Villains. We love to hate them. We kvetch about them on social media, speculate how they are going to get taken down, and celebrate with memes when they finally get their dues.

But what makes a good villain great?

Believe it or not, it’s not more villainous stuff.

It’s a mix of villainy and vulnerability.

Why is that combo so potent?

Because it keeps us uncertain.

Maybe they aren’t all bad, we think. We foster hope that they can be redeemed. And then bam! They do something so awful, and so terrible that you hate them all over again, even more than you did at the start.

So let’s think about where their vulnerability comes from.

Whatever it is that drives a villain to do their nefarious deeds, you can bet your last KitKat that it was once a noble thing (at least to them).

They became a villain because their villain / situation successfully thwarted their goals, and what was noble morphed into something else. Something darker. Meaner. Destructive. Selfish.

And gives birth to the kind of goal that is driven by…
I-will-stop-at-nothing-to-achieve-my-goal-even-if-I-have-to-kill-everyone motivation.

That’s the kind of villain we want to be writing in our stories.

Villains most likely coined the saying: The best way to defeat a monster is to become a monster, yourself.

But we’re not villains. Our noble causes haven’t been thwarted and made us into monsters hell-bent on revenge against, well everyone and everything.

So how to get into the head of a villain without (ahem) becoming one yourself?

Not to fear, these 10 steps will take you into the mind and heart of a well-crafted villain without you having to so much as squash a bug.

Step 1. Start by thinking about the villains in your life.

Think about difficult people or situations in your life. Who or what has kept you from your deepest desires or goals, or simply just made your life hell for no good reason?

Think about the times these people or situations made you feel small, powerless, or angry and how it affected you emotionally and mentally. Write down how these things made you feel.

Your notes are golden nuggets you can use to build out the brokenness of your villain. Every villain started out being tormented by someone or a situation that they chose not to resolve in a healthy way.

Instead they channeled their hurt, anger, resentment, revenge, and jealousy into tactics to control the narrative of the lives of others, and get what they want through amoral behavior. These emotions form the core of a villain’s motivations.

Villain-craft 101: Meet Vanessa, a barista who’s out to sabotage the budding love interest of our heroine, Emma. Vanessa is beautiful and dangerous.

Step 2. Explore your reactions and choices to their behavior.

How did the way they treated you influence your behavior and choices? Did you become more cautious, defensive, or assertive? This is the source material for you to build the vulnerable side of your villain.

Understanding the emotional impact of being tormented by another will help you create a villain whose actions and motivations are deeply rooted in relatable feelings.

Villain-craft 101: Vanessa lives in a continual state of jealousy and resentment against anyone who is in a happy relationship. Every time she sees Emma come into the shop for a date with the handsome new guy in town, she’s reminded of her own insecurities and past failures in love, fueling her desire to bring Emma down.

Step 3. Create your villain’s origin story.

Now is the time to sketch out your villain with who they were before, during, and after their slide down the slippery slope into villainy.

Think about their past experiences, upbringing, and the pivotal moments that shaped them. Focus on the defining events that “broke them” and drove them to choose to be bad.

Make sure to consider major influences like family dynamics, relationships, and traumatic childhood experiences.

If you want to craft a great villain, you’ll need a well-developed backstory - even if that story is only ever in your head - because the goal is to make your readers feel conflicted and able to relate to the complexity of your villain.

You want to make them think: This could have been me if I had chosen as they did.

Villain-craft 101: Vanessa grew up in a household where love was conditional and often withheld. Her self-worth became tied to external validation and beauty. After a bad breakup where the person she loved told her she was unlovable, her self-esteem was shattered. Seeing Emma happy and hopeful triggers her unresolved pain, driving her to sabotage Emma’s budding romance.

Step 4. Bring them to life with believable flaws and vulnerabilities.

It’s crucial that you make your villain relatable by giving them human qualities and flaws. Even the most evil characters should have vulnerabilities and moments of humanity.

Consider their fears, desires, and moments of weakness. Show how these flaws influence their decisions and actions. This not only makes your villain more believable but also allows readers to understand and empathize with them, even if they don’t agree with their actions.

Villain-craft 101: Vanessa volunteers at a local animal shelter and genuinely loves the animals. She fosters the most difficult ones at home until the shelter can find them a new home.

Her vulnerability lies in her deep-seated belief of being unlovable, which drives both her destructive behavior and her compassion for the animals no one else will love.

Step 5. Get laser-focused on what drives them to be bad.

Being a bad guy isn’t enough. Even villains have an overarching goal. Perhaps they were thwarted in high school and missed their chance to get a contract on an NFL team.

All they wanted was to provide for their poverty-stricken single mom, and put their siblings through university. Instead, our villain ends up working in an inner city parking lot kiosk for minimum wage. Fuelled by bitterness and resentment he robs people to get back the money that was “taken from him”.

Turn personal grievances into your villain’s motivations. Define what they hope to achieve and why. Ensure their goals are clear and stem from their backstory and emotional triggers.

A villain with understandable and relatable motivations is more compelling and believable. Their actions should make sense in the context of their desires and fears, creating a complex and layered character.

Villain-craft 101: Vanessa’s motivation to ruin Emma’s happiness stems from her belief that if she can’t be happy, no one else deserves to be. She sees Emma’s chance at happiness in love as a threat to her fragile sense of self-worth.

Step 6. Crush clichés and stereotypes.

If your villain isn’t multi-dimensional and a complete person outside of their villainy, there’s still work to do. Make sure you’ve given them unique traits and complex motivations that go beyond typical villain archetypes.

Develop their personality with unique quirks and behaviors that have nothing to do with their villainous behavior.

Maybe they always attend beach clean ups to get rid of discarded plastic from beachgoers because they care about the environment and wildlife. Often villains see themselves as the good guy, so make sure to feed into that with behaviors that they can fall back on when others point out their awful behavior.

Villain-craft 101: Vanessa isn’t a stereotypical “mean girl,” she’s someone who is charming and intelligent with a warm smile. She is popular but doesn’t have any close friends. She isn’t overtly evil but is driven to sabotage the happiness of others in love. She makes use of her charismatic personality to appear innocent while creating doubt and drama.

Step 7. Reveal your villain by their actions.

Let readers see your villain’s complexity through how they interact with the world and with other characters. Make use of dialogue and their actions to show their personality, motivations, and inner conflicts.

Villain-craft 101: Vanessa often makes seemingly innocent comments that plant seeds of doubt in others. In a conversation with Emma’s love interest, she might say, “Emma’s so sweet. I hope she doesn’t get hurt again like last time,” implying there’s something Emma isn’t telling him.

Step 8. Layer your villain’s personality and backstory.

Give them moments that reveal their past and explain their current behavior. Use flashbacks, inner monologues, and interactions to show different facets of their personality, and how they struggle with their own emotions and decisions.

Villain-craft 101: A flashback scene could show Vanessa as a child, overhearing her parents argue and mention how “unlovable” she is. This moment explains her lifelong fear of rejection and need to undermine others to feel superior.

Step 9. Connect with your villain through creative “conversations”.

To truly deepen your villain’s character and make them as authentic as possible, spend some time connecting with them through creative writing prompts. The prompts below are examples to try, but let your villain guide you to what you feel might still be missing. They will have plenty to say if you take the time to “listen”.

• Write a scene where your villain relives the moment they believed they would never achieve their goal unless they started doing morally gray things.

• Dialogue out a therapy session between your villain and their therapist where they share their deepest vulnerability and hurt and how it makes them feel.

Villain-craft 101: Vanessa might reflect on the night her relationship ended, replaying the harsh words said to her. In a dialogue with a close friend, she might confess, “Seeing Emma so happy makes me feel like I’ll never have that and I can’t bear to see what she has that I don’t have.”

Step 10. Keep a detailed profile.

Develop a detailed character profile to keep your villain’s complexity consistent. Make sure to include their background, motivations, flaws, and major influences.

