There’s a difference between writing as a practice and building a career as an author. If you want both—creative growth and professional longevity—you’ll need more than ambition and output. You’ll need deliberate systems, sustainable habits, and the discipline to keep learning when it would be easier to coast. These 10 points will help you build a stronger foundation for your career.
1. Newsletter
A strong newsletter doesn’t chase engagement metrics but builds a relationship with readers. You got to work it to work it. Meaning, you have to put the time and care into fostering your voice in your newsletter and your relationships there. Programs like Kit’s Creator Network can help you get in front of readers, but you need to actively engage them regularly to keep them feeling like part of something important. Make yourself feel accessible without having to engage with readers…unless you want to do that…which can be a great way to foster reader loyalty.
2. Community of Creatives
If your involvement in the writing community is based on visibility or hierarchy, you’re misunderstanding the function. You don’t outgrow your peers. You grow alongside them. Having a reliable group of peers—whether that’s a Discord server, a local accountability group, Author Nation, or a handful of writers you talk to regularly—can make the difference between short-term output and long-term resilience.
3. Quality Images
Don’t be signaling a lack of seriousness with low quality graphics. There are professionals who do this work every day. Hire them. Get help sourcing quality images. Sites like Fiverr or GetCovers or having an author assistant are a great way to make sure your images are quality, on brand, and on genre, without taking away much of your writing time.
4. Editing
Editing well is a discipline. Excellent resources are available, like Hooked and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, that can train you to see your own work with a sharper lens. Editing other writers work can also help you grow in this area. You can also hire a professional editor. A good editor will help you to learn to see weaknesses in your writing in general, not just in the manuscript you are currently on, so you can fix that issue yourself on future books before anyone has to know about it.
5. Continued Education
Stay curious—about the genre, about the industry, about the questions your work is trying to ask. Knowledge is power, baby. Writers who stop studying the craft and the world become static. Your genre evolves. Reader expectations shift. Actively read current work, revisit core craft material, and follow the conversations that are shaping the industry you want to work inside. As Stephen King said, “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write.”
6. Learn to Talk About Your Books with Joy and Confidence
When a reader or bookseller asks what your novel is about and you freeze or ramble, it appears like you have a lack of understanding of your own work. Learn to speak clearly and calmly about your books, not like a marketer, but like someone who knows what they’ve written and why. The only way to get better at this is to practice. (I have a section about this in Book Release Boot Camp)
7. Marketing Plan for Every Book
Every title you release deserves a unique marketing strategy. Research how readers are discovering similar books right now. Write out the tactics that make sense for your audience, your time, and your budget. Then execute that plan as professionally as you’re capable of. Have a plan!
8. Goals for Your Career
If you want this to be sustainable, you need more than short-term wins. That means setting mid- and long-range goals that include creative growth, publication targets, revenue planning, and personal boundaries. If you can’t articulate where you want your work to be five years from now, then every decision will be reactive. Set targets for publication pace, audience growth, income, and craft development. Use those to filter what opportunities you say yes or no to.
9. Time Management Skills
There are hundreds of tools and systems out there to help you get better at time management. Try different ones and find what sustains you, and what kind of schedule makes it possible to keep writing. Be intentional about figuring this out. It will not look the same for every author. Some writers need hourly scheduling. Others need daily word counts or limited obligations during drafting months. Try different systems. Track your results. Choose the one that helps you maintain creative momentum without eroding your stamina.
10. Reviews
Reader reviews are part of the ecosystem that helps new readers decide whether your book is worth their time. That means asking for them—consistently, respectfully, and with a clear system in place. It also means using the ones you do get in a meaningful way, whether that’s through social proof on your website or as signals to your future readers that others have already engaged with your work and found value in it.The more you have, the more credible your book looks to strangers encountering it for the first time. Can’t find new readers or friends and family to get reviews off and running? Use platforms like BookRoar. Build review requests into your launch plans. Follow up with readers who finish. If you treat reviews like a passive outcome, your visibility will be limited, no matter how strong the writing is.
I suggest focusing hard on one of these a week for the next 10 weeks. In less than 3 months you will have a stronger foundation for whatever size creative empire you are trying to build for yourself.
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