About a year ago a super famous author spoke to my writer group (Apex Writers) during a zoom meeting. This man has sold millions of copies of his books and he’s a household name at least in the SFF world. Now, our group is made up of a lot of different writers at various levels in their careers, to people just starting out to people like me who’ve published 10+ book, and while a lot of us are pursuing the indie path there is a significant chunk of us who want to break into traditional publishing.
So, this very famous author was telling the story of how he broke into the industry, and he said he’d sent out query after query to agents (this was around 2000 I think but don’t quote me on that it doesn’t really matter) and kept getting rejected. He finally went to a conference, and a mutual friend introduced him to an agent who was also attending. Now, this was an agent who’d already rejected him, but he had lunch with her, and they bonded about nerd stuff, and especially their love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the agent told him to send his book to her again and she’d take another look. ‘Anything for a fellow Buffy Fan!’ She took another look, signed him, and the rest is publishing history.
Now, the writer meant this story to be uplifting and inspirational, sort of: ‘You never know what is going to get you in the door!’ And I can see how it is that, but for several of my friends who are pursuing traditional publishing, this story was deeply depressing. One friend put it best: ‘It just proves that it’s not about the strength of your work, it’s about personal connections and the mood the agent is in when they read the submission.’ For those of you who are in the query trenches, this seems deeply discouraging, especially if you’re more introverted or (just as likely) you don’t have the budget to attend a lot of conferences and make connections in person.
Now, for me there’s a little bit of tension in these types of stories, and any successful writer who’s being honest will tell you that while these stories can be interesting, there’s usually very little in the way of useful advice in them. People who break in (whatever that looks like) usually have an extremely specific story of how they did it, and that story is generally not replicable. Not because anyone is being a jerk, but because creative careers are so specific that there is no surefire way in.
If you’re going to be successful, you’re going to have to make your own path.
That advice can seem a little depressing, but for me it’s liberating. It means that there’s a way in that will work for you. Certain things must be true. The work must be strong. It’s helpful not to be a jerk to people you deal with professionally. Getting yourself out there and meeting people is absolutely valuable, but beyond those basic principles the genuine advice is just kind of ‘Good Luck <shrug emoji>.’
You can’t follow anyone else’s path. It’s covered over with thorns as soon as the person has walked it. You can learn from them what pitfalls to avoid, but they can’t really pull you up the mountain behind them. It doesn’t work that way.
Everyone’s audience is slightly different. There are no two authors who have the exact same audience. What you need to do is find your people. The good news (at least to me) is that you can have a career without having to read the mind of a gatekeeper. You can take your work directly to the market, and let readers decide, and instead of one chance to be accepted or rejected you have thousands or even millions. Because even if you do get selected by a gatekeeper, that’s no guarantee of long-term success. But it’s not as if indie publishing is this magical cure all for the gatekeeper problem. Yes, work can be evaluated directly by the market, but there is so much out there that it’s hard to be discovered, unless you spend thousands on advertising or luck into some sort of strategy that aligns with who you are and where your audience happens to be. That’s something you can work your way toward but not really plan for.
And really, though that famous author’s story made it sound like it was all about who you knew, if his work had not been strong, the agent would not have ultimately changed her mind and picked him up. The work absolutely needs to be strong, so it’s most useful for beginning writers to level up their craft through lots of writing and seeking valuable feedback.
I have been publishing seriously since April 4, 2021. It didn’t really start to grow my I audience in any appreciable way until November of 2025. What I did do was keep my head down and write and release books I was proud of. 11 between 2021 and 2025. So, what’s happening now is that readers are starting to discover me, and when they like one book they often burn through the rest of my catalog in short order. This is one of my favorite things to watch happen. Readers are finally leaving me good reviews and recommending my books in relevant reader groups. This has happened after years of putting in the work to build the catalog in the first place, and being engaging on social media. I also found out that I’m really good at writing posts about my books, and when I boost those posts, my numbers are really good. Usually around a 15% Click through Rate and a 9% conversion rate. These numbers are practically unheard of, and when readers enter my ecosystem, they usually spill over into my entire catalog.
Now, I want to be transparent. I’m not doing huge numbers financially, but compared to where I was a year ago, this feels like runaway success. I’ve gone from having months at a time with) in royalties to now earning usually between $50 and $200 dollars in a month. That is not enough to live on by any means, but it is more than a majority of indie writers make. Also, I crossed a milestone in that I have made enough money so far in 2026 that I have become perceivable as a business entity by the IRS. So, yay?
I also built a catalog with a lot of books with a similar emotional experience but different genre tropes. The Brand is my voice, not my genre or my tropes, and readers really seem to be responding to it. I did this against all industry advice, by the way. Most people will tell you to pump out books in one series or one subgenre so readers know what to expect from you, but my muse would not cooperate with that, which is why I currently have two series going at once and I’m about to add two more. I do have one complete series at this point. But this worked in my favor with my particular audience. Each book is a similar experience emotionally, but the books are very different from one another. I did this intuitively rather than intentionally, but it sems to have worked.
Traditional publishing would never have allowed me to build a career this way. When Blade of Shadows, Wings of Light did reasonably well, I would have been forced to write ten more Ascension Apocalypse books as soon as humanly possible and that might have been the only thing I was allowed to write for the rest of my career. That’s a trap many rich and successful writers are caught in, which is why you have a writer releasing book 20 of a very by-now warmed-over urban fantasy series. The writer has written other things, but they were not given much attention by the publisher. This happens a lot. You write a popular dog wizard book (as an example) and you become the dog wizard guy for the rest of your life when your heart yearns to write about lemurs for a change.
The point is that there are thousands of ways to become successful in the publishing industry. There are as many different ways as there are writers. The bad news is a lot of it depends on luck and whatever is happening with the market. For advice on this approach, I highly recommend the work of Becca Syme, not only her published books but her quitcast podcast. It’s full of practical advice and it’s centered on every writer being different. As part of exploring her work I took the Clifton Strengths Inventory quiz, and it was revelatory in showing me the ways I work and how I could be successful. It kind of set me on my current path. (I should probably send Becca Syme flowers at some point but that would probably be weird.)
I don’t know if publishing is a mountain or a forest or some weird alien planet we’ve been stranded on. The good news is there are a million ways to succeed, and the bad news is none of them are easy or guaranteed. But also, in an age of indie publishing, you get multiple chances. If one thing doesn’t work, you can try something else. You can iterate endlessly. One failure does not doom your career (it might doom your chances in trad publishing, at least under that pen name, but there are many ways around that).
You will have to make your own path. The rest of us can give advice, but that’s usually just telling you where the landmines are (which yes is objectively helpful). The actual path that will work for you is something you don’t so much discover as create. Many people will sell you a supposedly replicable plan, but those people are usually making their money selling the plan and not publishing books.
So, if you’re following other people’s advice and it’s not working for you, it’s not you. Persist, and you will find your own way to break through. That’s not only the best way, but it’s also the only way.