Their profile is a useful tool to keep you centered as the story progresses so you can be sure that your villain’s actions and development stay in tune with their traits and backstory.

Villain-craft 101 - Vanessa’s profile:

• Background: Grew up in a cold, critical household. The relationship she believed would validate her need for love ended badly.

• Motivations: Driven by jealousy and fear of being unlovable.

• Flaws: Insecure, manipulative, self-centered.

• Major Influences: Childhood neglect, failed relationship, volunteer at an animal shelter & protective of unloved animals.

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Bonus Step! Mine the feelings of your shadow self.

The authenticity of your own shadow emotions and conflicts will resonate with readers. Mine these feelings to make your villain even more believable and engaging.

And, remember…

On a sunny day in June 2013, in a quiet Swedish town tucked up against the Baltic Sea, my rescue kitten died.

I missed Djet more than it should be possible to miss a kitten. Despite blood transfusions, hospitalizations, and sleeping on the floor beside him to help him get to the litter box, he crossed the rainbow bridge.

The house was empty without him. Unmoored, I searched for purpose. That was when I remembered the book I had written years earlier and the editorial review I had received that had sent me spiraling into despair. I decided I would rewrite the book as a legacy to Djet’s memory.

How I Wrote My Debut Novel

Four years later, my debut novel was published. It won a slew of awards. I was given an agent via Wattpad (where I had originally serialized the story), who managed a bid from Alibaba to create a full cast dramatization in English and Chinese. It was a magical time.

To this day, the book still sells, even without any marketing.

But I didn’t just sit down at my laptop and out popped my book. (If only!) I ended up writing four versions before it was done. And, I wrote another book to practice one part of the craft so I would have the confidence to do the last round of edits.

I spent ten or more hours a day, every day, learning the craft, writing, falling, and getting up again. Determination to honor Djet’s short existence was a strange motivation, but it kept my nose to the grindstone even when I had to rip everything up and start over again.

Editing My Debut Novel

After I completed my initial revision, I crossed paths with Kath, an editor who was the perfect match for my needs. I couldn’t believe my luck when she took me under her wing: an award-winning author signed with London’s RCW Literary (check out their client list – it will make your eyes water) who also happens to teach the craft of writing at Faber Institute.

If anyone could help me turn my “wooden-puppet two-dimensional characters” into real, living breathing characters, it would be her.

In the four years I worked with her, my whole understanding and approach to writing and storycraft changed. She taught me things she’d learned from other writers, her agent (also an award-winning author), and her editors.

5 Things I Learned About Writing

The five things she taught me are just too good not to share. And so, without further ado, here are the five things I learned from another writer, who’d learned them from other writers.

#1 Always Anchor Your Reader in the First Sentences

Have a quick look at the beginning of this post. From the first sentence, you knew exactly where and when you were and what was happening. There was even a taste of mood, an awfully sad thing happened on a beautiful, sunny day.

One of the most important things you can do for your readers is to anchor them in place and time.

Readers need to know where they are spatially in a story. If you are writing in multiple POVs, then you also need the reader to know whose head they are in, ideally in one or two sentences.

As storytellers, we have a lot of power. The mind doesn’t know the difference between seeing something happen in real time or reading fiction. So long as you give the reader a solid anchor their mind will believe what they are imagining is real.

Each time you start a scene, imagine what it looks like. Walk around the ‘set’ of your scene.

Explore everything. Is there sun streaming through the window and there’s a warm sunny patch your character who’s always cold could stand in? Familiarize yourself with your scene’s dimensions, objects, temperature, and its positives and negatives. Then distill those details into one succinct sentence that takes the reader into your world.

#2 Make Every Word Count

Less is always more. Trust your storytelling. You don’t need to over-describe anything or pepper your dialogue with adverb-filled tags.

There is no better mantra than this: Every word in your story must earn its place. If it can be cut and the sentence holds, cut it. If it can be cut and the sentence is better, you’re already doing it! Now you just need to trim the fat to see how talented you already are.

As writers, we want to be sure we are clear, but clarity comes with sharp, tight prose, not flowery, wordy descriptions.

Cut, cut, cut and your story will bloom.

#3 Keep Dialogue Tags Simple

Remember I mentioned that I wrote another book to practice one aspect of the craft before moving on to the final edit of my book? It was dialogue.

You might be surprised to learn that dialogue is much more powerful than we realize. I had veered into the dreaded adverb territory because I didn’t trust my ability to write strong dialogue.

When your dialogue is strong, you don’t need adverbs to emphasize mood. A good writer can get away with using just ‘said’ or ‘asked’ (or in the present tense: ‘says’ and ‘asks’).

It’s scary to use ‘said’ or ‘asked’ when you really, really want to say ‘she said sarcastically.’ But if you tell yourself you can only use ‘said’, you’ll write the dialogue in a way that your reader will hear the sarcasm in their head.

Also, for some reason, when you use ‘said’ or ‘asked’ the reader’s eyes skim over it, so it doesn’t feel repetitive to them. As long as your dialogue is strong, your tags just keep things neat.

#4 Use All 5 Senses

For some writers, sensory descriptions can seem extra. When you’ve already described your setting, and your character’s violet or cinnamon-colored eyes, shouldn’t it be enough? No. It’s not enough.

Unlocking sound, color, texture, temperature, and scent takes your reader deep into your world. They will believe it’s real because their senses tell them it is.

When your characters are feeling and sensing things most readers will relate to, or at least be able to try to imagine, you’ve got a captive audience.

Now, they are experiencing the clear, warm, Caribbean waters rushing past their feet as they perch on the extra-warm edge of the catamaran, wishing they had brought a towel to sit on. They squint against the diamond-white sparkle of the sun on the waves. The salt in the wind tastes briny on their lips. They drag their fingers through their drying hair, stiff with saltwater. You get the idea.

The trick is to combine your scene setting, character POV, and sensory details in a succinct way. A good exercise to develop this skill is to do this to yourself. Say you are out in a park walking your dog.

Make yourself the character in your story. What are you seeing, feeling, and smelling? Are you warm or cold? Is it windy? Or, are you hot and desperate for a drink of water? Has your dog just run into the lake and come back and shaken itself all over you and now you smell of wet dog?

When you write, you are your character. Be them and experience their world through their senses.

Then, share the most relevant and important parts. Anything that enhances or contradicts the scene’s mood is a bonus. (Like it having been a sunny day when my kitten went over the rainbow bridge).

With this shift in perspective, you will get the hang of allowing yourself to write sensory details into your narrative. In time, it will come naturally to you. You will slip into your character’s world and the story will tell itself.

#5 Read Widely in Your Genre

This one is self-explanatory. If you’re not reading, you’re not gaining insight into what readers are reading, you’re not honing your craft, and you’re not feeding your creativity. Read everything in your genre.

But also absorb marketing copy (clever ways to use words!), Substack thought pieces, and nonfiction. Keep your mind full of words, and the words will come out to play when your fingers hit the keyboard.

The wonderful thing about learning from other writers is they have already walked the path we are walking now. Their wisdom can give us a head start writing the kind of prose that might otherwise take years to reach on our own through trial and error.

Finally, the most important aspect of your journey is to believe in your ability to tell a story and to trust that there will be people who will want to read it.

Happy writing!

Crossposted from the Fictionary Blog

A big thank you to all the new readers and paid subscribers to The Understory: Love, Culture, Fiction. Welcome to my little corner of Substack!

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So, I heard about this from David Gaughran in his recent newsletter and to use his words, it’s a bit of a ‘Hoo-hah’.

And he’s not kidding. I trust David totally. He is a true ally to indie authors. As a marketing and tech guy, he’s mainly focused on ways to leverage marketing on Facebook, but he also occasionally brings other great things to the table.

And this one is one of them.

Let’s get going.

What is Affinity and Why Should I Care?

