Maintaining resilience while dealing with reality - some thoughts and strategies for authors
More ways to protect and optimise our writing energy in 2026 - plus some key stats about author earnings
I’ve written various articles about resilience over the last couple of years on the Resilient Author (for those who might have missed them, I’ll add links at the end of the post). However, one thing I haven’t written about – but I’ve been thinking a lot about recently – is resilience and staying realistic. We often talk about cultivating a resilience that will allow us to do more and get closer to our dreams, but the sobering statistics on writing (some of which I’ve outlined in the accompanying PDF) suggest that we can be as resilient as we want to be, and many of us will still struggle to earn a viable living from our work.
So, my question today is how do we find the right combination of realism, optimism AND practical action in order to feel good about keeping going and challenging those dire statistics?
How do we keep our dreams alive when we’re always uncertain if our next book will sell better than our last one?
How do we stop working ourselves to the bone trying to produce book after book, when they don’t always land the way we hope they will?
How do we get real about the challenges, while maintaining our productivity, confidence and love of storytelling?
In the past, I’ve worked way too hard to get books on the shelves: delivering a book (and publishing another one) with tiny children, working through burnout, sitting in chairs so long that I now suffer from various health-related issues including a bad back and neck. The reasons for this overwork run somewhere between a deep love of storytelling, financial need, ambition to do well in the marketplace, and because I really want to stay part of the writing industry! However, I’m reaching the grand age of 50 this year, and the thought of working in that fashion for the next decade brings me out in hives. And yet – I have so many more books I want to write! (Yep, I’m a glutton for punishment, but I know you’ll get it!) So I’ve been thinking hard about what a sustainable plan looks like for me – one that allows me to do my best work AND live my best life. With the understanding, of course, that I can’t control every single thing, and that life likes to throw curveballs* (see my current curveball at the end of this post!).
I’ve worked hard on some of my processes, which I’ll be breaking down in various posts in the weeks to come. But I’ve also worked on my mental game, because my peak sales came with my 2019 book You Don’t Know Me. I’ve published two novels since then (which is quite slow for me), and the first of them was in Covid – not in the early part when everyone was buying books, but eighteen months in, when the shops were still shut across half of Australia … And it was a dystopia! So you can imagine how well that sold – and even though it’s my highest rated book on GoodReads and the one everyone talks to me about, it’s also my Achilles heel when publishers look at my sales track (and this is despite the fact it has a TV deal with an LA company and a high-profile actress attached)!
It remains to be seen whether I can return to the kind of six-figure income I had for a few years, because the traditional publishing industry seems to get a little more clogged, and broken, and challenging every year. But I’m going to give it a damn good try! I know that practical action is the only way out of these immense challenges and the emotional fug that comes with them – it’s just choosing the right course that’s the tricky part.
On the positive side, the number of innovative, refreshing voices seem to rise each year – and I can’t help but feel buoyed and inspired every time I read of someone taking ownership of their work or creative practice and doing things differently. However, I realise we don’t always see the financial cost and/or success of such projects, and we might end up believing that people are thriving when they’re actually struggling. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in our industry, and it’s certainly evident that many self-published authors go on to take traditional publishing deals when they’re offered them.
