4 Writing Career Mistakes That Cost Me Years

If you’re making writing career mistakes, I want to spare you some of the years I lost.

Picture this: Years of your life wasted, stuck in your first book, completely invisible to readers. And why? Because you ignored four simple pieces of advice.

I know because I ignored them, and it almost blew up my entire career.

That’s why I want to share this with you. I’m hoping that you, unlike me, will take these pieces of advice and use them to help build your writing career a lot faster than I did.

The First Writing Career Mistake: Ignoring Story Structure

The first piece of advice writers—especially new writers—love to ignore is learning story structure.

There’s this romantic idea that structure is a cage. That it will stifle your creativity and turn you into some formulaic paint-by-numbers worksheet. I bought into that lie completely, and it cost me a lot.

I didn’t learn structure for a long time. Honestly, it’s because I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand what it even was or why it mattered.

I’m a musician, and as a musician I absolutely understood why I needed to spend years learning scales and key signatures and time signatures and tempo markings and phrasing and all of that. These are the foundations that let you actually make music. Without them, you’re just making noise and hoping it sounds okay.

But when it came to writing, I thought because I had read a lot, that I could just wing it. I figured all that reading had absorbed into me somehow and that I instinctively knew how stories worked.

I did not.

When I Finally Figured It Out

What ended up happening was that I wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote again, and I had a mushy middle, unclear stakes, and the feeling that something was off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. My drafts fizzled. They didn’t go anywhere. They stayed unfinished. I thought it was because my ideas were bad, so I would start a new story.

Then I ended up struggling with the same mess, so I would start again.

Finally, I learned it wasn’t the idea. You can have a gorgeous premise. You can have beautiful prose. Readers will still drift away if the story never tightens, builds, or delivers.

Structure is what creates that feeling in a reader that they can’t put the book down.

When my one-on-one coaching clients finally get clear on structure, a whole new world opens up for them, like it did for me, because they can finally finish their books. And not just one. They can go on to write more because they understand the architecture they’re working with, not just the words.

Structure is not a cage. It’s a spine that holds everything else in your story up.

I now know that if you don’t know this forward and backward, you’re going to fail as a writer.

The Second Writing Career Mistake: Waiting to Build a Platform

The second piece of advice writers tend to run away from is this: start building your author platform from day one. As in now.

The excuse is always, “I’ll do it when I have a book to sell,” or, “I need to focus on the art, not the marketing.”

This is a huge mistake that sets you up for a launch party with zero guests.

In today’s market, just having a finished book is not enough. If you wait, you’re choosing to be invisible.

This was a huge mistake on my part, mainly because I just didn’t understand “platform” when I was working on writing. I did nothing on this front until after I got my first publishing contract.

By then, it was too late.

My first book came out and basically languished on a website nobody saw. No readers were waiting for my book, so it was just silence.

Even then, I waited.

Author Platform After Two Published Books

I got my second publishing contract and my publisher nudged me to work on my platform. So I upgraded my website, revised my niche, and got onto social media. It was a start, but it was still late.

If you wait until your book comes out to start building your platform, it is too late for that book.

You can still do it for your next book, but you have to understand that without any readers who know you and who are interested in your work, the book is probably going to go out there, sell maybe a handful of copies, and then die.

I’ve seen this happen to myself and to other writers who didn’t have a platform to begin with.

The truth is, it takes time. Trust takes time. Readers take time to find you and decide they want to stick around.

That means the best time to start is now, even if your book isn’t done. Even if it’s nowhere close.

Starting Your Author Platform Doesn’t Have to be Overwhelming

I want to make this feel less overwhelming because I know it can feel enormous. When I first heard even an inkling about this whole build-a-platform idea, my reaction was, “How am I supposed to do that while I’m trying to figure out how to write a story?”

If I had known then what I know now, I would have realized it didn’t have to be some monumental effort.

Here’s what start now actually means.

You need one home base. Your own website is the best choice because that is your land, not somebody else’s algorithm or a platform that can change the rules on you tomorrow.

I often recommend starting with a blog because it’s the easiest thing for writers. We write. So writing a regular weekly blog is a very good way to start building your platform.

Then share that blog on whatever social media platforms you’re on—Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever. Or if you prefer video, make videos. Do Instagram reels. Do YouTube. Do something weekly so you start getting into the habit of connecting with readers who may be out there.