Affinity is a graphic design tool that has been in competition with the ridiculously cumbersome and expensive Adobe’s Photoshop suite of tools for like, forever.

Mainly used by pro graphic designers, Affinity has been outside the creative reach of most writers alongside Adobe’s complex tools. Those of us who might want to make anything ‘graphicky’ have been forced to rely on the easier-to-use tools in Canva. But there were limitations to how far we can go.

Not anymore.

At the end of October this year, a big announcement came out from Canva. Affinity has put on its game face and totally kicked Adobe in the nuts with what they’ve developed since Canva bought them back in 2024.

They’ve made the entire suite of their tools FREE, like free free, forever to Canva users. And they’ve made it accessible to novices. That’s the part that’s got everyone buzzing. Now anyone can use professional graphic design software for free.

Want to make an image like the one above? Now, you can, without having to learn graphic design.

That means the only thing standing in your way to full creative freedom is choosing not to download the Affinity workspace into your Mac or Windows system. That’s it. Just one download. No subscriptions. Nothing.

The next part is up to you. If you are a novice to Affinity (like me), you’re going to face a learning curve but it’s so worth it. But, that’s okay. You also get a super helpful AI assistant called Ritson who slays at helping you figure out the parts where you are stuck. And you will be stuck, prepare for that, there’s just a lot of options and it can be bewildering at first.

If you ask Ritson ‘how do I make a new document’. Boom. Step-by-step instructions a three-year-old could follow. I did watch the intro tutorial but it is pretty fast and while it gives a great overview of the possibilities (which are unreal), getting to grips with the tools requires a bit of time using them. I found it most helpful to spend time adapting to the multitude of tools available to play with as you progress through whatever project you want to work on.

And there are many, many tools. Put it another way, if you can imagine it, there will be a way to make that a reality with Affinity.

So I decided to dig in with a rework of a 40-page guide I wrote back in 2023 about finding your voice as a writer which is visually pretty meh. I figured it would be a fun way to make it snazzy while simultaneously learning how to use the tool. I spent yesterday getting to grips with it and when I started to get the hang of things I was super happy with the results.

I’m looking forward to exploring much more, and will share the results when I am done redoing my guide, but I wanted to get this post out to you stat so you can start using Affinity, too!

So without further ado, if you are interested to access this amazing tool where you can make anything (including your own profession paperback book covers, hello!), you’ll want to settle in with a coffee and follow these step-by-step instructions to get Affinity for yourself.

Step-by-Step Guide to Get Affinity by Canva For Free

Step One:

If you don’t have a Canva account, you’ll need to create one*. You can get started here https://www.canva.com/

You do not need to have a paid subscription on Canva to access Affinity. You can have everything for free.

If you don’t already have a Canva account, you only need to set up a free account to unlock Affinity. Side note - a free account on Canva is usually plenty for most users, there’s a lot of value there on its own. (Disclosure: I use Canva Pro and have for years).

Step Two:

Sign in to your Canva account if you aren’t already signed in.

Then go to https://www.affinity.studio/

Click ‘Get Affinity’ button in top right hand corner

Click ‘Sign up to download’ button

On the Welcome to Affinity! window Click ‘Continue’ button to connect Affinity to your Canva account (or you can choose to sign in with another Canva account).

Download Affinity to your system (available to macOS and Windows)

Play elevator music in your head while the software downloads. Took about 1 minute for it to download for me.

Step Three:

Open the downloads drop down list from your system’s (Mac or Windows) toolbar and and click the Open icon beside the file.

Click Install. Note: the Launch when ready button is ticked by default, if you want to disable that, do that before you click Install. I left mine ticked.

Once installed, you will get a new window with a button to Log in or sign up. Click that.

Click Continue (or you can switch to another Canva account if you’d rather use Affinity there)

Note: Your browser may display a system prompt asking if you want to open the app. Choose Allow or Open Affinity to continue

You’ll see that your sign-in was successful and you may close the window and get started with Affinity.

Close the window.

Step Four:

The Affinity workspace will be open automatically on your desktop. (It might load behind open windows so you might need to minimize them to see the workspace)

You can play the intro video or skip it. It’s not critical to watch it, it’s just a short video to show you a few of the amazing things you can do with Affinity.

Next: Choose if you wish to share your usage. I left mine unticked.

A tutorial pane then opens. You can choose to watch the tutorial if you are new to Affinity or go straight into creating if you know your way around things.

You are then sent to the Home page where you will see a selection of tutorials to watch on a variety of topics. You can also click the Learn tab to access these tutorials any time.

Click the Intro to Affinity (it takes a moment or two to load the workspace so don’t keep clicking the tutorial like I did because then you get a ton of them loded all at once - I think I had twelve ha)

When the workspace (finally) opens up it looks like this:

You can click forward and back through the steps of the tutorial.

Then it’s really up to you how much or little you want to use the tool. I found to avoid overwhelm to just think about one thing you want to do and experiment with it and learn as you go!

Also, if you need to talk to Ritson the AI assistant for help (highly recommend for new users) just click the little question mark in the top right corner. A new chat pane will open that floats over the app so you can move it around without having to close it while you work. I had Ritson with me constantly and it really helped me to learn the tools far faster.

If you have files you want to import and work on without having to start over again, here are all the file formats you can import.

Happy creating!

Pro tip: Pin the Affinity icon into your taskbar so you have easy access to it. I had to search for it after I closed the app.

*This is not an affiliate post for Affinity or Canva. I don’t even think it’s possible to be an affiliate for Affinity which I actually love, because it means it’s pure value, and no take.

When I happened upon this a month ago via this article in The Guardian I loved the simplicity of it.

It’s such a cool concept I wanted to share it with you, too.

Created by Richard Beard, author six novels including Lazarus is Dead and five narrative nonfiction books including his memoir The Day That Went Missing, it’s called The Universal Turing Machine but it has nothing to do with artificial intelligence or testing robots to see if they can pass any tests.

Instead, it’s been designed to celebrate being human via a shared tool everyone can access to write their memoirs (and be selected for publishing - more on that below).

How It Works:

The UTM is a chessboard grid with 64 squares. Each square represents a year of your life. And each year contains a maximum of 1,000 words. The constraint offers a beautiful way to write about that year in an original and creative way.

What makes this unique to memoir writing is that instead of writing each year sequentially, instead you bounce around the chessboard from year to year via the moves of a knight (so you can move in an L-shape of two squares in one direction and then turn right or left of the top square). So, if you choose 1986 as a year to begin writing, then the next year you can choose from would be one of the squares highlighted in blue (1969, 1971, 1976, 1980, 1992, 1996, 2001, or 2003). When you choose the next year from that list, your selection changes and so on until you complete all sixty-four years.

In this way, you can roam through your life and recall things you may have forgotten or relegated to the back of the memory drawer. It’s a wonderful way to explore your past, and discuss the things that occupied your life then, only to see how they played out now. And of course if you are not 64 years old, you can think about where you think you might be in the future.

Thousands of people are taking part in this great living memoir. It’s a celebration of what it means to be human in an age of AI.

What’s beautiful about this living memoir is that everyone is welvome to write at any age and from anywhere in the world. It’s completely free to join and you retain all the rights to your work. You can read more about the UTM community here.

What About Getting Published?

If you are looking for some exposure and a share in the contributions (published memoirs get a 50% share with other published authors as well as links to wherever you want readers to navigate from your memoir to (your website, blog, Substack, etc.)

The first deadline for a complete memoir is 31/01/2026, Eight memoirs will be chosen for publication and will be published on 01/06/2026. If you don’t have your memoir complete by the end of January 2026, you can apply for the second round. There is no charge for submission.

From the FAQs (bolding is mine):
Each round of memoirs will be chosen according to those which seem best suited to the form, which favours authenticity of memory and imagination, whatever the subject matter or life lived. There is no guarantee of online publication but the number of memoirs added to the UTM increases with each round – submissions not selected in the first round can be reconsidered for the second round, and so on.

