New episode of A Self-Publishing Author’s Diary Podcast is up. This one about my reality (or realities) of missing out in my self-publishing business…
Also, you can listen to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform, but I’m also just adding the audio here for ease. The text below isn’t a transcript but a short summary. If you’d like me to provide transcripts in the future, let me know and I’ll try my best.
So this episode/post is brought to you by a shower, a hoarse voice from dictating, and a long list of grand and great plans I had to adjust due to fatigue.
And all of that got me thinking about ROMO. The Reality of Missing Out. Not FOMO. Not JOMO. The third thing.
I thought I’d made up the term. Yes, really. I was really proud of myself. And then I Googled it. I had not.
(Side note. The episode I actually thought I was going to record this week was about all the things I’ve been Googling lately, because I am not a lawyer and I’ve had to research so many legal things. That one is still coming. ROMO won the shower.)
A little context for how this one came to be. I had every intention of waking up early today and getting a lot of words in on My Christmas Wish-List (which releases July 1, so the deadline is real), and then going for a jog. This jog is important to me: emotionally and physically.
I’ve been dictating, which is going great word-count wise. I had two 6,000-word days last week, which hasn’t happened in forever. But my voice got hoarse, and I don’t know if it’s the dictation or if I caught a virus, and I didn’t sleep well, and yeah. No jog today. I did get 2,400 words in this morning, so it’s not a wash. But it’s also not what I’d planned.
And in the shower I started thinking about all the things I’m not doing right now. Not because I’m afraid of missing out on them. Not because I’ve made peace with opting out of them. But because I genuinely can’t do them right now. And I feel like that’s its own thing, right? And I thought I’d named it.
Really. I did. I was so proud of myself.
Turns out I had not. Cleveland Clinic and Psychology Today both already had. I’m adding the links at the bottom…
A few of the things I get into in this episode:
Declining profits from one year to another. Last year was a four-figure profit year for me. Two years ago was a good five-figure year, not high five figures, but a good five figures. And then last year, well. Kindle Vella shut down, which had been a big chunk of where the revenue was coming from. We had an international move. A lot of other things on top of that. I’ll do a Numbers episode about it at some point. But the short version is, I’m rebuilding. Again. I’ve rebuilt before, after cancer, after Vella, after a lot of things, and that informs how I’m thinking about everything right now.
The Kickstarter I’d love to do for Cancer Is Not My Brand, and why I’m not doing one right now. I really would love to. I think there’s an audience for it. I think I could come up with rewards I’d actually be excited about. I’d love to share the A to Z experience of running it. But I don’t have the time, or the bandwidth, or the energy to do it right. And I’ve made that mistake before. I ran a Kickstarter for The Leftover Bride audiobook that didn’t get fulfilled, and a big reason was that I tried to do it fast and hoped for the best. So I know what running one that doesn’t get fulfilled looks like, and I’m not going to do that to this book. (That’s not the only reason though. I get into the rest in the episode.)
Not doing InkersCon this year, or the Write Better, Faster Academy digital conference on fandoms. I really recommend both. I still have last year’s InkersCon videos that I haven’t all watched. For those, it’s less ROMO and more, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I’m more attuned about what I need right now or just because I can’t expand more energy in those directions right now. Still searching… but isn’t it amazing how sometimes revelations come to you as you’re writing or recording? Because yes, that came to me while I was recording. For those doing Gallup strengths (and I didn’t mention that one in the episode, doh, I am a #8 communication… talking out loud definitely helps me).
Ines Johnson’s Romance Write Club Kickstarter. I just backed it. She does these amazing things where the Kickstarter comes with a course. I took the course from a previous Kickstarter, so I didn’t take this one. But she’s one of the authors I look up to, and I’m trying to learn that it’s possible to look up to people and also not chase what they’re doing, because they’re in their story and I’m in mine. Still learning that one.
The Becca Syme idea that really resonated with me, about the different business phases of your authorship. Making decisions based on where you actually are in your phase, not where the unicorn authors are. Her videos and Patreon are linked below.
And the whole thing kind of comes back to Cancer Is Not My Brand, in a way. I’m working on it. The cover is in progress with Qamber Designs. I’m thinking about the blurb. I’m thinking about narrating it. And I’m thinking a lot about what it means to write a book about a difficult thing without letting that difficult thing become my whole brand. The ROMO concept is part of what the book is about, really. There’s a lot of missing out in cancer treatment, and not the FOMO kind. Sitting with that, and writing about it, is taking up a lot of my brain right now. So the Kickstarter waits. Many things are waiting…
So the reality of missing out, for me, is twofold. Sometimes it’s I cannot physically or emotionally do this right now. And sometimes it’s I cannot financially or time-wise do this right now because it’s not the best for my author business. And those are different. And then there’s a third thing, which I actually figured out while recording like I said (as one does, right?), which is realizing you’re not actually missing out at all, because it may not be what you need at that moment.
There’s also a thing my therapist used to say. It’s okay to not be okay. And it sucks to not be okay. And sometimes knowing that helped me find more moments where I could find the okay. Which I know doesn’t sound super inspiring, but it really helped me. I talk about it in the book, about feeling like you’re alone in a pond. If you’re going through a hard time right now, I hope you feel a little less alone.
Links and resources mentioned:
- InkersCon: www.inkerscon.com (I think Golden Angel has a $50 discount code)
- Write Better, Faster Academy: https://betterfasteracademy.com/
- Becca Syme on author business phases:Phases for Author Business:
Deep dives on each phase: https://www.patreon.com/beccasyme/shop
- Ines Johnson’s Romance Write Club Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/romancewriteclub/page-turner-craft-a-complete-page-turning-story-blueprint/description
- Cleveland Clinic on FOMO, JOMO, and ROMO: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/understanding-fomo
- Psychology Today on the reality of missing out: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-deeper-wellness/202506/understanding-and-managing-fomo
- Qamber Designs (cover designer): https://www.qamberdesignsmedia.com/
If you want to tell me what you’re missing out on, or if you’re currently more in a FOMO, JOMO, or ROMO phase, or all of the above, don’t hesitate to leave a comment…
Wishing you happy reading and happy writing 🙂
Thanks for reading/listening.
<3
Elodie
Numbers: A TikTok Experiment As an Indie Author (the yay, the nay, and what it costs), pre-order numbers and more – A self-published author's diary: The Ups and Downs of Self-Publishing (and everything in-between)
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- Writing and revising, Author Taxes & the Emergency Room: 3 Days in My Self-Published Life
- Numbers: Amazon blocked one of my e-books (one that had been live for ten years)
- ROMO Or My Reality (Realities) Of Missing Out In the Self-Publishing World…
- Numbers: The Book That Had 23 Preorders and…became my most read book.
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