Can you downscale before you burnout?
I know a few self-published authors who are quitting the business. It's not the writing that's the hard part, it's selling the books, it's marketing, it's managing their own online shop, it's struggling to find readers and fans for your books in an age of instant social media gratification and AI slop. It’s dealing with companies that you may find morally reprehensible, but have to deal with because that’s how the market works.
Burning out, especially while running your side-hustle/hobby business, can be all too real.
I was chatting about this with a friend; it’s not just self-publishing books; most hobby business will talk about marketing, how to find readers/clients/customers, and from every perspective it’s a slog. And these leads to burnout and one less creator in the world. This isn't good.
Is there a way to stop self-publishing or small side-business burnout? To manage your mental health points/spoon count or whatever metric you want to use?
I think the best way is to work out your minimum business requirements that satisfices your business and ethical needs. Satisficing is the word I learned from project management - how can you achieve a 'good enough' result for your business goals? That's why a lot of courses/business books go on about your goals as a business owner/content creator. You need to know what you want to achieve and then what you can realistically achieve to figure out what your success story looks like.
When I started self-publishing, I didn’t want to stick all my books on Amazon in their Kindle Unlimited program (which is where readers pay a monthly subscription to read as many books in the program as they want.) I wanted to be available in many places instead. If you don’t want to be only on Amazon, there are other vendors: Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Books. Your own shop, hosted on Payhip or Shopify.
I put all my books out there, directly. And each new book release was a long, grinding slog of uploading, checking meta-data, making sure everything was correct. To the point where I was dreading release day.
Four years later, I’ve downscaled. I still want to be on other shopfronts rather than just Amazon, so I signed-up with Draft2Digital to distribute to a bunch of shops, including Apple and Barnes & Noble. One upload and they do it all for me.
Another issue is - do you need your own direct digital shopfront? A lot of business podcasts are very big on this. You must have your own shop! they say. But do you need to?
The full version of Shopify costs $29 USD a month, and I don’t make anywhere near enough to justify it. Plus, with a shop, if you are the merchant of record, you’ve got to worry about taxes and so forth. There are cheaper shops, like Payhip which works by taking a cut off each item sold, but you’re still the merchant of record with them.
Do you need to be everywhere? You could (gasp) put everything in Kindle Unlimited and not worry about other shopfronts. If you don't want to give everything over to Amazon, you could use Amazon and just Draft to Digital to get to other shopfronts, which only gives you two things to worry about. If you want paperbacks, D2D also has paperback option. Sure, you won't make as much profit, especially on paperback books, but it's one stop shop and less things to worry about.
Do you need to be on every social media platform ever? I tried that early on and failed miserably. What platform do you enjoy the most? Stick with a profile on Facebook or Instagram, but focus on Reddit, or TikTok or whatever you have the most fun with. If you don’t like social media at all, you could focus on building a newsletter.
I like blogging, and plan to do more posts this year, although I often use social media to funnel things back here where I'm happiest. I think a blog is quite versatile - you can have centralised content on your website, you can email it to people in a newsletter (giving them articles in advance or cool bonuses as well so they sign up), you can link to it on Mastodon/Bluesky or your social media of choice. If your social media enshittifies, at least you’ve got a central hub of your posts.
If you don’t like talking to people at all, and have money, you could figure out ads. Write books, build a backlist, and run ads to it once you’ve got enough things of interest. I wouldn’t bother with ads for your first book; I was told finish a series, or get at least three or six books out, then advertise it.
Anyway burnout is real and if you feel the signs of it coming on, perhaps you can downscale a bit. If you want to stay in publishing, but find it all too much at the moment, work out your minimum business requirements, what satisfices you, and go from there.