HOW NOT TO MAKE IT AS AN AUTHOR: A REFLECTION ON MY MISTAKES AS A YOUNG WRITER

Hello, readers. This is my first blog post, designed to explain why I’ve gone relatively quiet in the book world in the last decade or so through the mistakes I made as a young writer. Some mistakes I continue to make, but that will hopefully be the subject of another blog post down the road. I am asked regularly how writing is going or when my next book is coming out, so I figured I would catch everyone up in one post I can point to in case they are truly interested. I never really know because people in my social circles think of me as “the writer” and it’s the default question people ask me during small talk. Perhaps they’re humoring me. It doesn’t really matter. I am grateful they care enough to ask.

Some of you may remember that the first book I self-published was a fantasy novel I began in high school and finished while I was still a teenager. I didn’t really think much about publishing the book when I started (I wrote it for myself and my then girlfriend, now wife, with little thought for a wider audience), so I wrote the novel by hand across five separate journals. Many authors do this, but for me, it felt wrong. Typing out all 114,000+ words before I had a manuscript to edit was a big mistake at the time. I became impatient, surrounded by the usual distractions and social obligations of a freshman in college, and didn’t have anyone steering me in the right direction. Simply finishing the book was enough for me to feel like a genius, like I had done something with my life. I’ll never forget holding a copy of that book for the first time. I took a walk and smoked a cheap cigar to celebrate. I felt powerful. I felt alive.

Anyway, that first book was a disaster. My “editing” process was basically ensuring there were no egregious typos and rearranging a few sentences that were particularly ugly. I had no true editorial input. No beta readers. No plan. I didn’t even know how to edit myself. I didn’t have a voice (Elmore Leonard famously said it takes writing at least a million words before you discover yours). I didn’t know how to format the book properly, and even with the aid of a self-publishing service, there are still lines in the book that don’t render correctly. At least, I think so. I haven’t opened the book since about 2009, so I can’t say for certain. I’m too embarrassed. Not just for the content of the book, but for my lack of self-awareness at the time, which continues to fuel my anxiety eighteen years after its publication.

I thought I was special when I held that book in my hands. I don’t want to kill that feeling for you if you’re a new author simply looking for a tangible object to celebrate your accomplishment. And it is a tremendous accomplishment to finish writing a book, especially in the age of AI when people can’t be bothered to peck away in solitude for hundreds of hours to craft a project from the heart, people who will never experience the catharsis which that wonderful, terrible journey brings. But I do want to caution against too much pride in your output, especially your early output, if only to save you embarrassment. Josh Malerman wrote something like fourteen novels before Bird Box was picked up. Brandon Sanderson wrote ten I think before Elantris? There are probably dozens of other examples. Joe Hill uses a pseudonym because he wanted to make his mistakes secretly without the expectations of being Stephen King’s son. That is the best approach to take unless you’re a prodigy, and I am not. I’ve learned there is a fine line between annoying everyone around you and confidently putting your work out there. Maybe this warning won’t apply to you. Read it anyway in case you need to pass it on to someone else down the road.

It’s now eighteen years since I first held that book, and I can’t get anyone I know personally to read my writing. Many simply don’t read, don’t read fiction, or don’t read the kinds of fiction I write, but I sense a greater problem. They were fatigued by my insistence on them reading the first book. A few people do read the novels I release, of course, but almost none of them are family or friends (shout out the Makelas!), and it’s not their fault. I thought I was hot shit when my book came out (I was twenty), and I made a huge deal about it. I was loud on social media, arranged book signings, even used my employment at Borders Books to promote a novel that was doomed from the start because it was terrible. Friends and family drove from all over to attend my book events. They nodded their heads when I gave readings and dutifully asked me to sign their copies at the end, feeding my ego. They were even kind enough to waste their time reading the novel I thought was so damn impressive. I used all my resources to get the book out there, and predictably, most people read the first few pages, saw it for what it was, and never opened it again. They had made their decision about me as a writer. The Rubicon had been crossed.

