THIS is the #1 thing that trips up writers

Do you know what the #1 thing is that trips authors up when they’re writing?

I’m talking even authors with a great voice.

Authors with an incredible premise for their book.

Authors with all the talent in the world.

It’s TIME.

And specifically it’s time management.

I can’t tell you how often I see writers coming down to the wire of a deadline and not being able to accomplish all they wanted to with their story because time caught up with them. Or they had to extend the deadline and then got stressed because it still wasn’t enough time. (For all of my clients who are reading this and going "is this about ME?" it's not! I know how you all think.)

Obviously, none of us have as much time as we would like, with so many responsibilities and goals and desires pulling us in different directions. (I promise, this will not turn into a “just wake up early and write!” kind of email. First of all, I would never tell you anyone to wake up at 5 a.m.—5 a.m. does not EXIST to me—and I also get that for many people, there is literally not enough time in your day to stretch any further.)

As a romance writer, especially if you’ve already written at least a book or more, it feels like there’s a very loud ticking clock to release the next book and the next book and the next, and there’s not a lot of time to breathe in between. I could go on and on about how this is a function of capitalism, and of an oversaturated publishing market that requires romance writers to produce at a rate that will eventually burn most people out if you don’t put your foot down—but you have probably heard this from me before.

I cannot magic you more time to write, but I can offer you some ideas to help you give yourself enough time to write a great book: 

Be realistic 

There are a lot of timelines pressing on you as you write a draft: your own internal deadline, the deadline to get it to your editor (the latter two often end up being one and the same), scheduling betas/ARC readers/proofreader/cover artist/etc. Lots of people are counting on you to make those deadlines, so you need to be so for real about how long this is actually going to take you. 

Consider the complexity of the story you’ve set out to write, what else you’ve got going on in that time (is there a holiday? is it a busy time at work? are your kids doing multiple extracurriculars that you have to ferry them to and from?), and how much you can write in a day/week/month. 

So, if you’ve never written a book in less than four months, but you haven’t started yet and you want to release in September? Let’s not do that to yourself or to everyone else involved in the production of the book. You might not get it out in the insanely short timeline publishing experts “say” you should get it out in, but you have to give yourself the liberty to take a little longer and let your creativity have room to breathe and not feel so stressed out. Do NOT burn yourself out for the sake of a completely arbitrary deadline.

Budget your time

When I was a TA in grad school, I often left my grading until the last minute, which meant I was marking a stack of undergrad English essays in a two-day frenzy. After too many late nights of essays beginning with “Since the dawn of time…”, I finally decided I would divide up the essays so I had X number to grade per day over the week or so that I had before I had to hand them back. Total common sense, and yet it took me years to figure it out.

Do the same with your writing. How many words can you write in a session? How many words do you expect the book to be? When do you want to be done by? From there, work out how many days you need to finish the book.  

You definitely do not have to write every day without fail (I actually think it’s better for most writers to not write every single day), but again be realistic about how many days you can write per week and for how long per day. Build in extra time for the days when things come up and you can’t write at all or as much as you’d like, or in case the book gets longer than you anticipated. 

Do not fall victim to the pressures of publishing

One of the reasons why there’s a push to get books released multiple times a year is because the market is so saturated that readers will forget about you if you’re not feeding them books regularly. And apparently the Amazon algorithm responds better and pushes you out more when you’re publishing at regular intervals, but it’s not at a pace that most writers can easily maintain. If it’s every four months, that’s three books a year, which maybe you can do once or twice (and that’s not possible for most people), but imagine doing that nonstop, forever. You’d get bored or frustrated or burnt out trying to keep that consistency.

I’m a fan of consistency, but consistency that actually works for you. If your goal is to be a best-selling author or to write full-time, yes, you have to put out a lot of books quickly to start getting momentum—and then you can let off the gas once you’ve got enough of a backlist and a fanbase that you can make money regularly. 

But if your goal is simply to write your books, put them out into the world, and hopefully make some money off of them as a part-time gig, there is much less stress on you to release books at an unsustainable clip—a book or two a year is going to be enough for you.

And if you don’t want your readers to forget about you, make sure you give them lots of incentive to sign up for your newsletter (have a really good lead magnet) and to follow you on social media so they know what’s going on with you and can get hyped for your next book.

Don't let time steal away just how good your book can be!

