Why I'll Never Be a Successful Writer
If you want to be a successful author, you have to treat writing as a business. Businesses have rules to follow in order to pull a profit and maintain viability in a competitive work space. In other words, to translate for the Gen Alpha audience, you have to aura-farm your words to mogg on the other writers and author-max your writing, no cap. (Did I do that right? Leave a comment.)
Now, you don’t have to treat writing as a business. Especially if you decide to follow a more independently managed writing career path, you can always define your own success outside of the metrics used by traditional publishing. That’s exactly what I’m doing with my own independent publishing company where I’ve published three novels and helped two other authors publish their own books. I just want to write and publish things that are fun to read.
However, this means that I’m probably never going to be the traditional “success” promoted by Big Book™. I’m currently very satisfied with my writing career and the journey I’m embarking on, but I’m never going to be a big name on bookshelves like Agatha Christie, Stephen King, or, god forbid, James Patterson.
Here are all of the exact reasons why I’ll never be the big successful author your mom and all of your neighbors knows about:
I don't write for a target audience
Here’s the primary problem: most of my writing is just for me and what I’m interested in. Do I think it would be funny if a group of teens hunted ghosts as a satire of rural small town Kansas life that includes the Ghost of William Shakespeare as a main character that speaks exclusively in iambic parameter? Yes. Do I want to be a bit more serious to vent about mental health and promote my anti-AI agenda through the lens of a programming major dropout fighting an android army against her will to save humanity? Also yes. Do I want to write a fun story about a crew of chaotic pirates hunting lost treasure and make their two captains have a hot makeout session in a shower during the adventure? HECK YES.
But this is a huge no-no for traditionally published (and successful) authors. Traditional publishers want the writing to appeal to a specific reader interested in the book. When querying agents and editors, it is incredibly common for comp titles from already published books to be paired with the summary of the queried book just so the publisher can see where an existing audience fits for the novel. Traditional publishers want writers to know their target reader for their novels so the same audience will be interested across all novels for a consistent buyer base for the product. It makes sense, but I don’t really want to do that. I want to write what I want to write without worrying if it’s within other readers’ interests, or even within my previous audience’s interests.
I also don’t want to commit to a specific age or gender demographic for my stories. How to Survive a Ghost Story is squarely YA, but Fatal Flaws is squarely Adult and Harrock & Quimby is a mix that can be read by older YA to adult audiences. This is a wide berth of potential readers. Almost too wide. It’s not easy for bookstores to tell if my novels should consistently fit in the YA or the adult shelves.
I like the idea that all readers who enjoy fun would enjoy my writing, but this type of broad appeal means it’s harder to find my audience which, in turn, means my books aren’t as successful as the books written for specific readers in mind. I can’t maintain that specific reader demographic across all of my books that makes traditionally published authors so successful. I’m just going book-by-book at this point seeing what connects to folks.
I don't write a specific genre
Along the same lines of not writing for a specific reader, I don’t commit to a specific genre. This should be a career death sentence for most indie authors, who appear to only find success if they write for a single genre (Indie Reading Community). But I’m a voracious reader who reads across all genre lines at all times, so why would I keep myself locked to a single genre for my writing? The whole point of my writing endeavor is that I get to craft my own books for my own enjoyment and my enjoyment is not locked to a specific genre.
Unfortunately, the current expectations for authors is to commit to writing within a single genre to, again, appeal to a consistent reader and buyer base. Even some of my favorite authors will publish under pen names in order to write a new genre (hey there Rachel Hawkins/Erin Sterling). And also once again, I’m not faulting Big Book™ for promoting this specific mindset. As a reader myself, I enjoy that I can rely on specific authors for specific genres and trust that their books will meet those standards. But as a writer, I couldn’t do it. Life is just too short to not explore all sorts of different genres in my story-telling!
The smart thing for me to do would’ve been to write under a pen name for each genre, but frankly with how expansive my literary tastes are, and how I so very rarely write sequels or within the same genre, it’s not worth the effort. I already have no idea how to market my books as they currently are, so do you imagine how impossible it would be to market my books all under different names? That’s not going to work for me. So I’m going to keep writing everything under my own name and hope readers like to genre hop with me. Or maybe they’ll just enjoy a one-and-done reading experience with a single copy of one of my novels. That’s fine by me too, but it just means I’ll likely never build a huge consistent reader base that will automatically buy every single copy of my new books if I’m only appealing to one and dones.
I don't write for trends
Want to be a successful author in 2026? Write Romantasy. (Doaba Publications) With the massive success of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, romance/fantasy books are currently on a hot streak of success. BookTok has captured the genre and held it hostage against all genres, which makes it hard for non-romantasy books to break through on the platform, and currently BookTok is the hot make-it-or-break-it market for new books. (Write Stats)
The problem? I just don’t like romantasy books.
While I do love a good romance novel, I’m always a bit iffy on fantasy and find that a lot of romantasy books just don’t really appeal to my reading interests. So I’ll probably never write a romantasy because if I don’t like reading it in general, then I probably won’t be inspired or understand the genre well enough to be able to write for it on my own.
The beauty of writing is that you can write whatever you want. But with writing as a business, if you want to be successful as an author, you have to at least meet the trends in the industry a little bit. Look at the rise in popularity of “old Hollywood” type novels after the success of “Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Amy Suto). Readers like being a part of a movement and larger community reading the same type of books everyone else is. They like when they can talk about those books and get recommendations along the same lines of the books they enjoy. Even if they don’t participate in the reading community, if a reader likes one book on a topic, they will likely read more books on that topic. If something is trending, readers are going to give that novel a shot just to see what the hype is about.
