Writing is just a hobby for me… and why that’s a good thing

When I started self-publishing in 2020, it was because I needed a source of income. The pandemic had forced the company I worked for—a company I loved working for—to close its doors, and while the company’s owner was able to keep us on payroll for a few extra months, I could see the writing on the wall. I knew I would soon be unemployed.

Self-publishing is a huge risk. To do it well costs money. And it’s not easy to make that money back, let alone make a profit. It turns out that writing a great book is less than half the battle. Marketing and promoting the book cost even more time and money than writing and publishing the book. Looking back, I can see that my expectations of self-publishing success in 2020 were completely unrealistic.

But that’s okay. I learned a ton in that process, even if the lessons were costly and painful.

A couple of years after my foray into self-publishing, when I was still feeling discouraged by my lack of success and bouncing from one awful job to another, my brother-in-law asked me a critical question:

“What would happen if you thought about writing and self-publishing as an expensive hobby instead of a business?”

My first response was annoyance. I couldn’t afford an expensive hobby. I had blown through my savings self-publishing, and the only jobs I had been able to find at that point didn’t pay enough to support an expensive hobby. I needed to make a decent ROI to keep writing and publishing.

But you know what? He was right.

Thinking about self-publishing as an expensive hobby motivated me to not settle for an awful job. It motivated me to keep looking until I found a full-time position that would provide enough disposable income to support an expensive hobby. Writing more novels became the carrot instead of the stick.

Happily, I found that position in 2023.

Even more than the motivation it gave me, thinking about self-publishing as an expensive hobby has been incredibly freeing.

I no longer feel unjustified spending time writing when it’s not making me any money—it’s just a hobby, not a business investment. The only excuse I need for making time to write is that I love doing it—it’s a hobby, not a job that has to get done. I don’t feel so much pressure to make every cent of ad spend count, which has given me a lot more flexibility to experiment with marketing tactics. I can focus on getting my books into readers’ hands instead of getting their money into my pocket. I can share my stories with the world without worrying about my bottom line.

And the upshot is that this simple change in mindset has made my self-publishing astronomically more successful. I sold 10x more copies of 680 Miles Away on its first day of release than I did of all my other published works in 3+ years… combined.

I guess I owe my brother-in-law a "Thank You” card or something. Thanks, Andrew.