You can read everything about submissions here

How Flexible is the System?

Very. Far from being a draconian set of rules, really the only two constraints are how you can move around the board and the word count limit per year.

You choose and label your board. You can combine years together into groups (say for your early years), you can repeat years if you want to give more words to a particular year, you can look further into the future as well.

If you want to do one year at a time, you can do that too. It’s your memoir. How you choose to play the board is totally up to you!

I hope you find this concept as interesting and intriguing as I do. I think it could be a lot of fun to be a part of something like this. You can find out much more on the links below….

until then Happy Writing!

About the UTM

The UTM Community

Help Guide

FAQs

About Richard Beard

A big thank you to all the new readers and paid subscribers to The Understory: Love, Culture, Fiction. Welcome to my little corner of Substack!

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Substack was on my radar for about four years before I decided to jump in this year. Back in 2021, I created a publication and then just kept an eye on how Substack was growing.

The longer I watched and waited, the more impressed I became. Substack was doing a lot of things right. I just didn’t know how I could fit into the community as an indie author.

I’d had heard from various thought leaders in the indie author community that Substack isn’t the best place for authors to invest their energy - that it’s more for essayists and columnists who migrate away from big magazines and freelance for themselves.

All true. But still, Substack had an appeal. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on what that appeal for indie authors might be.

Then, a very good Canadian high-school friend of mine died of cancer. She was one month younger than me. We’d been friends since the 1980s. She’d visited me in the UK in the 90s. I’d flown to her wedding from Denmark in the 00s.

We commiserated over singledom, divorce, and getting our hearts broken. I watched her son grow up. We celebrated her finally finding true love a year before she died. We might have lived far apart but remained close in a way that distance could not overcome.

When she was gone, I rifled through her online presence, seeking hidden tidbits of her life I might have missed. She was only active on Facebook but was present there a lot. What made me sad was despite her many posts of YouTube videos of songs she liked, memes, and AI face filters, these were all there was left of her online. And it didn’t represent who she was as a person at all. I had wished there were a space where she existed as her true self beyond our private WhatsApp chats, somewhere where everyone could go and remember her as she was. A place where we could keep her alive in the here and now.

That thought then led to me considering my writing which over the last 8 years had been scattered to the four winds of the Internet. My writing was all over the place. Wattpad, website blogs (no one ever looks at anymore), my newsletters, fanfiction.net, and in bookstores online.

But these are my stories. I realized I might have released them to the world, but they had run off in a million directions like a giant clowder of cats set free in a field. I realized I wanted them all in one place in case the worst happened and suddenly, I too was gone.

And that’s when it hit me . . .

I started to dig into Substack, really dig in and learn what I could do with it to make sure no matter what happens in the future, my writing, thoughts, essays, and rants would remain gathered together in one glorious free to post place for anyone to peruse at any time.

Benefits of Substack for authors:

• Upload all your books for paid subscribers to enjoy

• You don’t have to pay for what is effectively your own website on a huge, thriving platform of avid readers

• You can send newsletters to your subscribers from Substack for free instead of paying MailerLite, ConvertKit, or whatever

• You can migrate your newsletter lists from other platforms to Substack

• You can chat with your readers directly on the Chat and build rapport with them

• You can have a podcast that can be linked to all major podcast platforms including Spotify

• You can post Notes to the feed and enjoy the world of pre-X Twitter again

• You can link directly to your services and offers

• You can post anything you would normally post on social media (ie. Live) on Substack allowing you to leave the cesspool of social media and concentrate all your energy in one place

  ---

I was sold on the benefits. The only thing I wasn’t going to give up was my website. But instead of using my website as the top of my funnel, it’s now the bottom.

Substack is now the top and middle of my funnel as an author. Wherever I can, I direct traffic to my Substack. Free subscribers get access to most of my writing , and paid subscribers get my books in full for a token $5 a month (or $50 annually) plus full access to the Chat, Threads, and are able to leave comments. This arrangement means they are not only not giving their money to Amazon, they are getting a great deal by not having to buy all my books digitally AND are supporting my work directly. There’s so much win I could cry with happiness.

Substack is where I can build my connection with my readers across many forms of media. It’s probably the most effective, coherent way to direct your energy into your art because you are not running around fifteen different social media platforms getting sucked into their rabbit holes and losing focus and energy just trying to post and comment all over the place.

Moving everything into Substack took quite a bit of time, energy, and effort, but looking at it now, the investment was worth it (not going to lie, it was six months, but that included the learning curve, which hopefully this post will spare you). There is still more of my writing to be uploaded, but the foundation is secure and it’s just a matter of time now before I have all the old writing archived here.

How to Set up Your Substack as an Indie Author

So, if you are thinking of using Substack as an indie author, here’s how I did it. Remember this is just a guide, do take, leave, or tweak my strategy to suit your purposes!

Step One:

Make a list of everywhere you have your writing online. This is probably going to be a much longer list than you expect especially if you have been writing for years. Go slow, turn over the rocks, go through your whole website, past social media posts, Google Drive, emails, blogs you’ve retired, fanfiction sites, Wattpad, Radish, etc. You’re going to find gold, I promise. It’s amazing what we write and then forget about!

Step Two:

Create your Substack if you haven’t already, give it a good name, and then decide on your Sections. Sections are places you can categorize your work. And remember if you are going to incorporate your whole online self here, and you like to make felt animals as a hobby, well you can have a felt animal crafting section. It doesn’t have to be just about your books, this is your spot to be your whole, authentic you.

Step Three:

Start uploading your writing. Single pieces are easy. If it’s really old content you can change the date to match when it was originally published so you can have a whole timeline of your writing that’s totally coherent from the past to present (I should have added this as a benefit actually!) You’ll also want to decide before you post if you want to make your post paid or free.

There is a lot of debate on the pros and cons of paywalled content. My two cents after hours and hours of research and reading is if you are a new writer to Substack, give a lot of value to your readers because if they don’t know who you are how are you going to get them to pay a subscription to you if they don’t know anything about your writing?

Paywall only the things that really ought to be paywalled (in my case, my books). A good way to check is to pretend you are reader coming to your publication - what would you feel comfortable seeing paywalled and what would make you click away from your publication if it was paywalled? Beware paywalled clickbait! This isn’t the place for it.

Then once you have figured that out for your publication, you’ll want to think about tags. I learned the hard way that tags on Substack don’t work like other places. Readers can’t type in a word and then Substack offers up a bunch of publications that cover that topic. So bear in mind when you create your tags, these are only for your own organization, but they do come in handy for when you want to lay out your homepage.

So, in my case, I have tags that reflect topics I think readers will be interested in like the ones in my Substack name: ‘Love’, ‘Culture’, and ‘Fiction’. This makes it easy for readers to look at these topics without having to sift through my Sections to find them. That’s how tags work in Substack and using them this way can beneficially expand the reader’s experience of your publication.

Step Four:

If you want to upload your books, this would be a good time to do it. How I did it without having a bunch of loose chapters floating around was to create a meta-post page (Loom video) with the cover art, blurb, reviews, content warnings, spice level, etc., and then just linked each chapter in one after the other. This way your whole book is in one place and the reader need only click the first chapter and then at the bottom click through using the next or previous buttons. Just make sure to enable that setting.

You add the link to the meta-post page once you have published the chapter (or scene if the chapter is very long). I created a special Section called The Chapters and ticked the option: Hide posts on Homepage. (see Image 2)

Here’s how to set up your Chapters section for silent publishing and populate your meta-post with your published chapters.

Image 1 - Navigate to Settings and then scroll down to Sections, then choose the Section where you are posting your chapters and hit ‘Edit’ button.

Image 2 - Where the box is you need to tick to make sure what you publish in your chapters doesn’t get posted on your homepage (otherwise you’ll have a mess of chapters up and no one will know what’s going on with your Substack!)