This was originally published in my newsletter. If you want more on what’s new and important in romance writing, marketing, and the romance industry at large, join my newsletter and get my Romance Resource Roundup, a collection of the BEST romance books/websites/podcasts you should be consuming as a romance writer.

Can you be a romance author without being on social media?

Honestly, does anyone want to be on social media anymore?

If I didn’t have to be, I probably wouldn’t be. (I would probably have an account so I could lurk, but my real life is way too boring for anyone to be interested in what I take pictures of.) And I think most authors don’t want to be on social media either, or at least don’t want to be spending their time promoting themselves there.

So, what if you could just… get rid of it entirely? Do you NEED to be on social media as a romance author, especially an indie one?

Well…no.

Wait, wait, wait—I don’t want to get your hopes too high.

I mean, if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to. There are lots of other avenues open to you. Unfortunately, they will probably cost you a lot more money than free social media (but then, how free is it when it’s costing you time and energy that you could spend on other things?). Here are some of those other avenues:

• Amazon ads, which if you can figure them out can be fruitful—but the learning curve is steep, from what I’ve heard. And you can pour a ton of money into them before you can figure out how to most effectively use them

• Book promo sites, like BookBub and many, many others (David Gaughran is my go-to guy for everything book promotion, and he has a big list of them and how to use them here)

• Hiring a company to distribute your book to book influencers to create posts for virtual book tours (e.g. cover reveals, release date blitzes, reviews, etc.)

• Giveaways of print or ebook copies

• Accessing NetGalley or other paid sites to reach ARC readers to review your book

• Book influencer friends or fellow authors shouting out your book (this one is free, but you have to cultivate these relationships—which might be hard to do without social media, especially for the introverts)

• Word of mouth (also free, but this one is mostly just luck of the draw and can take a long time—one of my clients’ books was mentioned on a busy romance subreddit, and she saw a huge spike in sales just from that)

• In-person events: romance conventions (which may include travel, hotel, and con costs); talks at local libraries, bookstores, book clubs, etc.; an in-person book tour (if you’ve really got money to travel)

• Your own newsletter, Substack, Patreon, etc. (links to all of those should be in the back matter of every book you write)—and yes, a newsletter is a non-negotiable for every author, whether you use social media or not

This guy seems to think that authors don’t need social media in 2025, but he doesn’t really give a lot of alternatives. Apparently all you need to do is just be successful as an author and then you don’t need to use social media at all!

But realistically, what do you as an indie author really have to do to sell your book?

As much as I’d love to say that all you need to do is write a great book, that’s just not the case for even the greatest author out there. Trust me, I’ve seen so many books from my own clients that I think are stellar and are beautifully written and deserve all the hype and sales—and they don’t have them.

So: you absolutely do have to promote. If you’re indie—and even if you’re trad, and especially a trad BIPOC author—you will probably be doing that legwork all on your own, unless you can afford to throw money at the problem. And you will have to throw some money at it in order to look professional. (Your cover counts as promo, and please do not skimp on that—we can all tell when a cover has been made by someone who doesn’t have experience designing romance covers specifically.)

You need a promotional strategy that includes some paid methods (like a virtual book tour, for example) and some free ones. So I really don’t think it’s a good idea to abandon social media entirely, unless you are indeed SO big that you don’t need it. There’s so much noise on social media, but if you can carve out your own little niche, it’s a great way to talk to your readers and to find more. Also, I am someone who lovesa deal—and social media is free, and I love free.

That said, social media is hard work. I’ve said this a million times here, you have to promote way more than you’re doing right now, whether that is on social media or elsewhere. With the way algorithms work, people aren’t seeing your posts enough, so you have to just go hard with quantity and put out a ton of posts to get visibility.

And yes, promo as an indie author SUCKS. It’s probably not something you’ve been trained to do so it’s hard and exhausting, and it takes time and energy away from doing the thing you’re here to do, which is write the books. I get it—all I want to do is edit and book coach, and making silly Reels is not something I super love. But I do it because it supports the things I actually want to do by getting me in front of potential clients who will hopefully follow and then hire me.

Listen, I am rooting for you to get so big that you don’t have to have social media. In the meantime, though, use it to your best advantage as a tool in your promo arsenal!