Unfortunately, this same thing can be said about the next few books I released, when I still had more support from my loved ones than my work merited. At least with those short story efforts, the bones of interesting tales exist. The major gripes I have can be edited away with enough time. In fact, I dream of one day re-publishing all my out-of-print works with revisions, including those titles. As of now, I only have two novels left from Severed Press and a few short story collections from Post Mortem Press to go before that dream is realized (yay for returning publishing rights!). The first book is so awful, though, I would never consider re-working it. The damn thing is irredeemable. Regardless of how important it was in my development as a writer and as a person, and I can acknowledge that I wouldn’t be where I am today without that experience for whatever that is worth, it kills me how that was the first impression I made to the world about my skills as a storyteller. If I could go back, I would simply shelve the book and move onto the next. I get sick to my stomach simply looking at it.

But I did learn my lesson. I needed help. I needed time. The next seven or eight novels I wrote have never seen the light of day, and for good reason. In the four years between that debut and the next novel I published (which seemed forever given my writing output in that period), I worked with Bill Thompson, the editor who discovered Stephen King and John Grisham. I completed my M.A. in Creative Writing, which involved workshopping for the first time. I enrolled in a directed study focused on my writing. I wrote around a hundred short stories in those years, some of which were anthologized in collections with authors like Clive Barker, Jonathan Maberry, Harlan Ellison, and Tim Waggoner. Some of them were even good. Finally, I wrote a novel called The Hunt (Severed Press, 2012) as my thesis project. It was published by a well-known horror publisher in Australia to my absolute ecstasy, and I had visions of finally righting the wrongs of my unfortunate debut. It’s not my best work. Not by a longshot. There are still things I would like to go back and fix (and I will next year for the fifteenth anniversary!) but I’m proud of it to this day.

What follows might seem like a digression at first glance, but it continues the theme that there is a balance between belief in your abilities and delusional egotism, and that patience with yourself and your work is the name of the game in the publishing world. Over the next few years, I published a couple more novels with Severed Press. I started the Stasik series. Post Mortem Press released three short story collections of mine based on songs by bands that I love (Tea Leaf Green, Grateful Dead, and Blues Traveler). As an aside, those collections are still out-of-print and there are more legal hurdles to getting them revised and back in print than the novels due to licensing issues, but I’m hopeful they will see the light of day again. They are rough, but they are sincere, and I love them.

I did not query agents or publishers in this time. I saw no need to. I had a great relationship with Post Mortem Press and Severed Press, and as long as they were willing to continue releasing my work, I was happy. I started to feel pretty good about myself again after despairing over the quality of my debut novel. I wrote rough drafts of three sci-novels set in the Stasik universe between August 2014 and March 2015 (Furnace, Colt, and Pit), and I thought the idea behind the first one was interesting enough that I might take a shot at securing an agent.

And I did. I received an offer of representation from perhaps the top literary agency in the U.S. My book went out on submission to major publishers. I had made it! Or so I thought. I did get to experience the overwhelming joy and terror of refreshing my email inbox a thousand times a day, awaiting an offer. The first one that came in was from an eBook-only publisher. I’m a traditionalist who has never fully converted to the eBook reader experience, though, and I wanted to hold the book in my hands, so we politely declined the offer. A mistake? Perhaps. I’ll never know.

Another publisher had interest but wanted me to rewrite the novel with third-person narration rather than the first-person the book employs. At the time, I couldn’t fathom rewriting the entire book to accommodate the request as there is a lot of introspection that I thought wouldn’t have translated well. I was so excited that I wanted an offer right then and couldn’t wrap my head around such a seemingly massive roadblock (what did I think the professional editing process would be like???). In retrospect, I realize I should have taken my time and started re-working to their comments in a separate draft. I felt too confident in the story, and that may have prevented me from advancing my career at its most critical juncture.

That wasn’t the end of the road, though. After that, I went to the revise-and-resubmit stage with a BIG FIVE PUBLISHER under a pseudonym due to my comparatively poor sales history. My agent told me that writers who made it to that stage were usually given offers. I don’t know for certain whether this is accurate, but he said the odds were high that I was about to be signed with my dream publisher. The notes from the editor were relayed to me over the phone by my agent. Essentially, I was to make the book read less like horror and more like hard science. I happily made edits and sent the new draft in for review, convinced that I was about to achieve a dream I’ve had since I was six years old.

Something was lost in translation. I retained too much horror or didn’t make the science plausible enough (which had never been my intention; all my work bends toward the supernatural). The editor said she knew I would be a successful military science fiction writer in time, but that she would have to pass on the project. I was devastated. And despite one or two other publishers inquiring about the book, no other offer materialized. Fortunately, Severed Press was willing to publish the novel. They acquiesced to my agent’s request for additional editorial assistance and provided a ton of author’s copies, but hamstringing the process with an intermediary seemed to discourage them. Our process hadn’t been broken, why had I made things more complicated?