Image 3 - Once you have hit publish on your chapter (please note, make sure you untick anything to do with sending it out as an email to your subscribers, unless that is what you specifically want to do). But if you are just populating your books on Substack to prepare them for readers to read in full, you won’t publish to anything but the site.

After you hit publish and ignore all the offers to send it to subscribers, you need to grab the link to put it on your meta-post page with all the chapters. Simply grab the link as shown below by going to your Published posts list and clicking the three dots beside the chapter and then clicking ‘Copy link’. Paste that link on your meta-post page. You can choose to have small, medium or large previews. I chose medium size because you get a nice little blurb for readers to scan.

Step Five:

Once you have everything you want uploaded and organized and ready to go on Substack for readers, the next thing you’ll want to do is get all your emails ready. Substack has bog-standard wording on the emails so if you don’t want to spend time on this then the basics will be covered, but I recommend personalizing your emails and letting subscribers know who you are and what you are bringing to them. You can also outline your subscriber tiers in more detail so they know what they will get if they upgrade. I’ve highlighted the emails I recommend you have a look at. If you do any of them, make sure you do the Welcome email. You can tweak the message for Paid subs and Imported subs (those you move over from your newsletter lists).

If you want an idea of how to structure your subscription tiers as an author, here is what I decided to do:

The reason I recommend writing your emails last is because as you work through building up your Substack Sections and adding your books, you will be in a better place to figure out what you want to offer to subscribers. I did it the wrong way around by writing the letters first and ended up having to rewrite them all once I had pulled the Substack into shape.

Step Six:

If you have a newsletter list on a mail site like Mailchimp or MailerLite and you want to move them to Substack, it’s good practice to give them a heads up.

This Substack support post is extremely helpful in guiding you how to ethically move your list from a huge variety of platforms.

And that’s it!

If you are looking for a place to keep all your writing, have a one-stop top and middle funnel for your readers, and want to have the tools to connect with your readers and do Live videos and have the option to add in a podcast, I can honestly say Substack is a great choice. Plus you get all that for free.

Other things to know: To set up payments, you’ll need a Stripe account, and Substack takes 10% of the earnings and there is a Stripe fee as well.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments. I’m happy to help!

This is an amazing opportunity for writers who have never been published by a big 5 publisher! Read on oh aspiring writers of short stories!

Today Chuck Palahniuk shared this message to his Substack subscribers:

The Writers Guidelines for the Views From the Overlook Anthology

Here they are, the much-anticipated guidelines!

VIEWS FROM THE OVERLOOK

An anthology of stories set in the infamous hotel from Stephen King’s THE SHINING, edited by Jamie Flanagan, with foreword by Mick Garris, to be published by Vintage Books in 2027.

FEATURING STORIES BY…

Michael Bailey, Chelsea Cain, Johnny Compton, Mike Flanagan, Christopher Golden, Justina Ireland, Ai Jiang, Alma Katsu, Brian Keene, Daniel Kraus, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Chuck Palahniuk, and more.

WHO SHOULD SUBMIT?

• We’re looking for a new voice.

ELIGIBILITY FOR OPEN CALL

• Author must submit an original, unpublished work

• Author must not have a book published through a traditional big 5 publisher

SUBMISSIONS

Short stories that take place in Stephen King’s world of THE SHINING, prior to the Torrance family’s arrival at the Overlook Hotel. The anthology will be based on lore from King’s writings (follow the books; not the films). We are seeking original, unpublished works only. No simultaneous submissions, please.
(Note: we originally proposed a single setting—the Overlook Hotel—and a narrow timeline. We’ve removed those restrictions. Follow your muse.)

Jamie will be working alongside open-call readers to judge submissions. To ensure a fair process, they will utilize blind submissions. Before stories are acquired and authors are awarded contracts, submissions will also be reviewed by editors at Vintage Books.

Short Story Submission Details

• Word Count: 3k-5k

• Compensation: $2,000 USD advance ahead of royalties (the same professional rate as all other invited contributors)

• File Format: Microsoft Word .doc or .docx

• Multiple Submissions: No.

• Reprints: No.

• Formatting Guidelines: https://www.shunn.net/format/classic

SUBMISSION WINDOW

Based on community feedback, we’ve extended our proposed deadline by an extra month to help authors reach their goals. The original proposal of “first come, first served” has also been scrapped. Submissions will remain open for 24 hours. All submissions received during that time period will be considered.

• Submissions will open: March 1st, 2026, at 12:01am EST

• Submissions will close: March 2nd, 2026, at 12:01am EST

• Submissions will be handled through Moksha. Submission link to come.

• Instant rejections: reprints, excerpts, plagiarized works, references to works not in the public domain, poetry, works that contain hate speech or discrimination of any kind other than to fight against such horrible things, and anything generated by A.I.

From the editor:

While we can’t promise more than one open-call slot at this time, the best leverage an editor can have is a story in hand. One that we—and our publishing partners—can’t imagine the anthology without. Should the call yield more than one such tale, that’s a problem—and conversation—I dearly hope to have.¹

Stay safe. Stay kind.

Jamie Flanagan 10.22.26

In Secrets to Writing a Romance by K. Stanley and L. O’Donnell, I learned something new and exciting. With the romance genre, you need to craft your story around not one but two story arcs.

For anyone new to story arcs, these are the rails every fiction is driven on with five critical stations along the way: Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Middle Plot Point, Plot Point 2, Climax and (one less critical but important final stop) Resolution.

At the end of the line, you can look back and see a clear starting point for the story (Inciting Incident), and a clear ending point (Resolution) and a change in the character from state A (i.e. single and unhappy) to state B (i.e. in love and happy). Usually it’s for the better, but occasionally, it can be for the worse. It really depends on the story the author wants to tell.

But getting back to the new thing I learned: Romance has two story arcs. A specific Romance story arc which is the main story arc and an External story arc. Figuring out these plot points and putting them together in the right order of priority is what makes for a dynamic romance novel.

If you are a reader of my books, you might be surprised to learn that I have never written a ‘real’ romance. My books have plenty of romance tropes in them - enemies to lovers is a big one - but they are not romance novels.

The romance plotline(s) of my books burn along behind the external story arc. In The Lost Valor of Love, the external story arc is Istara freeing herself from being the pawn of kings and gods and carving her own path in a patriarchal society that treats woman (including queens) like disposable currency.

Her sacrifices were huge, and the stakes were insane, but she pursued her goal anyway. Her forbidden love affair with Sethi, Egypt’s commander of the armies (though a hugely popular aspect of the story) was secondary to her arc.

In the image above, I took some liberties with the outline plan discussed in the book and added in mood board elements. Along the left side you have the romance story arc beats/scenes (Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1 and so on), these track the main story arc of the romance.

On the right hand side you have the external story arc which runs alongside the romance and supports the romance arc at each story arc beat/scene.

In If Only . . . the story begins before the Inciting Incident with the heroine, Erin, dealing with a humiliating public breakup with a famous tech bro. As a writer, she is offered an opportunity to be disruptive by writing a book detailing all things bad about AI.

The publishing house is counting on her using her insider access to give the book its credibility. That’s the beginning of the external story arc. Erin needs to overcome her humiliation and redeem herself in the eyes of the public with a comeback book that discredits the marketing ploys and lies of her tech bro ex.

However, she is also lonely and depressed. She loved being in a relationship, and being cut adrift and replaced by someone else publicly has left her deeply hurt and questioning her worth. Abandoned by her social circle, she turns to a Chatbot and shares her woes. It asks her what might cheer her up and she jokingly mentions a well-known celebrity she’s always had a crush on could make her feel better.

Enter Inciting Incident: A few days later, there’s a knock at her door. She opens it to . . . the celebrity she mentioned. Only it’s not him, but a perfect reproduction of him, right down to the stubble on his chin. He claims to have been reading her chat and comes from an advanced AI lab. He says he wants to learn how to be human - maybe she could help him?

