The Hardest Step as a Writer

If you're a writer with a half-finished manuscript, or a finished one that no one has ever seen: this one's for you.

Maybe you published a book that quietly went up on Amazon and then languished without reviews. Maybe you froze when it came time to market it. Or maybe you typed "The End," closed your laptop, and never opened that folder again. I know that feeling, that's my life.

In my last post, I confessed something I don't talk about much: my husband Daniel Roy Greenfeld and I wrote a four-book fantasy series together, and then we did almost nothing with it. We got scared, we froze up, we thought other projects had more potential. Even after spending two years of our lives writing for hours every day.

Writing that confession actually shook something loose in me. It made me realize that the only way past the shame of neglect is a single, small step. So I decided to put the books on my author website. Just put them there. I didn't try for a grand launch or email blast or anything that would send me into overthinking and panic.

There was just one problem: my and Daniel's author site has always been for our technical work. Web development books, open source projects, that side of my brain. Retooling an ice cream-colored author site for dark fantasy adventures is a project I've attempted for years and only half completed. I couldn't figure out how to get it over the finish line.

But then I remembered why I built WriterStead in the first place: for exactly this kind of creative chaos. So I decided to use it as the ultimate test. Could this platform finally sell the books I've always wanted to share with the world? Starting with Abyssia.

I dug through old hard drives and found our most "recent" cover art, which was from 2023. It's a massive improvement over our original 2016–2017 art, but when I look at it now, I still see every flaw and can't imagine the books selling well without yet another redesign.

I found our old book descriptions, too. I uploaded everything to my new WriterStead site: audrey.writerstead.com.

And that's when something unexpected happened.

Uploading those files tested the WriterStead theming system in a way I hadn't anticipated. I realized we didn't have a great theme for fantasy authors with a four-book series. So I built one on the fly. Because that's what we do, right? We solve the problem in front of us.

For the first time, I looked at my author website and felt genuine pride. The books were far from perfect but I could see that we had created stories worth selling. Seeing the books in a proper sales context, with their descriptions and covers working together, actually made me want to finish republishing them.

You can visit the site now and learn about Abyssia. But you can't buy them yet. Not quite.

That's the next step: getting Abyssia I: Shadowfall back up on Amazon. It's not there right now. And honestly? That's a little terrifying to admit out loud. But I'm saying it here so I can't back out.

So here's my question for you. What's the book you've been hiding? Not because it's bad, but because you're scared? Maybe today is the day you pull it out of that folder, dust it off, and take one small step forward.

It's really okay if you don't have a perfect cover or any sort of launch plan. You just need to put your books somewhere where they can be seen. If all you have is a half-written manuscript for your first book, start with putting just the bad cover and unpolished details for that one up on a website, and then showing it to a few supportive friends.

I'll be over here doing the same.