The book didn’t sell well. It didn’t review overly well, either. I still hadn’t completely accessed my voice. Despite how terrible my debut novel was, this was truly my low point as an author. My agent, who had assured me before I accepted his offer for representation (I had an offer from another agent and had received requests for the full manuscript from others) that he would be with me to build a career regardless of the sales performance of Furnace, said he wasn’t interested in representing Colt. He dropped me. Shortly thereafter, Severed Press informed me that all the novels I had published with them were to be taken out of print, and the rest of the Stasik series was cancelled after book two, let alone Pit: the sequel to Furnace. Not long after that, Post Mortem Press shuttered for good. I bear no grudge. The people involved all sincerely believed in me, at least for a time.

I was left with no publisher, no agent, nine out-of-print books, and a formidable mental health crisis that would take five years, two institutionalizations, and electroconvulsive therapy (not to mention around fifteen different medications) to curb. I was scarred. I continued to write but was terrified of the submission process. I flinched at the idea of putting myself “out there” again, even to reviewers. I didn’t want to start over, even though I had shifted from writing horror to science fiction, fantasy, and even a literary fiction book in the meantime. I was probably due for a change, but I couldn’t face it.

The first novel I’m really proud of as it exists today is Colt, which I self-published in 2017, unable to bear the thought of going through the submissions process again. That book and the next one I wrote, Hallelujah, are my two favorite projects I’ve written so far. If you only pick one of my books to read, I hope you pick between those two (visit the Books section of this site to see if anything else stands out to you!). My old publisher from Post Mortem Press, Eric Beebe, was kind enough to publish Hallelujah and my next book, Analytical, under a new imprint called Petulant Child Press, but again, I wasn’t ready to put myself out there. I had burned myself out with Goodreads ads, Amazon algorithms, website design, Reddit AMAs, and social media posts trying to make Furnace a success, and I had lost my taste for marketing. I lost critical belief in my own work. I went from being delusionally egotistical about my writing when I didn’t deserve it, to questioning my worth when my writing had vastly improved. It was a terrible feeling. I am still torn between wanting to get my work out there and fearing another massive rejection at the precipice of my dream. I have to remember that there is a balance. I’ve harped on my former egotism, but I fear I’ve drifted too far in the other direction. It’s time to take pride in my work again.

I’ve decided I’m going to keep trying, whatever that means. Eventually. When I’m ready. Patience is key, I’ll say again, and it’s one of the hardest aspects of the writing process and publishing world to master in my estimation.

I’m telling you this in hopes that someone out there in the same shoes as I was eighteen years ago sees this and decides to take it slow with their first book. Maybe take a second (or maybe six months to a year as Stephen King suggests), to let your manuscript breathe before you edit. DO NOT RUSH. If you get an offer for representation, make sure it’s with an agency that is interested in cultivating a career for you. My former agent represented one of my favorite musicians as well as several other celebrities and best-selling authors. If I could go back, I would have accepted the other offer, but of course hindsight is twenty-twenty.

I hope this advice/confession/venting session is taken in the spirit it is given. Some authors try to maintain a mystique that convinces you they are more successful and self-assured than they really are. It is normal to question yourself. Imposter syndrome is normal. I promise. I would even argue that it’s a sign you have some insight into your work and how you can improve. If you think you’re hot shit, you’ve probably lost sight of what should always be one of your primary goals in writing and in life: to improve. Self-discovery comes with the territory. I’ve learned that the beauty of writing is the journey, not the destination, something AI “novelists” will never understand.

So, this is me putting myself out there again. I’m working on a dream project right now that I hope to share details about soon with publication tentatively scheduled for 2027. If you’ve read this far, I hope you stick around to get to know my work and me better. If you were one of the unlucky few whose first experience with my writing was one of those books I published in my early twenties, I hope you’re willing to give it another go. There is new hope for me, and I can’t wait to connect with all of you again. It’s already started, in fact. Between November 2025 and March 2026, I released four new books. I’m in the process of healing.

In any case, if you’ve gotten this far, I’m grateful for your time! I appreciate you! Be well!

Joseph Williams 8 June 2026