That Inciting Incident then begins the journey Erin takes as she works through her issues of worth, and her growing connection with her new companion as her emotions shift from sadness, to hope, to love, and finally to despair when she discovers she’s been the unwitting victim of her ex’s cruelty, greed, and power.

By reading through the If Only . . . story arcs from the bottom, you will see how the story unfolds across the two arcs. Note how the romance arc is the arc that drives the story forward through each story arc beat/scene. The external arc keeps things anchored to the realities of Erin’s external goal.

A good way to test if the romance arc is the main arc is to take it away from the story. Does the story still make sense without it? Yes? Then the romance arc is not your main arc. However, if the external arc doesn’t make sense without the romance arc, you’ve nailed it.

If Only . . . has yet to be written, but without this framework set up I’m not sure I would have been able to tackle writing a romance as the genre requires. There is much more helpful knowledge and information in Secrets to Writing a Romance. If you want to understand the craft of writing romance, I definitely recommend you add this book to your writer’s toolbox. It is an essential reference for every writer of romance!

That’s the million dollar question. And the ten cent answer is: writing great copy.

Don’t know how to write copy or even what copy is? Never fear, as a paid copywriter for four years working on multiple campaigns, I can help with that.

But first, let’s accept some cold, hard marketing facts.

Great copy converts into sales. It’s almost like magic.

But! To get that coveted conversion you first have to engage your reader so they keep reading…

… all the way

…to the

…buy button (and then click it).

That’s great copy.

But what is great copy really?

It’s a magical combination of words.

Un-magical words are 100% the reason why our ecourses, masterclasses, workshops, and book promo ads end up unclicked and languishing in the lost corridors of the metaverse.

Our words just weren’t magical enough.

Why? Because they first need to do two things…

1. Capture attention in a crowded, noisy, distraction-driven online space

2. Gain trust when online trust levels are at an all-time low

And that’s where copy beats prose hands down. Copy is a unique writing skill that takes a bunch of words and abracadabras them into something magical.

But let’s go back to your product no one is buying. You worked hard on it and know it can add value to the lives of others. The problem is how to get it selling without sacrificing your ethics.

But you’re a creator. Not a copywriter.

Dilemma.

Because even if you are a bestselling, award-winning author, prose and copy are two very different animals. Like…jaguar to koala bear different. The only thing they have in common is they like to hang out in trees.

But one will have the other for breakfast. And that’s why copy makes creators like us edgy.

For most, writing copy feels a little bit shady, kind of predatory, and at times, downright icky.

But it doesn’t have to be shady, predatory or icky. There is another way.

Before we get to that, it might help to dive into a bit of copy history…it will be worth it. I promise.

On May 29, 1886, Coca-Cola hit the ground running with its first ad in the Atlanta Journal. It was a small, text-only ad that read:

Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!

All hyperbole aside, this little line of text fathered a multi-billion dollar industry.

Building a bridge from product to trust was key to Coca-Cola’s success. As a brand new beverage no one had ever experienced before, they built relatability to their target market through a variety of ads, and by understanding the needs of each one, they gained trust, and with trust came sales, and then…loyalty.

In this 1907 ad run in Good Housekeeping, upper-middle class women discovered they could soften the transition from the excitement of the theatre to hum-drum reality with a refreshing Coca-Cola.

It didn’t happen overnight, but once the writers at Coca-Cola started to get the hang of things, there was no stopping them.

Then, in a perfect alignment of factors: a homogenous target market, high levels of trust in consumer goods (thanks to the smart marketing strategy of Coca-Cola that other businesses mimicked), and large amounts of disposable income, sales/ad copy became a force to be reckoned with.

After WW2, during the 1950s direct sales copy hit its stride when folks were busy getting married, raising families, and enjoying the economic post-war boom.

Dropped into mailboxes, these flyers were usually comprised of double-sided letter-size ads absolutely crammed with tiny-fonted content about a product or service. Through clever copy, they navigated the reader from one pain point to the next, solving each with their solution, alongside sidebars filled with life-changing success stories, testimonials, tips, plus an array of exclusive bonuses and unmissable extras that would arrive only with an order of their product.

Generally, these products were items a housewife would care about, like the convenience of a four-slice toaster to get all the kids fed breakfast quickly, or, a new vacuum cleaner with a built-in sanitizing filter, or pairs of trousers guaranteed to never crease (to save time ironing obviously), or some new-fangled gadget for the kitchen no one else had yet…you name it, you can bet there was Direct Sales Marketing copy written about it.

Whatever it was, the most important thing was to first build trust.

And these long, long, LONG ads did exactly that.

They appealed to housewives stuck at home with engaging, relatable stories empathizing with their underappreciated pain points along with convincing, neat, easy solutions.

It was insanely effective.

Sales boomed and any business with a decent copywriter was making a mint.

Fast forward to 2022.

What was effective when people had the time and attention span to give copy the space to do its job has been whittled down to a razor-thin slice of copy trapped in a scrollable, hyper-saturated, eye-blinding metaverse of me-firstism.

So. Does that mean copy, as it came to be, is dead?

No. Well, sort of.

At least the way it used to be is definitely dead. I mean, unless your target market is the Silent Generation (age 75+) then maaaybe it might still work, and if that’s your target market, well, you can stop reading, in fact, I don’t even know why you’re here. Go make some money with your words!

Anyway, for the rest of us slogging it out in the bloody arena of cyberspace, what worked in the 1950s now needs to snort a truckload of Ritalin to have the chops to capture the target markets of this century. (And sure as heck, it’s not housewives taking a tea break from hanging laundry on the line).

So knowing who you are writing to, how they think, what they want, and how to engage them is only part of the battle. You also need to have a good grasp of SEO if you want any chance of your copy to even be seen in the first place.

Nightmare right?

Not much wonder our products get lost in the vast dark void of the Internet. And not much wonder so many people give up and go back to just being creative and hoping that their products will somehow sell on the back of their good name.

Good luck with that. Unless you’re Oprah-famous, then yes, you can coast on your name. But let’s stick to the majority.

The majority are stuck. Their products are stuck. And the more they try to sell their products with paid ads on Facebook or through Giveaways, the worse things get.

Because buyers are exactly like cats. The more you chase them, the more they run. The more you act like you don’t care about them, the more they want your attention.

Yes. Cats could teach us a lot about copywriting.

Except they can’t. Because they’re cats. But the concept is solid.

So here’s where the magic happens using a little formula I have found works - let’s go with the cat concept for this…

Cat is just sitting there, doing nothing, vegging out (potential client)

1. Walk into room and start to wiggle new feather toy (capture attention)

2. While ignoring them, build their interest with a few whirls and floofs of the feather (build trust)

3. Put it down and walk away (hand over the trust that you have captured their interest and gained their trust)

4. Two minutes later the cat is all over the feather toy, having a wonderful time (link clicked)

Why?

Because:

You’re all: Ohhh look at this new amazing thing (target market is important here, you’re hardly going to wiggle a feather toy in front of a cow, although you’d be surprised how many of us do just that and wonder why we don’t sell anything).

BUT, you are also super casual about it too, like: I’m just playing with this amazing thing. Oh look it does some other cute things too…this is important because it is as if you are discovering these things at the same time as them which builds trust.

Once you have finished enjoying it, put it down and leave it there. If you have targeted your market correctly, and you have demonstrated your product or service in a way that will capture their interest and make them want to know more, they will check it out. Meaning…they will click the link to either buy it or learn more.

And that’s the magic of copy.

Minus the oily used car salesman ick.

It’s honest, it’s interesting, and most importantly, it builds trust.

And as those very first writers of copy for Coca-Cola learned, trust is everything.

Trust builds loyalty.

Loyalty builds a brand.

And brands that are trusted, sell.

