Waiting for Lightning to Strike Isn't a Business Plan. It's Wishful Thinking.

Defining your audience is not the enemy of your art. It is the thing that lets you keep making it, and keep supporting your dreams.

I want to start by saying the people who got mad at me are not wrong to love story.

A few months ago I wrote about marketing, audience, packaging, and positioning, and some authors were taken aback. (Which, of course, is part of the point of writing it.)

The main gist: Story should come first. Authors should not be thinking in terms of markets and audiences and read-through. Story, always, first.

I have big thoughts about this. And I want to be careful here, because I am not about to tell you story does not matter. Story is the whole point. If the book is bad, none of the rest saves it. A great cover on a boring book just helps more people find out it is boring, faster.

So let me say it plainly. Story first. Yes. Absolutely.

However, if story matters the most, we also need to find readers to read it. That part of the equation is equal to the story, if not greater.

And also: if you do not define your audience or market your book, your desire for an author business is only wishful thinking.

Both of those sentences are true at the same time. Sit with that, because the whole post lives in the space between them.

If you are an author who says "I just want to write," "I hate marketing," you don't really want an author career. You want the dream, but we can't write dreams to pay our mortgages.

Get ready for advice. But first, a story.

In 2017 I did not have a business. I had a hope.

Then a man named Mark Dawson started teaching authors how to run Facebook ads, and my buddy Bonnie and I went back and forth about whether it was worth the money. Six hundred dollars? That felt expensive. I joined anyway. First cohort. One of his very first students.

Here is the part that matters for this conversation. When I sat down to actually run ads, I did not pick my own books. My books were weird and chaotic. (Spoiler: they still are.) I picked Mal's science fiction, because I understand PEW PEW. I am a Trekkie and a Star Wars freak. I got those books in my bones. I loved them.

Mal wrote them for herself, but she was the ideal reader. So it was in her DNA, and it was super easy to write for that audience (even if the stories are filled with story, math, and factual science).

That was not me abandoning story for the market. That was me standing exactly at the intersection of a thing I loved and a thing readers wanted. Remember that. It is the whole game.

I wanted Mal's books to make money, and make a lot of it.

That year, we hit $25,000 in a single month for the first time. I refreshed the KDP dashboard so many times I thought I was seeing things. I ran the numbers on a notepad because surely the screen was wrong.

It was not wrong.

Then Mal's third book came out and we went from $25,000 a month to roughly $50,000 a month in two to four months. We built an omnibus, landed a BookBub Featured Deal, and climbed into $60,000 to $75,000 a month. Over the life of the company, we crossed nearly $2.8 million to $3 million.

Now here is the question I actually want you to ask.

Was any of that lightning?

You are not waiting for lightning. You are refusing to build the rod.

Here is the story-first fantasy, and I say this with love because I lived inside it too: you write the beautiful book, you release it into the world, and the world recognizes its brilliance. Sales strike like lightning. You get discovered. Readers love you forever and consistently show up.

Sometimes that happens. Once. To almost nobody. And here is the cruelest part: even when it does strike, the author who got lucky usually cannot do it again, because they never learned what caused it. They are standing in a field in a thunderstorm holding a metal pole and calling it a career.

Eventually it will fizzle and fall flat.

Wouldn't it be better if you could make the lightning strike on purpose? On a consistent, repeatable process?

Because that is what those numbers up there actually were. Not luck. Not a viral moment. A process.

Consider the ad that built a huge chunk of our empire. The copy read: "Is MD Cooper the next Larry Niven?" People were furious. Genuinely, essay-in-the-comments furious. How dare an indie author claim that company. And they bought the books to prove us wrong. The ones who loved Niven bought too. Both camps clicked. Both camps became readers. (Some will fall off, because that's just the way it works.)

That was not a bolt from the sky. That was a decision, made on purpose, about what would stop a thumb. We ran variations of that concept for years because we understood the mechanism. When you understand the mechanism, you can pull the lever again. And again.

That is the difference between a wish and a business. A wish happens to you. A process, you operate.

Creativity is not precious. It is a skill.

This is the sentence that is going to sting, and it's supposed to.

Writing creativity is not a sacred, untouchable gift that lives outside the normal rules.

It is a skill. It comes easier to some than others, sure, the same way singing or coding or throwing a curveball does. But it is still a skill, which means it has parts, and the parts can be studied, strengthened, and yes, managed.