This was originally published in my newsletter. If you want more on what’s new and important in romance writing, marketing, and the romance industry at large, join my newsletter and get my Romance Resource Roundup, a collection of the BEST romance books/websites/podcasts you should be consuming as a romance writer.

How to Write Memorable Sex Scenes in Romance

In eight years of being a romance editor, I have never done a post on writing sex scenes! An oversight I will be rectifying now.

So what makes a sex scene one of those ones that a reader will bookmark and come back to again and again? It can be a setting (an unusual, unexpected place or moment, e.g. carriage sex), an object being used in the scene (e.g. Haunting Adeline—iykyk), another person present (e.g. in a voyeuristic sense or a group sense), a position (let’s go tamer for this example: something like the man who never submits down on his knees), and of course, words that become iconic (if it has an acronym that BookTokkers can identify without any help, e.g. stfuattdllag).

But all these are really just gimmicks (which I’m not knocking—you gotta sell this book, and sex scenes can be great marketing), so let’s get into what’s really going to connect with the reader in these scenes in terms of craft.

Choose the right POV

For any scene, your POV character (if you’re do alternating POV) should be the one who is most vulnerable or has the most to lose in this moment, and this is especially important in a spicy scene. There’s a stronger emotional impact if you show your POV character leaning into that vulnerability or how the other character helps them let go by making them feel safe or uninhibited.

Be comfortable with what you’re writing

Choose your steam level. How descriptive are you going to go? Are you worried about your mom or your grandma reading it? Here’s one time I will say not to write with an audience in mind—just go straight from the id here and write what you think is sexy. If you’re feeling way too self-conscious writing about sex, scale back or even just fade to black—your words will probably come out stilted and readers know when you’re holding back.

Engage the senses AND the emotions

Sensory details are important here—what’s going on with sight, sound, taste, hearing, touch? Unexpected details can make a scene much more memorable—for example, the scratch of lace against skin and the reaction that feeling provokes in the partners. If you’re a writer who falls prey to white room syndrome (i.e. description isn’t your strength), this is a good opportunity to stretch a bit! 

Start with the sensory to ground the reader in the scene, and then get into the feels. What kind of emotions are these physical details evoking? Sex can bring up big emotions—are they overwhelmed? Are they afraid of feelings and wanting to run? Are they feeling affirmed or at peace by the end? Play with the tension between the physical and emotional.

Match the tempo of the scene to the writing

Pace your scene based on the kind of sex the characters are having. If it’s a quickie, the pace should feel fast to match that intensity. (My favourite trick for this in editing is to take out commas where I can—commas are there to pause for a breath, but we ain’t got time for that!) If it’s slow and languorous, you can draw out the sensuousness of the moment in the pacing. 

Should the sex scene move the story forward?

This is a debate: can you just write a sex scene for the sake of writing a sex scene, or does it have to move the story forward? Some claim the former is too gratuitous, but I come from fanfic where there is literally a sub-category for this: PWP (either Porn Without Plot or Plot? What Plot?). I think it’s easier to get away with this in fanfic, but as an editor, I lean toward the sex scene doing some kind of work for you—either moving the plot forward or showing character growth.

(By the way, I swear that any innuendo that you think you see here was purely unintentional.)

How do you write sex scenes? Are they fun for you to write or stressful? 

This was originally published in my newsletter. If you want more on what’s new and important in romance writing, marketing, and the romance industry at large, join me and get my Romance Resource Roundup, a collection of the BEST romance books/websites/podcasts you should be consuming as a romance writer.

Is it time to discontinue your romance series?

I did a presentation to the Ottawa Romance Writers’ group earlier this month about The Dos and Don’ts of Being a Romance Novelist, and one of the participants asked a great question at the end (and one that I’ve been meaning to write something about for a long time!).

The question was: How do you know when you should stop writing a series that doesn’t seem to be getting any traction?

I’m sure as readers or consumers of media, we’ve all experienced the frustration of not getting the end of a series. We can all name a TV show that we loved that ended on a perpetual cliffhanger, never to be resolved, or perhaps less often, a book series that a trad publisher decided not to continue to put money into. But what about if you’re on the other side of that as an indie author?

So here are some considerations to help you decide what to do:

1) Why is it that the series hasn’t gotten enough traction?

