A long time ago there was the belief, a myth really because I don’t think it ever was true, that authors wrote books, sent them off to agents who sold them to publishers who published them and got them in front of readers. Sure, authors attended genre and more general writing-related conventions. By the time my career got started in 2002 authors were starting to blog and have a web presence. We all rushed out to create MySpace pages, networked over AOL chat rooms and ICQ messenger, and when the more modern iterations of social media arrived, we were there too. But to be honest, even in the early 2000s, while authors were starting to realize that they had to market their books too, I don’t think the message quite has settled in yet.
This isn’t something new. Authors and their publishers have been talking about authors needing to market for at least two decades now, and probably longer. The goal posts have changed, of course, as they often do in a shifting media landscape. First you needed to simply exist on social media. Then you needed to have a certain number of followers. Now it’s posting so many days and interacting with people. Lately, it’s been something else.
I’ve been hanging out in kickstarter groups, trying to learn, thinking about how I might utilize this tool in my writing work, especially my fantasy, and mostly I’ve just been exhausted reading the posts, especially right now with the global uncertainty surrounding tariffs and costs and well…everything. While I have always known intellectually that an author needs to market, and I’ve known there’s this gnawing sense of needing to do MORE (that’ll be another blog, maybe next week), my real only thought while hanging out with authors doing really big numbers on kickstarter is — when do they find time to write? Followed up by, I don’t think this is humanly possible for someone with a day job and other responsibilities.
But I didn’t write this blog just to bitch about the realities of publishing, but rather to think about how it interacts with our creative nervous system. As someone who has made the actual act of writing, of putting words to screen, fingers dancing across a keyboard, even when I’m writing a blog or something nonfiction, my happy place, all the rest of it is so NOT my happy place. And frankly as someone with AuDHD, where a desire and a “want” to do something is half the battle of wrangling executive function, that can be difficult.
I propose that it’s important that we make sure to understand the different “hats” we’re wearing as an author and for those of us who struggle with transition, learn to better understand the ways in which our brains work and be gentle with ourselves as we navigate publishing.
That is what it means to understand and navigate our creative nervous system. It’s also a part of changing our stories as authors. That begins by understanding what hats we wear, how we engage our energy, and being able to adjust to changing market conditions. How do we do that? Through our creative nervous system.