I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone that I’ve, once again, decided to change directions. The breakthrough I mentioned in my post, Have I Finally Found a Marketable Niche? remains a breakthrough. I still really like the ideas I came up with. I like those ideas as MF, and I like them as romances. I even thought my overall new pen name concept was a good one. Then I made the mistake of researching AI’s impact on indie author publishing.
In a nutshell, it hasn’t been good for KU authors writing in well-defined profitable niches. Yes, the chances of me making a living, or just more income faster, are still much higher than doing whatever the hell I’m doing, but it woke me up to the reality that none of this is guaranteed, and it will take a lot of hard work and dedication.
I recently chose to really give building author websites a go as a business because I kept making the same mistake day job-wise: Chasing something I really wanted, turning around to run to the safer thing when the opportunity presented itself, getting burnt out and quitting the safe thing, then returning to the thing I really wanted.
I decided I just needed to commit to the less safe thing and give it my all. It would end up being more “safe” long-term because it was actually sustainable for my brain.
I think I’ve come to a similar conclusion about my writing.
The problem with trying to focus on this new gothic dark romance pen name isn’t that I wouldn’t enjoy writing the stories I come up with. It’s that I don’t think I could take the rigidity of only writing those stories long enough to gain traction.
In theory, I love the idea of ideal publishing strategies and well-defined marketable niches. I want to give myself the best chance of success at this author thing. But it just doesn’t gel with my chaotic little AuDHD brain, and at some point, I have to concede that writing something semi-consistently in an unoptimized way is better than writing nothing under a perfectly optimized plan.
With that in mind, here’s what I’m trying next:
- Writing exactly what I want, all under Taryn Moreau: Could be dark romance, pure gothic, high dark fantasy, modern-day paranormal fiction, dark erotica, a random-ass paranormal romance, etc. Relationships could be MF, MF + multi-gender multiple partners, FFM, MFFFFF+, whatever the hell I want. I’ll continue to make story-level decisions based on what I want the story to be and what I feel is true for it, not what’s most marketable. You can continue to expect almost everything I write will be decently crafted, darkly erotic, and fantasy or paranormal.
- Not having a publishing plan: I’m wired for exploration and driven by interest, but my perfectionism craves certainty of outcomes so much that I’ve stifled the things that drive me and have stalled nearly all progress with decision paralysis, trying to figure out the plan that will guarantee my success as an author. For the foreseeable future, my publishing plan will be to write and publish what I feel driven to write, and to challenge myself to do it often.
- Marketing my work, even if I don’t feel like it’s good enough: I have it in my head that I’ll go back and make my work better one day. It’s not ready to be promoted. Or it’s not a novel, so I shouldn’t promote it. I think I’ll start with simply picking a social media platform or two to publish on, come up with a schedule and loose guidelines just to keep myself moving, and primarily focus on talking about the books and fictional topics I’m passionate about for now. That, and restarting my monthly newsletter. Just doing things I enjoy doing and not worrying about if it’s perfectly optimized to get the most or the most relevant audience or whatever.
- Practicing imperfectionism: Perfectionism has kept me from so much for so long. It’s negatively impacted my health and my finances and has kept me largely unproductive. I’m dedicating myself to getting used to not creating perfect stories. No more spending an extra year on a story because I feel like I could still make it better. No more postponing the stories of my heart because I want so badly for them to be the perfect version I have in my head. I want to write good stories, but for now, my focus will be on writing (and finishing!) good enough stories rather than the absolute best version of a story I can. My covers don’t need to be perfect. My prose doesn’t need to be elevated. I can make mistakes and not spend an eternity trying to get everything just right.
- Building a more suitable community: One of the biggest hangups I’ve had with writing what I write under Taryn Moreau actually has little to do with feeling like I can’t be successful. It’s feeling like I don’t belong anywhere. I badly want to join in all the reindeer games, and I feel like that would really help me gain momentum. I want to do newsletter swaps, group promos, join anthologies, go to author events, participate in a mastermind group, and just have author buddies who can actually help me and vice versa because we’re writing the same genre. This will remain an uphill battle, I’m sure, but I can try to sniff out more authors who are at least writing erotic horror and not pre-exclude myself. I can build a space for these authors somewhere, if there isn’t one already. A Facebook group or Discord or something. Do it messily but do it.
- Focusing on novels: Novel writing has been my white whale for well over a decade now. I’ve written short stories and novellas, and am starting to write novellas almost consistently now. So I think it’s time to focus almost solely on trying to write novels. First, because almost all of my favorite ideas require the space of a novel, but also because novels are more marketable with more longevity in the marketplace, I think I could get away with putting them on mainstream retailers more easily, and because I hate feeling like I can’t share what I write as an author since right now, it’s mainly erotica instead of longer, more story-driven books.
- Figuring out my writing process: Simply finishing novel-length projects is something I know I should be focusing on above all else. Writing short stories and novellas, I’ve noticed that I tend to expand from the inside out. I write the core of the story as a short, novellette, or novella. And if called to, I start expanding places that feel like they need expanding, until I have the finished work. I think that’s going to be the basis of my novel-writing process. Outline, making sure I know the premise, the ending I want, and the main story engine, at least. Probably add some key plot points. Write that short(er) first draft. Then expand wherever it makes sense to. It feels unorthodox and scarily intuitive, but I just have to learn to be okay with that.
So there it is. The next strategy to try. No pressuring myself to follow an optimized plan or to do things perfectly. The goal is to start writing, finishing, and publishing more. Over time, maybe I’ll form better systems. For the love of god, I hope this sticks long enough for me to at least publish one novel. Maybe I’ll report here from time to time on how it’s going.