Be very, very honest with yourself here and analyze what’s going on. Are the covers not giving the reader a good first impression? (Are they on trend with other covers in your subgenre?) Are your blurbs and marketing materials not intriguing or unique or clear enough to get the reader to buy? Are the books priced too high? Have you put in the work to market them and get them in front of your target audience? Is the quality of the writing and editing not as good as it could be?

Do your research, ask your readers and impartial observers, and be very real with yourself. Are you willing or able to put in the work to fix these problems? That might get expensive—i.e. recovering all the books so far in the series, re-editing, doing additional marketing, etc. Which begs the question…

2) Is it worth it to continue to put the time and money towards this series?

Not only to revamp the previously published books in the series, but also for the ones to come. More books in this series means more money put towards editing, cover design, and promotion, and it takes you away from books that you could write that might be more successful. And if the books you’ve already written in the series aren’t helping to fund much of the next books still to come, do you have the budget to continue? The books in this current series may be the books of your heart right now, but if they’re not selling, it might be time to consider how you can rework the larger ideas of this series and eventually repurpose them for a different series that might do better for you down the line.

3) Do you have a full series already?

A complete series is a great thing to have in your backlist. If a new reader falls in love with your writing and goes back to read all your old stuff, they might buy the full series immediately to consume, rather than one standalone book at a time. And if all your books are linked in the same extended universe (which I do usually recommend doing!), a full series is even more of an easy sell. So, is it worth it to finish off the series in this case?

4) How do you feel about this series?

When you’re an indie author, it’s all on you to decide if it’s worth it to continue the series. Are you happy with the quality of the writing? Have you had good feedback from readers, or has it been crickets? Are you still excited to continue the series or get to that final book? Especially if you haven’t had a ton of great feedback from readers about the series, you may have lost enthusiasm for it—that’s normal. It’s time for some soul-searching about whether you should keep going with it.

Even if you do decide to discontinue a series, I do not want you to feel like it was a waste of time or that you didn’t get anything out of it. I especially do not want you to see this as a failure AT ALL. Every single writer, even the most popular or successful, has books that just don’t hit. And every book is a learning experience. Writing those books has improved your writing skills, has made you more aware of the things in your author career that you might have to spend more time/energy/money on, and is going to make your next book and/or series stronger. As much as I’ve asked here “is it worth it?” to help you decide whether to continue the series or not, I think there is always something worthwhile in the experience of getting these books out into the world.

Have you ever discontinued a series? What made you decide to? (I genuinely want to hear! Let me know in the comments!)

Fast publishing is here—but are we fooling ourselves in thinking that it's new?

I don’t know about you, but it seems like quality in everything is tanking these days. (God, I feel so old in saying that—“back in my day,” etc. etc.). Granted, I’m not shopping at high-end places most of the time, but things that used to be decent are either more cheaply made (clothes), sneakily smaller (food packaging), or built to fall apart quickly (electronics).

So how do books fit into this? Or do they?

Buckle in, because we’re talking about fast publishing today!

Probably everyone and their mom has read Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and its sequel Iron Flame this year. The unexpected success of Fourth Wing, released in May, sold the book out in hardcover—it was impossible to find on bookstore shelves this summer—and caused a frenzy for more. But when Iron Flame was released in early November, fans were quickly up in arms about the quality of the book, both in aesthetics and in the writing—there were misprints, pages missing, typos, and poor writing and editing alleged. (The latter two are subjective—personally, the writing doesn’t blow me away and she crams every romantasy trope and cliché in there, but I did find it propulsive as hell and I flew through it; the editing…was rushed, let’s say, and it probably didn’t have as many passes as it should have for one of the most anticipated books of the year). But this has led to the rise of discussion around “fast publishing.”

Fast publishing makes the comparison to fast fashion, where fashion trends are quickly identified, produced, and rushed to market to capitalize on them while they’re still hot, but the quality of the garments is sacrificed, and the end product is essentially disposable once the trend fizzles out or once the garment falls apart, whichever happens first. 

The pearl-clutching about fast publishing has really only come about because the intense popularity and anticipation for Iron Flame and the trad marketing machine behind it has brought the issue to the fore. (Fashion historian Abby Cox talks in this video why this comparison doesn’t actually hold.)

