Time to move on

And thanks for sharing the journey with me.

Any subscribers to this Substack might have noticed that there have been no posts from me in a while. (Of course, you might not, which is in fact far more likely. Our inboxes are so full that a hiatus in receiving emails might well be seen as a relief or just not noticed at all.)

The time has come for me to thank you for sharing the first part of my self-publishing journey with me, and to move on. The journey hasn’t ended, of course, and I hope it never will, as I plan to continue to write and publish into my dotage. But I feel this stack has had its day.

When I began self-publishing, there were plenty of resources to help me. What I couldn’t find was anything that walked me through the process hand in hand, sharing the pitfalls, successes and failures (or learning points as I like to see them) along the way. In the absence of this, I decided to document my journey, hoping it would be of use to others.

I don’t think it is.

Or rather, I think there is so much stuff out there about self-publishing that my articles are just so many more moths bashing themselves against the inside of the light jar.

Even TikTok is now awash with debut indie authors documenting their self-pub journeys, some of whose posts cover exactly the topics that I have done. Of course, they do. They are stages on the same journey. They don’t cover it in the same way. Everyone’s experience is unique. But there is plenty of material now out there on what it is like to go through the early stages of self-publishing, if anyone wants to find it.

I’m a fiction author and by the end of September will have published four books within the year. Writing fiction is what I want to do. Writing a Substack article each week was taking too much time away from writing my books. As an indie author, there is enough stuff competing for your time — marketing/editing/advertising/promoting, etc. Why give yourself more to do unless it matters? And I don’t think my articles matter enough. (Not said from a self-pity perspective - and I’m so grateful to those of you who have supported me by reading and subscribing and sending heartwarming and encouraging comments.)

The bottom line for me is that there is so much noise out there. I groan every time I open my email inbox and, more often than not, I delete about eighty percent without even reading them. I rarely have time to read the Substacks to which I have subscribed. Every few days Substack will send me another email suggesting new things for me to read. Enough! I don’t want to add to that noise anymore.

And so, it is with regret that, like the cares of the day in Longfellow’s poem, I shall fold my tents and silently steal away.

(I shall still be on Substack with the author blog that runs on my website but my ego is not such that I expect you to rush across and subscribe. It’s just a way for me to communicate with my fiction readers and can also be found at https://www.saskiavanderzee.com)

Thank you again to all those who’ve supported me. Adieu 👋🙏