Season 2 Episode 5: Why Authors Burn Out: You're Running Five Departments
Season 2, Episode 5
Knowing your House tells you how you work. It doesn't tell you how much you're being asked to do. Writing is one department out of five — creation, development, production, distribution, promotion — and a real publishing house staffs all five with actual people. You have one body and a lot of guilt about it. Every piece of advice you've ever been handed belongs to exactly one of those departments, which is why following all of it at once breaks you. Creation and promotion come nearly free to Heartweavers, creation to Wildscribes, development and distribution to Mythmakers, production and distribution to LoreKeepers. The other two cost each of them triple.
Show notes:
People keep asking me when I'm going to be a real author.
They're trying to be supportive. It still makes me want to put my head through a wall — because a real author is running an entire business, and what most people picture when they say it is someone running one department with paid help on the other four.
This episode is the map: what the five departments actually are, which piece of advice belongs to which one, and why the department you're bleeding from is almost never the one you think.
In this episode:
"When are you going to be a real author?" and why it's the wrong question
Draft Suck, and polishing the beautiful turd in development
The five departments, and which one is easiest to hand off
Why a publishing house would never talk to you the way you talk to yourself
Write every day, rapid release, build in public, don't edit while you draft — four pieces of advice, four different departments
Heartweavers and the cover they know is ugly
Wildscribes and "every Tuesday at 3"
Mythmakers, for whom promotion should just be another system and never is
LoreKeepers, and what happens when the system stops producing
Hybrids, and why you start showing other Houses when you're in distress
The question that changes your next quarter: which department is bleeding?
Questions Authors Ask About This
What are the five departments of an indie author's business?
Creation (brainstorming and drafting), development (editing and market alignment), production (covers, formatting, metadata, website), distribution (platforms, pricing, KU or wide), and promotion (reviews, launches, reader relationships). A traditional publishing house staffs all five. You're running all five alone, and then calling yourself lazy when one of them slips.
Why does writing advice work for some authors and not others?
Because almost every piece of advice applies to one specific department, and nobody tells you which. "Write every day" is creation advice. "Rapid release" is distribution advice. "Build in public" is promotion advice. "Don't edit while you draft" is development advice. Apply any of them outside the department they were built for and they fail — and you conclude you're the problem.
Which publishing tasks should I outsource first?
Production, usually. Covers, formatting, and metadata are concrete jobs with a clear finish line, which makes them the easiest to hand to someone else. The exception is Mythmakers and LoreKeepers, who tend to genuinely enjoy production and should outsource somewhere else instead.
What does it mean when a department is "bleeding"?
It's the one actively costing you books, money, or months right now — not simply the one you're worst at. The trap is over-investing in it, which strips time and energy from the departments that were working. All five are connected, so draining the ones that run well to prop up the one that doesn't breaks the whole cycle.
Can your author archetype change?
Your underlying wiring doesn't change, but under distress, trauma, or imbalance, even a die-hard LoreKeeper starts showing signs of other Houses. It's a stress response, not a reassignment.
Should I sell my books on both my author site and my publisher site?
Pick one. Selling the same book in two places doubles the maintenance for no gain. Sell through the publishing house and link to it from your author page. The people who successfully run both have staff.
Transcript — Season 2, Episode 5
So you know your House now. You know how you function and how you work.
And knowing that still isn't fixing the problem.
So today I want to talk about one of the things that might be holding you back, and it's our perception of ourselves. Let's talk about the five departments in publishing. Because the problem you're having is not that you're lazy, or that you can't stick to your guns when it comes to writing. It really comes down to the fact that writing is only one department of your publishing house.
When are you going to be a real author?
It frustrates me, and it makes me very angry, when people ask that. They're always trying to be helpful. Trying to be supportive.
Look. I don't know who you know, but I can tell you that a real author is running an entire business. What we call a real author is running one department and getting assistance with the other four.
So who's the real author here? There are arguments to be made both ways — maybe the real author is the one getting the help.
But we all have to start somewhere. And the ones who are going to be successful are the ones who start at the ground floor and build their way up, because they allow themselves to fail. That's how they learn what's actually helpful, what's actually beneficial, what actually has value. So that when they start making money, when the success starts coming, they can look back and know exactly which parts deserve the reinvestment.
Because this is a business. This is a business.
The five departments
Creation is where we have a lot of fun. Not everybody — I just talked to an author who genuinely hates the creation part and loves all the other departments, and it was fascinating to get into that headspace and see what it looks like through their eyes.
But creation is where you're brainstorming, you're writing, and you come up with Draft Suck. If you don't already call your first draft Draft Suck, I'm giving you permission to do so. Because when you do, you're giving yourself the grace to just get it out. To let it suck.
