the “squishy skills” areas, and drawn from the experience of the many hundreds of authors I’ve worked with over many years, the book came together quickly, in the kind of writing “flow” we so often strive for as authors. (Passion is a potent animating creative force.)

I wanted to offer writers the kind of concrete, practical approach that I bring to my work and my teaching on the “hard skills” of story craft and writing—but for dealing with these often amorphous, hard-to-pin-down areas.

So with the objective approach I bring to my editing work, I broke down these thorniest of topics into their causes and laid out specific, actionable ways of navigating these choppy waters:

• How to handle rejection and criticism. 
• How to adapt to an ever-changing publishing market. 
• How to handle the common “writer demons”: impostor syndrome, competition, comparison, procrastination, fear of failure, “writer’s block,” and a host of other demons that live in all of our psyches, but perhaps most acutely in creatives
• How to take control of your own career and feel a sense of agency in an industry where often it feels as if the author has the least amount of influence over the trajectory of their career.

I call it a survival guide for writers, and my most fervent hope for it is that it offers authors the skills and tools to help them create and sustain a successful, satisfying writing career for a lifetime.

Like my pandemic book release, we may not always be able to control every aspect of our careers. But we can develop the tools to take agency in our own career and consciously create a path that fulfills us—and the resilience to sustain it for a lifetime through our field’s unpredictable ups and downs.

Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers. She is the founder of FoxPrint Editorial (named one of Writer’s Digest’s Best Websites for Authors) and author of Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing and her latest, The Intuitive Author: How to Grow & Sustain a Happier Writing Career. She is a regular contributor to writers’ outlets like Writer’s Digest, Jane Friedman, and Writer Unboxed, and a frequent presenter and keynote speaker for writers’ organizations around the country. Under her pen name, Phoebe Fox, she is the author of six novels. 

 

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Category: How To and Tips