Unfortunately, the length of time it takes for me to write and publish a novel also means I can never really truly follow writing trends. From a pragmatic publishing standpoint, it takes about 3-6 years for me to write and publish a book. If I wrote for the trends right now, the novel might be outdated by the time it gets published. That means, if I write for a trend, I have to predict what the trend is going to be 3-6 years in the future in order to make it relevant and also making sure it can age with the times. Big Book™ has the resources to do this. I, a one-woman and one-dog team, do not. So I’d rather just keep writing what I want to write and let my stories do their own thing against the times.
Although I will say Fatal Flaws was my attempt to write for the future when I first drafted it in 2016, assuming that everyone would be talking about robots and AI by the time it was published. Sure enough, by the time it published in 2023, the power of AI became a dominant conversation topic, so good guess, past me. But I do have another novel that had to be shelved completely because most of the plot was dependent on Twitter, which no longer exists or is super relevant in day-to-day life, so you win some, you lose some.
I’m not a fast writer
For the record, taking 3-6 years to publish a novel is a bit slow for today’s market. If I wanted to be successful, I’d be publishing at least once a year, maybe every two years. But I enjoy the way I write novels and taking my time to make sure I’m crafting a great story. You basically only get one chance to tell that specific story so why not take the time to make sure it’s the best story it can be?
I hate social media
Social media is a toxic wasteland that openly abuses users’ mental health and personal safety just to meet a bottom dollar that make the already-rich even more rich through data harvesting. (Forbes) (Lee Hopkins) . However, social media is also the necessary evil that all businesses are required to utilize for their marketing in 2026 or risk losing their livelihoods due to the sheer amount of people utilizing social media. (Forbes)
In 2026, there are 5.6 billion social media users worldwide, accounting for about 69.6% of the global population, and the number is estimated to surpass the 6 billion mark by 2028. (Resorcera) That’s a lot of potential readers that could happen to see a post about your book while scrolling through their feeds, which makes it almost a requirement for all writers to have a social media presence these days (National Business). Especially for indie authors, like myself, who don’t have quite the same amount of real life pull as a traditionally published author who might have a team of publicity agents managing their relationships to readers (or not), social media feels like the only real avenue to generate notice and promotion for your work while also remaining relatively cost effective. (So You Want to Write a Book - Substack)
But, 5.6 billion social media users worldwide is also just a lot of people online at all times. With social media prioritizing ads and suggested posts over the people you actually want to connect to, this means content on social media is incredibly super saturated at the moment. (California Learning Resource Network) There’s a certain level of time and dedication required to stand out on the platforms these days to be successful that I just refuse to commit to. I’ve already lived that life of keeping a constant eye on the feeds and living my life according to social media trends. I didn’t fully enjoy it. It was fine for the time being, but ultimately inauthentic to the life I actually wanted to live and it’s been more enjoyable living my life for me than for an audience.
So I’m likely to fail as a writer just because I refuse to commit to social media with the time and energy required to be successful on it. I also refuse to make TikToks or Instagram Reels, and those are currently the best types of social media posts to maximize engagement and get some real attention on platforms. (Digital HEC) I’ll be on social media when I want to be, but I’m not going to go out of my way to commit more of my life to online platforms when I don’t need to.
Writing is not my full time focus
As much as I would love to claim otherwise, unfortunately I cannot center my life around writing. Due to my lack of financial success as a writer (see: literally this entire post), I do have a full time day job to pay the bills and it doesn’t always allow me to focus on my own writing. I also have a dog who requires walkies and pepperoni, friends and family that I like to hang out with, non-writing hobbies that keep me occupied in downtime, and then there’s the whole “adult responsibilities” thing that usually keeps me busy with chores and other tasks in between everything else.
Writing, for me, only takes place in the snippets of time I can afford to steal away for it. I think I’m lucky in the regards that I have more time to steal than other people, but I don’t have as much time as the writers privileged enough to be able to write all day or afford a writer’s retreat or organize a book tour or take a writing class or hone their craft in other ways or literally anything else that helps writers be successful. That means my output is generally a bit smaller than people in those positions. Where a full time “successful” writer might be able to publish a new book every 1-2 years (maybe more than that), I’m limited to publishing my books about every 3-6 years. Since I’m also managing the business and promotion side of my books on my own too, that’s even less time to write as the time I steal for writing is often also the time I have to utilize for business/marketing stuff.
But I also like being on my own schedule. I like being able to set my own deadlines and schedules for my writing. I even like the flexibility with my writing time, where I can choose to draft a new novel or work on a blog post or edit a short story (or even work on marketing) rather than commit to a single project that is demanded of me from a traditional publishing contract. It’s fun having that flexibility to experiment and expand my writing opportunities rather than remaining hardlocked into a specific expectation for my writing time. The journey with writing, where I learn if writing short stories in between novels is sustainable or experiment with new content formats for my Instagram, has been very enjoyable to experience and is often very satisfying once I reach the destination I didn’t even know I was embarking towards.
There are just so many ways to determine your success as a writer. Big Book™ may never see me as a success, but I really do enjoy my writing career as it currently stands and all of the flexibility I get to practice with it. For me, it’s a tremendous success to be happy with my life and find new ways to play with words in it. Maybe that’s pursuing short stories and personal essays for a while, or maybe it’s just reading a ton of books to build a better understanding for my own writing, or maybe it’s attending writing events.
I have no idea! That’s the fun part! Writing is a journey, not a destination. I’m happy to be seen as unsuccessful if it means I get to keep lingering in the adventure of the task and do my own thing rather than treat my passion as a business to cross an arbitrary finish line to be seen as successful.
So eat your heart out, James Patterson.