Every one of us has strong points and weak points. I am chaotic and weird on the page. Mal builds universes that go 129+ books deep. Different strengths. Different weaknesses.

The professional move is not to pretend you are equally good at everything. The professional move is to know exactly where you fall. Write the stories that showcase your strengths. Structure around your weaknesses so they never take the wheel. And hire editors skilled enough to split the difference, to catch the thing you cannot see and smooth the seams you cannot smooth.

When Mal started bringing in co-authors, she had to learn to merge styles so their work read like hers. She practiced on me. It meant fights. It meant tears. It meant me wondering if I was even cut out for this. But my seven-book co-author series ended up with among the highest read-through rates of anyone in the universe.

That was not because I was born a natural. It was because we treated writing like a craft with levers, not a lightning strike we were praying for.

Precious does not pay. Skilled does.

But what elements I consider make a "good story" are different from Mal's, and that brings something fresh to the fans. New blood. New perspective. The ability to look at things a different way.

The real magic is the cross-section (and you get to keep your passion projects too)

Here is where the story-first crowd and I actually shake hands.

An author career is discipline plus knowing how to put what you LOVE into a story people will actually buy. Not what you hate. Not chasing a trend you have no feel for. That produces flat, joyless books, and readers smell it instantly.

The target is the cross-section. The overlap. The place where the thing that lights you up and the thing a real audience is hungry for happen to be the same thing.

We wrote a mission statement for the pen name. Not a vibe. A precise content promise. Mine was: I write strong women in impossible situations.

Kindly, I know what story-first authors are really scared of. You are scared that thinking like a business means killing the wild, weird passion projects that made you want to write in the first place. Everyone evolves, and your author brain and author business must evolve too.

I know this works because I have watched the other version, the one where there is no engine at all, and it is not more artistically pure. It is just more broke. It might get lucky for a book or a series, but eventually it'll fall apart because the engine behind it isn't defined. And it isn't in the author's control.

Wouldn't you rather be in the driving seat of your author career?

The receipts keep coming, even when you rest

Let me show you the part that should make every story-first author want a system.

From 2020 to 2025, Mal was healing from real, serious burnout. Two years earlier she was writing 10,000 words before lunch across multiple series. At the bottom she was fighting to get 1,000 words out in a full day. We barely released anything new.

And that catalogue, those "old" books, kept making six figures a year with almost no new content. Because we had built an engine, and the engine kept running while the artist rested.

Then we took the Intrepid Saga, a series that had been out for a decade, built an anniversary collection, and ran it on Kickstarter. A ten-year-old story raised over $23,000. Direct to reader. Completely outside any algorithm's control.

None of that is lightning. All of it is process. And every bit of that process is what bought Mal the space to fall back in love with writing instead of being strip-mined by it.

That is the thing I most want the story-first folks to understand. The marketing brain is not the enemy of the creative brain. In our best years, the marketing brain was the creative brain's bodyguard.

Here is what I actually want you to do

Write the mission statement. One sentence. The precise promise your books make. Use it as a filter, not a cage.

Study the Top 100 in your genre, not to copy anyone, but to learn the language your readers already speak so your beloved book gets to be found instead of scrolled past.

Get honest about your strengths and weaknesses on the page. Write toward the strengths. Build a team and a process around the weaknesses.

Find your cross-section, the overlap of what you love and what readers buy, and make that your bread and butter.

Keep a real box for the wild passion projects, and let your engine earn you the freedom to write them.

And stop standing in the field waiting for the sky to choose you.

The heart of it

Story first is not wrong. It is just not enough. A gorgeous book with no audience and no system is not a business. It is a wish with a nice cover that fuels your ego but little else.

You do not have to choose between being an artist and being a CEO. The whole point of learning the business is so the art gets to survive. So you can write for decades instead of flaming out in three years. So the thing you love does not become the thing that breaks you.

You can learn to make the lightning yourself. It is a skill, like the writing. And once you have it, no platform, no algorithm, no bad month can ever fully take it from you. I know that in my bones now, because we have lost it and built it back, and it was not luck either time.

If you want the actual system, the mission statement work, the market research, the evergreen ads, the read-through math, and real breakdowns from authors doing it right now, that is what we teach inside Author Empire over at The Writing Wives.

The first seven days are free: www.skool.com/thewritingwives. Mid-July we'll be running the Find Your Ideal Reader 7-Day Challenge. Join us.

Now go build the rod.