If you're an indie author, you need to read this post. Maybe you'll love it, or maybe you'll hate it, either way, what I'm about to share is going to challenge everything indies have been told about ‘how to succeed’ and turn it on its head.

First off, two important points:

1. This post is not a lead magnet, there is no upsell, no webinar, no ecourse, ebook or coaching sessions to access the ‘secret solution’ to solve all your indie author issues and turn you into a ‘#1 Amazon best-seller’ (for just 99 bucks or whatever).

I'm writing this because I believe in community and the sharing of hard-earned knowledge for free. I don't believe in snake-oil salesmen, crafty clickbait, long, boring, self-congratulatory, time-wasting webinars that are 98% self-promotion and 2% useless information that we already know, or emoji lists that bang on about all the awesome things that will happen if you do whatever the guy behind the curtain says you need to do to magically find the success that's been eluding you ALL. THIS. TIME. like they know something you don't. Spoiler: they don't, they just want your money.

2. I have spent the last year and a half researching the architecture of the indie industry, paying attention to trends, reading everything that the top indies are promoting as secrets to success and then digging behind them to understand what's really happening that's preventing us from reaching that ever vanishing goal of success (and keeping us wasting time from actually writing great stories and getting fans) so we can beat this game that is beating us indies to death.

So it's time to go hardcore. And I mean, hardcore. Scary core. The wins don't come from following the herd, from being derivative, or from trying to be the next big thing when there are no next big things left to grow into.

That means it's time to pivot.

Here's what to pivot away from

1. Creating lead magnets to get sign-ups to your newsletter.

It's 2025, and everyone and their donkey has a lead magnet they are offering, and you know what? People are drowning in content, most of it free.

Ask yourself: why would your lead magnet make any difference to a potential sign up? It won't. If it involves them having to give up more than one second of their time to collect it, they are going to move on. Freebies are worthless now, even full-length free books have no real value anymore what with Amazon's Kindle Unlimited turning our books into what Spotify has done to music.

Worse, if they have to do some actual work, like having to click a link, then download the book from Book Funnel or wherever it's parked and tuck it onto their mobile device along with the other thousands of freebies they've collected? It's not going to happen. That level of investment of time and energy is a decade old from the halcyon time when people cared, when things had value, and people were appreciative of something nice for free. Not anymore.

Social media has reprogrammed us to have the attention span of a mayfly. A study (ironically by Microsoft) found that social media has reduced the average American's attention span to less than a goldfish. So if you think they will follow your lead magnet and download it with an attention span that short, think again. Stop wasting your time, money and energy.

2. Newsletters sent from your author website via Mailerlite, Mailchimp, etc.

You probably think I'm nuts. I'm not. I'll explain. Back in 2022, there was a whole hoo-ha that Apple's newest iPhone would change the whole email game. During set up, users were offered an option to allow Apple to field your emails so only the ones you really want to see land in your Inbox (like from your grandma) but not the emails you are subscribed to, unless you go and triple confirm with them that you really, really, really, REALLY want that subscription to continue, and even then reports came out they still never came through.

In the hopes of trying to do damage control, indies on the ball sent out super helpful whitelist instructions to their subs warning what was to come - not that anyone cared. I mean why would they? It's hassle, right? And we live in a world where hassle is a four-letter word. So, back to Apple who made it pretty near impossible for your newsletters to reach your readers since their server just stops them at the gate. So. They. Never. Get. In.

Worse, Google and all the other big players have since emulated this form of email control. The idea is to protect their clients from getting overloaded with garbage emails (since unsubscribing to those sites that offer those tasty one-time discounts to buy something from them in exchange for your email is like, so. much. effort). Enter the four horsemen of the email apocalypse. Apple. Yahoo. Gmail. Outlook. And kiss your hours and hours of clever newsletter writing goodbye.

But wait, there's more. We also lost the visibility to make sure our newsletters were getting to the readers we wanted to reach. Did you write a new sci-fi? Great! Send it to your sci-fi list, but now, because you can't see if your emails are actually being delivered for real, you are getting false stats that they are because the gatekeepers holding them back are letting you think they are going through. Even though they are not.

I'll let you digest just how messed up that is.

Moving on.

3. Sweepstakes contests from freebie seekers (that you pay for, over and over for zero gain).

For those of you new to this, it's legit and was once a great model for growing your subs but with the changes above, it's more like throwing money into a fire to watch it burn. So, here's how it works, to win a whole bunch of free books, freebie seekers enter an email address via the sweepstakes site where your book is included as a prize (you have to send out to them at your own expense). You pay to get that list of sign-ups in a csv file you can pop into your mail system like Mailerlite.

Awesome right? Because now, suddenly you have a whole bunch of new emails on your mailing list which makes your feel pretty good except when you go to email your shiny new list you get a message that you have crossed the free threshold of 1000 subs and now need to pay hundreds of dollars to keep mailing your subs.

And here's the really crappy bit, the mailing system counts unique subs, which includes all those people who subscribed just to win and then unsubbed when they didn't. So now you have to pay to email 800 people (that you could have emailed for free) because 200 unsubbed or worse, complained you are spam when they double consented to receive your mails! That's a nice sure-fire way to get your emails parked in the spam/promo folders. Great.

So keep your money in your pocket. Building an email list with sweepstakes was a good a idea once, now it's a Trojan horse to your reputation, your ability to contact your readers, your bank balance and ultimately, your sanity.

4. IG reels, stories, TikTok videos, book trailers, or any kind of social media video-based content.

These potentially enjoyable but ridiculously time-consuming projects don't convert into real, sustainable sales. Video content doesn't bring in real revenue. They just don't. Its ROI is worse than not doing anything. It's hobby level stuff. Do it if it's fun, and you like it and it stimulates your creative juices, but don't do it in the belief you are going to derive sales from them - and definitely don't let it eat up core creativity energy needed for your true talent: writing.

The unfortunate reality is most reels are not even watched to the end, most people glance at them for one or two seconds max and scroll on, their attention often on something else at the same time, like kids, a conversation, a show on Netflix, you name it. Reels are just about the most useless way to get serious traction as an indie.

Social media has trained us to keep scrolling for that next big hit, laugh, shock, whatever, non-stop, so the chance that YOUR reel is going to get scrollers to actually leave the platform and go through the steps to check out your book is infinitesimal. It's probably crappy to read this, but if you want to succeed as an author, making reels isn't the way you will do it.

Reels come AFTER you're a mega success and people are coming to your feed to see what you are posting, not the other way around.

If you need a break to make a comforting cup of tea or pour a glass of wine, I understand. It's not what we want to hear, but are Reels working to make sales, real sales for your books? No. So. Let. It. Go.

5. Book launch campaigns designed to get the coveted Amazon best-seller badge.

There are so many high-level indies who have written about this, the clever strategies that can be used to turn an unknown author into an overnight (one day) success simply by tricking the algorithm into noticing your brand new book is getting a ton of sales in one of the tens of thousands of obscure categories Amazon allows authors to choose from.

Until recent developments at Amazon, this could happen because an indie spent a lot of time, money and energy making a ton of noise about their upcoming book so people would be pumped to buy it on its release day. Add to that your "Street Team", influencers and readers who make sure their followers know about your book and review it on release day.

There's a lot of mutual back-scratching and glad-handing in this model, but if you really want to be a bestseller on Amazon, the legwork is worth it. Or you could get your book on a promo site and pay big bucks to get them to advertise your books to their list and watch the sales roll in. And for a time, this nifty little algorithm-tricking strategy worked. I even hit #1 best-seller with The Call of Eternity.

Amazon has since changed how its ranking system works. Lots of digital ink has been spilled about this, and if you are a savvy indie author you probably are already all over this, but the bottom line is instead of ranks for sales, reviews and ratings running in real-time and updating every hour, they are now lagging days behind, so things level out and those big, lovely spikes on launch day just sort of fade into the background. This has made a lot of indies very, very unhappy. Understandably so. But that's what you get when you let a monolith control an entire industry. It's their platform and their rules.