And yes, eventually you do need a niche so that you attract the people most likely to like your stories. That’s a bigger subject for another day. (Check out my award-winning book, “Writer Get Noticed!”, for help on that.)

But for now, keep it simple.

One home base. One format. One newsletter.

Set up an email list from day one. Email is still one of the strongest connections you can have with your readers because those people choose you. They raised their hands and said, “I want to hear more from you.”

Start small, but start now. Then stay consistent. You’ll be so glad you did.

The Third Writing Career Mistake: Trying to Do It Alone

The third piece of advice writers resist is investing in help.

Writing feels so solitary that we trick ourselves into thinking we have to figure it all out alone.

Sometimes we fear criticism and think it will crush our fragile writer ego. Sometimes we get arrogant and think our vision is so unique that nobody else could possibly get it.

Both of those paths lead to the same dead end: You stop growing.

Writing in a vacuum creates massive blind spots. You get so close to your own work that you can’t see the flaws anymore.

I waited far too long on this. I had a book that wasn’t working, and I just kept pushing at it alone. Months of floundering turned into years.

I had this deep belief that I should be able to figure it out myself.

The only thing that turned it around for me was getting fed up with my lack of success. I really wanted a traditional publishing contract, and I wasn’t getting it. I was spinning around, writing draft after draft, abandoning them because they weren’t working, and wasting years.

I want to save you those years.

I Finally Hired an Editor

Finally, I got fed up enough that I saved up my pennies and hired an editor.

It was the best money I’ve ever spent.

Hiring that editor and getting her help on my story propelled my career in ways nothing else would have. For the first time, I understood my actual strengths and my real weaknesses. I knew exactly what to work on. There was no more confusion or overwhelm. The fog lifted.

After that work with her, I got my first publishing contract.

Then I got more help. I signed up for week-long writing workshops. I went to several. I learned from more writing coaches, more editors, and I invested in myself.

That’s why I reached my goals.

I think part of why writers resist this is that we don’t fully believe we deserve to invest in ourselves. There’s this fear in the back of our minds that we’re not real writers, or that we might spend the money and still fail.

I understand that fear.

But getting help helps you improve. And if you improve and keep going, you move closer to your writing goals. It’s just the way it works.

Getting support doesn’t slow you down. It’s one of the things that speeds everything up.

And the earlier you do it, the more time you save.

The Fourth Writing Career Mistake: Betting Everything on One Book

The last piece of advice: Do not pour all of your creative energy into one book.

I focused on one book for far too long. I loved that book so much. I loved the characters. I loved what happened in it. I had this giant three-ring binder with all the character information and backgrounds and pictures of the creatures in the story because it was fantasy.

I was deeply invested in this one book, and I had this hope in my head that if I could just get this one book good enough, that would be it. My writing career would be underway.

Looking back now, I laugh a little at that former version of myself because she was so naive.

This isn’t just my opinion. Written Word Media’s 2024 indie author survey found that authors earning real income from their books had published an average of eight books.

Backlist matters too. Publishers Weekly reported that backlist titles accounted for 67% of all print units purchased in 2020, which tells you just how much of the market is driven by books that are already out there rather than only by shiny new releases.

Written Word Media also makes the same larger point in its backlist strategy piece: more books give readers somewhere to go next, which changes the economics of your whole career.

Every now and then, a debut author does break out in a spectacular way. It happens. But building your whole plan around that is not a strategy. It’s a dim hope.

Why Do We Focus All Our Hopes on One Book?

I think part of the reason we do this, especially early on, is that writing one book seems like such a huge task that we can’t even imagine writing two or three or eight. I know I couldn’t.

But I want to give you this piece of advice now because it would have helped me so much if I’d understood it earlier.

Think about writing your first book like baking your first cake. What did that cake look like? For most of us, it was a little lopsided. Maybe it fell in the middle. Maybe it was overbaked or underbaked. Maybe it was fine, but it certainly wasn’t your best cake.

Your first book is like your first cake.

Your second book will be better, and your third book will be better than that. As long as you’re investing in your craft and in yourself and actually working to improve, you get better with every single book.

The writers who succeed aren’t the ones who somehow nailed it perfectly the first time. They’re the ones who finished that first book, kept their eye on the long game, dove back into the next one, and kept going.

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Inside Writer’s Brain Studio, I show writers how to work with their natural style instead of against it so they can finally bring their story up to the vision they have for it.

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