Because you polish that beautiful turd in the development department.
Development is where you take your initial draft and you edit it. You make sure you're hitting all the targets you intended to hit with your original market research. And if you missed, or it didn't quite land — which happens, it happens — then you do more market research to find out where you actually landed. Is that where you wanted to be? Do you need or want to tweak it to get it back into the market you were originally aiming for?
And if you're a connection writer, I'm just telling you: don't doubt yourself. If you wrote it a certain way, figure out how to market it that way.
Production, for a lot of us, takes the least amount of time, and it's the easiest to get help with. You've got to pay for it, but you're still delegating it out — it's still not something you have to do yourself. Unless you're a Mythmaker. Mythmakers do all of it. Mythmakers and LoreKeepers.
This is your book covers, your formatting, your metadata, all of your websites. It's getting the thing ready to be a product you can sell.
Distribution is where you actually make it available. Platforms. Are you going KU or are you going wide? And if you're going wide, what does that look like? Are you putting it up on your website to sell, and are you doing that as an author or as a publishing house?
If you're doing it as a publishing house, sell it through the publishing house and just link to it from your author page. Do not offer it on both. There are some people who can — those people have support. They have staff. If you've got other bodies to throw at it, by all means, do the thing. But otherwise: save some time, work once, kill multiple birds with one stone.
Promotion is the final department. This is finding the humans who actually want to read your books. Getting the reviews, launching the book, building reader relationships.
And this is the part a lot of people end up focusing all their time and attention on. Partly because it kind of sucks, and partly because if you can't market, you have a really hard time being successful in your author career.
So a lot of the gurus and a lot of the authors focus their attention right here, in the marketing stage. And what that does is it has you investing most of your energy into one department, when you have four others that also need energy.
Say this one out loud until it sticks
A publishing house has staff for all five departments.
And a publishing house does not go to one single person — the author — and tell them they're terrible because they aren't personally providing all of the energy for all five departments.
So you need to stop doing that too. You are a publishing house.
What you need to understand is that each one of those departments needs time, space, respect, and energy. And each one needs a different kind of energy. So how you manage them is going to be a little bit different.
Every piece of advice belongs to a department
Let's look at this from a different angle.
There's a lot of writing advice out there, and it's pretty much the same advice getting regurgitated over and over. And for the most part, it's all true. There's a reason everyone keeps repeating it.
But we need to understand which department each piece of advice actually applies to.
"Write every day" applies to the creation department, because it's helping you get something that can become a product. But as we know, not all of us can write every day, because we create differently.
"Rapid release." We know rapid releases can be quite successful. But that advice only applies to the distribution department. Now — yes, yes, distribution is connected to creation. The head bone's connected to the neck bone, which is connected to the shoulder bone. I know those aren't what any of those bones are actually called. But they're all connected, and the advice tangentially connects to the other departments.
The focus of rapid release, though, is distribution. Because you can run a rapid release and still not write every day. It just means you take a step back, and for a year you write five books. And then, after all five have been written and edited and covered and blurbed and made into products, you set them up for rapid release.
Which means it's packaging. It's distribution advice.
"Build in public" is something I have tried to do rather unsuccessfully. That's promotion advice — you're attempting to build reader relationships through your books. And it can actually hurt and hinder your creation department. Especially if you're putting it out there and nobody's reading. You can't get it out of the void. Nobody's getting excited with you about it. Which puts you into a doubt spiral, which builds resistance in your creation department, which means you're not producing any words.
"Don't edit while you draft" is development advice. And I can kind of see where it's coming from. For some people, that's great advice. For connection authors, it's terrible advice — because connection authors need permission to see the connections and go, I can't actually move forward, because this thing here doesn't sit right unless I change something back in chapter two.
Good advice. Different department.
That's something to keep in mind as you move forward managing your publishing house.
Which departments your House runs for free
Here's the other thing, and I've mentioned it a couple of times: each department has different energy. And each of the author Houses can run some departments easily and struggle in others. So let's gloss over this quickly.
Heartweavers do a really good job in creation and promotion. If you doubt me, take a look at the romance authors who are absolutely, freaking slaying it right now. It's because they're writing stories and content that connect really easily with their ideal reader, and they're building engines that almost create their own energy to keep running. That's fantastic. It's beautiful. I'm so excited for them.
The departments they struggle with are production and distribution. And the reason is that there just isn't a human on the other side of it, and it's really boring. You're sitting there having to format a book. Or you're having to create a cover you think is ugly — because Heartweavers are terrible at determining what makes a good cover. When my Heartweavers are building a cover that's actually marketable, they're usually very upset with it, because in their heart and their mind and their soul they know it's a really ugly cover. And on the distribution end, it's just a lot of numbers. A lot of analytics.