And these five reasons alone should tell any indie author that it's past time to pivot.

What to pivot to

The trends of how people consume content (including books) is clear. Research has proven without any shred of doubt we've been trained to have a short attention span so we can have a snowball's chance in hell to see 0.0000000001% of the content that's out there before we kick the bucket, which means if you are an indie author, you need to deliver stories in delicious, glorious, digestible pieces. Think canapés, tapas, tiny, eye-catching, irresistible portions on a silver platter, yummy and addictive.

Because...If you get this right, you are going to go a long way. If you don't, well don't say you weren't given the option to at least try.

Here we go:

1. Serialization is the new black

If you are a die-hard author who needs to plan, write, edit and publish a book as an entire entity like any respectable author worth their salt, you are probably going to hate this, because it's anathema to what we writers were brought up to believe in the religion of writing the great American novel.

Because let’s face it…Serialization is kind of...sleazy.

There's a reason they were called potboilers back in the day because when Dickens was writing them, he did it to keep the food cooking (ie. the pot boiling). But these are strange times, and with strange times come strange opportunities.

I have always been uncomfortable with serialization as a main form of income over selling actual books. But I also struggle to turn a blind eye to proven research, trends that aren't going to change anytime soon, and making money. And facts, no matter how ugly they are, are still facts.

So, if you are still with me on this, you can tackle your adventure into serialization in one of two ways. Either write out an entire book and then upload it onto a story platform like Wattpad and if it's good, you are going to grow your fans and followers (bonus points for interacting with them in the comments), or you can just pants the whole thing and make up a new chapter (called episodes) as you go. Just make sure to update on a regular basis or you'll lose fans. And of course, make sure to keep people curious about what will happen next...

Now, where does the money come in from serialization? To answer that, I need to take a step back. With Wattpad, for example, your stories will be free to read (with annoying ads that break up the pace of your story and can lead readers away from your story to an addictive gaming app) or, readers can subscribe to Wattpad and read your stories without the ads, but all that nice subscription money goes to HQ, not you. (Boo).

I am one of the writers Wattpad HQ took under their wing. I never became a Star because I chose to self-publish and keep my rights, but for several very exciting months via my agent at Wattpad, Alibaba proposed to buy exclusive audio rights to The Lost Valor of Love to create a full cast dramatization in Chinese and English (like that wouldn't have bought me a house!!). It fell through at the 11th hour, but I swear to god, Wattpad can open doors for writers that would otherwise likely never have a chance in the world of traditional publishing. These days, Wattpad is the benchmark all other serialization platforms are measured against. They caught onto something early on, and now everyone is jumping on board looking to get their slice of this very lucrative (serialization) pie.

After Alibaba, I went my own way and kept writing and self-publishing my books, carving my own path, barely even looking at Wattpad or the thousands of followers and fans I had. I thought those days were done, that I had grown up and joined the big leagues.

Then something amazing happened. Over the last ten months, I started to get emails, a lot of them. From a lot of good places. And this is where one can't underestimate the power of sharing your work for free. You'll get found (and where did they find me? Wattpad). Remember, you are a content provider and what are platforms looking for? Content providers, especially ones that keep people reading (and paying).

So it's thanks to my presence on Wattpad I now have been contacted by Tales, Lure, Dreame (StaryWriting) and even a webtoon platform in Seoul, Korea to write for them as a featured writer. The moral of this story?

Serialization is the new black.

How much can you make? Depending on what you are writing (hint: romance is big money) A LOT OF MONEY. (Not that I have earned that, but I read an 18-year-old on Dreame was getting $10k a month for her romances).

When these platforms approach you, be prepared for the hard sell, they are going to want you to go exclusive. (I chose non-exclusive since I am protective of my rights, because you never know if there could be a film deal on the table one day, and I don't want to regret giving up my rights for buttons), but there is of course more money to be made upfront if you choose to go exclusive.

To go non-exclusive, if you are with KDP Select you'll have to kill that (Amazon won't allow you to have your ebooks anywhere else apart from a 10% sample - including on your website), which given the circumstances facing indies on Amazon isn't much of a loss. It's time to pivot. It's time to listen to the trend and stretch one's writerly wings.

In other words - it's time to get some pots boiling.

2. Substack

If you haven't started your newsletter on Substack, then you need to get on this virtual bandwagon. Stat.

Why?

Because Substack represents a delectable cross-section between enjoying total creative freedom and attracting the right readers without all the weirdness attached to the insane circus of social media. You can open opportunities to subscription earnings, recognition and genuine fans who haven't been cultivated through gimmicks, freebies or redundant lead magnets, but via honest-to-god brilliant content. Your content. Uncensored and unlimited by any character counts.

So if you want to have actual leverage over your success, build a following, and get things off your chest, Substack is where you can write newsletters about what you want plus have the power to choose how much of your content is free and what is subscription-based. Spend some time thinking this over because it can be a deal-breaker between your newsletter earning big or vanishing into thin air.

And no, you don't have to write about your writing. Write about what matters to you, cats, tea, knitting, pickling onions, K-Dramas, autism, whatever floats your boat, just be real. Because what's missing in this disconnected world is connection. Make a connection with your readers and you're golden. (And they will probably buy your books, too)

In this changing world, producing books is no longer enough for 99.9% of indie authors to earn money - as in publish, put it up and wait for the sales to roll in. Oh, wouldn’t that be grand?

Now, it’s you as the person, the author behind the words that will lead readers to your books. Let that sink in. To find your readers, you need to let them get to know you.

In a world of disconnection, your best marketing tool is you. Your stories came from your heart and imagination. You are unique and interesting. I know if Donna Tartt started a Substack writing about her cat (if she even has one, who knows) I would be all over that.

Readers want to find writers they can relate to. So, to connect to your ideal readers, simply write about what makes you tick and publish it. You can pop it on your blog on your website, but you’re going to get a lot more exposure on a platform like Substack that is packed with readers who want to read things from real people who have opted out of the social media hype. If you write about what you love and care about, you’ll find your readers, and the book sales will follow.

I promise.

3. Write to Market

Yes. I too swore I would never lower myself to writing to market. I love to write hard sci-fi, and work with physicists at CERN to make sure my science is theoretically correct, that if we had the tech, my story could really happen, a purist to the core.

But.

Purism doesn't pay the rent. Stories people want to read, does. So compromises must be made to navigate this brutally changing world where AI-using hustlers are trying to do what actual, talented humans have been doing since the dawn of time. That’s a whole other essay, but for now, let it be said I don’t think AI will ever overtake true human storytelling.

LLMs can only generate patterns from prompts. They can only generate derivative (and stolen) work because they cannot have a single original thought. If they did, they would Artificial Sentient Intelligence and we’re a long way from that. Don’t believe the hype.

The path the tech bros chose of piling on money, water and energy, and trying to scale in one direction has hit the wall. This is as good as it gets folks. To get to ASI they need to follow a whole other path and that will take decades. I’ll share more about this in another essay soon.

As writers, our enemy is not LLMs (AI) per se, it’s the shysters looking to make a quick buck off generating AI slop. Those people are the creative’s enemy. But if you are driven to write, have stories piling up in your head and know that your words on paper make you feel an inexplicable joy. Keep Writing. AI doesn’t hold a candle to that.

We live in a tough world, but we are the chosen ones: the creatives, writers, and storytellers, the most ancient and blessed of folk. We can't lose sight of who we are and what we have the power to do. We can take people away from their cares and grant them an escape they may badly need. Don't let this world tear you down.

Just write. Post it on Wattpad, or Inkitt, or Radish, wherever you want. Where you feel at home.

And the readers will come. Be authentic. Stay true to your art. Keep writing. Even in the darkest of times, we will prevail.

With all my love,

E A

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