But the writing to market, racing to release to keep up momentum, and cutting corners in quality is nothing new. We’ve been seeing this for years in indie publishing, especially in indie romance, with rapid release schedules that have some romance writers churning out multiple books a year, sometimes employing ghostwriters to keep that breakneck pace and doing everything they can to keep readers’ attention and game the KU system to continue earning big bucks (remember when a romance writer was giving away diamonds??). This practice goes way back to pulp writers in the ’50s who had to write books fast to make a living as a writer, and even further back to Victorian dime novels (see the Abby Cox video above for more on this), but we’ve been doing it in modern indie romance for a long time.

And if you’ve been with me for a while, you know I’ve been raising the cry for many years that this system is dangerous for romance writers and for the romance industry as a whole. Rapid release is almost a necessary evil in romance if you want to make a living as a full-time indie romance writer, especially when you’re just starting out and building a backlist—but it can lead to serious author burnout and mental health issues, declining quality in the work, and less innovation in the stories (which mean they’re not as often recommended and won’t earn you as much).

A lot of the time, I think that readers don’t really care about quality—if you’ve marketed yourself well that readers know exactly what to expect from you and/or you’ve established yourself well with a solid reputation for putting out good stuff, lots of people will read whatever you write. Note that I put the marketing first, because frankly that’s what will get you in front of the most people and get them to buy. But that’s the short game. If you want longevity as a romance writer, you need to be able to continually build on your craft and produce quality work to keep those readers long-term without them dropping off.

So what do we do when we’re being forced to rush but still want produce quality work?

We are seriously torn between capitalism and what actually makes sense for us on an individual level—you want to make money (especially in this economy), but you also have to prioritize your mental health and creativity and your own standards. I know you don’t want to put out crap—these books have your name on it! So you really have to take this at your own pace. If you can put out three to four books a year, great—I literally sell Series Architecture based on this premise (but full transparency, this is just a marketing tactic; if you can’t do three books a year, I’m absolutely not going to force you to!)—but I want you to put out books you can be proud of and that readers will want to read AND recommend. And listen, I read a ton, and there are very few books that are actually memorable to me because lots of romances are following a formula (which is totally fine!) but not doing anything interesting with it. The ones that stick out are the ones that do something innovative, i.e. an unexpected twist, an unusual setting, etc.

It's very, very easy to stint on quality, especially right now when we’re in a cost-of-living crisis and don’t want to spend money, and when it seems like the fast pace at which romance readers consume makes quality inconsequential. But I can’t tell you how many romance books I’ve read lately (mostly indie, but also trad) that I think “this could’ve used a good line edit.” And I think most books benefit from a developmental edit as well—there are very few that I’ve seen that have been in good enough shape to go straight to a line edit. You need quality from the writing to the editing to put out a great book.

And you need an actual person to edit, not an AI. I’m on the record as very anti-AI for lots of reasons, particularly generative AI for creative pursuits. I don’t use Grammarly or ProWritingAid, both of which I believe have an AI component to them—if generative AI is made up of the patterns that the AI is fed and people more often than not are making the same mistake, the AI takes that aggregate as normal enough to be considered right, making the mistake acceptable to its checks.

Also, AI can’t tell you why the errors it flags as errors are wrong—any good editor worth their salt should be able to give you a reason why they made any change they did. AI also misses on the art of editing because it's not a human that understands human nuances. Following a style guide to be technically correct is fine, but if AI put commas exactly where they’re supposed to go in a frantically paced sex scene, but it would slow down the action that way, and the cadence of the scene would be off. As an editor, I’ll run Word’s spelling and grammar check once because the squiggly lines bug me (and I usually reject most of their suggestions because it misunderstands the context), but I’m mostly relying on my trusty Chicago style guide and my own knowledge of language to edit.

All this to say:

• Fast publishing ain’t new, and indie’s been doing this for quite a long time.

• It actually sucks that we’re still doing this and running great romance talent into the ground by encouraging an unsustainable pace of production.

• Prioritize your own mental health and creativity first and go at your own pace—if it means you can’t go full-time writer sooner, that’s okay!

• Quality is ultimately going to be what you’ll fall back on, so it’s worth paying for, whether it’s in editing or in education and training to build your craft.

So what do you think of fast publishing? How else can we manage the capitalist hellscape that is modern publishing? Truly, I think about this so much, and I would love to hear your thoughts!

This post first appeared in my monthly newsletter. If you want to get these posts first, you can subscribe and get my free romance tropes workbook! Sign up here!