Wildscribes really love the creation aspect. It can still get a little sticky, especially if they're not giving themselves the ability to structure it. But this is where they have fun, because they can make all these different connections and just keep going and keep themselves entertained — as long as they keep the doubt monster at bay.
The departments that are absolutely brutal for them are development and promotion. Development is hard because it ties their feet to the flame and makes them sit down and focus.
Though I will say — if you can find a Wildscribe who can edit, they do a fantastic job, because they're able to see all of the connections. Just understand it's going to take them a long time. If they tell you it'll take a week, what they mean is three weeks. Build your schedule accordingly.
And promotion. The reason promotion doesn't just suck for them but actually hurts is that it requires a recurring schedule. Not just to create content, but to actually interact. They enjoy interacting with people — they just want it to be natural, to happen on their own schedule. Not to have to do it every Tuesday at 3. That's the opposite of how a Wildscribe works.
Mythmakers are similar on that point. What they actually enjoy is development and distribution, because that's research. And it's the kind of research that makes the brain explode with ideas. They are very big on ideas.
The creation part can be fun, and it can generate energy if they do it right — but it can also be an energy drain. That author I mentioned, the one who doesn't enjoy writing books quite as much as he enjoys everything else? He's a Mythmaker. Oh my gosh, such a cool guy.
The thing Mythmakers suck at most is promotion. Which, to this particular Mythmaker, is a little bit dumbfounding — because it's just another system. You create the system, you implement the system, it works. But it's repetitive, it's human-facing, sometimes it lacks parameters that actually make sense, and it requires you to get in there every single day and comment and respond to things there's no logical reason to comment and respond to. It can be frustrating, and it definitely requires a different kind of energy.
LoreKeepers are great at production, distribution, and creation. Because each of those can have checklists. They have rituals. They can be plugged into a schedule. All the LoreKeeper has to do is trust the system, and the energy is typically there. It's typically there.
Creation can get a little laggy if it doesn't have a great map. And promotion can be difficult when the performance isn't showing itself in a positive light — because the LoreKeeper has to trust in the system. If the system they're following isn't producing the results they're looking for, then why would they trust it? Why would they keep investing energy in it?
The grid is a starting point
A lot of us are hybrids.
And here's another thing I've learned: when we're in distress, when we're in trauma, when anything is out of balance, then even a die-hard LoreKeeper or a die-hard Heartweaver or a die-hard whatever will start showing signs of other Houses.
I don't know why. I haven't gotten my degree in psychology — though that's something I want to do, I think it would be so much fun. It's on the goals list. But it's something I have definitely noticed.
So which department is bleeding?
What you need to do to manage this is start at your House and ask yourself: which departments basically run themselves, and which departments are bleeding?
And then make a plan. A plan to both devote and limit the time you invest in the bleeding departments.
Because here's the thing. When a department is bleeding, we tend to over-invest in it. And when we over-invest there, we rob energy from the departments we actually enjoy. We strip the time, the attention, the energy, the focus, the value, the priority that needs to be invested in those departments.
And it screws up the entire cycle — because all of these departments are connected. If we're investing all our energy, all our time, all our everything into marketing, what do we have left to create with? And if we're not creating, how are we making books that become products we can sell and distribute?
What this looks like outside publishing
I'm actually doing this for a contractor right now. It's so awesome how easily contracting and publishing relate to each other. Everybody tells me my experience is just really weird, and I'm like — well, I think you're kind of weird that you don't understand it.
This contractor is fantastic. He's got great vision and he's all over the place. He's a Wildscribe. Except he's not an author, so keep that in mind.
What I'm doing is looking at where he's bleeding and prioritizing the systems that need to be built to make each of those areas something he can actually manage. We're doing the exact same thing here.
The difference is that in contracting, you can see when the systems start to make sense, because the results are almost immediate. With books, that's just not the case, because it takes so long to create the product.
When you remodel a house, yeah, it takes months. But you can break that project down into activities with a finite start and a finite end. We don't really have that in the author world.
I mean — we kind of can. We can make each chapter an activity. We can make each department an activity. There are so many ways to break it down. But sometimes breaking it down actually hurts the creation process instead of streamlining it.
Which is why you have to understand how your House operates. So you understand what kind of structure helps, instead of hinders.
What's next
You're going to keep building. We're building our departments, we're building our abilities, we're building our stamina, we're building our author engine — so we can create a sustainable system to build from.
I am super excited to see where you go.
And I want to hear from you. If any of this connected, go to realindieauthor.com and schedule an Unstuck Author Call.
Thanks so much. Happy listening, and happy writing.
