Let’s Call Them Plot Twists Because Calling Them Pivots Feels Too Corporate

Instead of creating art, I've been creating burnout for myself. Here's what I'm doing, changing, and exploring to get back on track.

For a while now– over a year, I suppose– I’ve been selling books on my website, and I’ve been trying to keep up a podcast and newsletter to support the bookstore part of my digital ecosystem.

I enjoy entrepreneurship almost as much as I enjoy creative writing. Honestly, given my experiences as a product manager in the software industry, entrepreneurship can be a little easier and comes more naturally than creative writing at times.

But recently, I’ve found myself burned out to the point that I’m not doing either my entrepreneurship or creative writing very well or consistently. I’ve felt torn between what I ought to focus on. Do I write today? Should I develop a better marketing strategy for the bookstore? Should I rebuild a portion of the website to enhance its optimization for search and AI retrieval?

Caught in a swift current of things that I can do–should do– I struggled to get stably back on the shores of actually doing.

I end up feeling stressed, unfocused, and reach for my phone as a distraction instead of putting my time and energy into the things that I know will make me happier and more fulfilled in the long run.

Making things even more stressful, the distributor I partnered with to fulfill book orders… isn’t great.

How I Fell Off the Writing Wagon

To save on upfront cash needed, I wasn’t keeping bookshop inventory on hand. Instead, I partnered with a book distributor (who I won’t name yet in case I need to avoid burning any bridges), and would use their direct-to-home fulfillment services to essentially dropship book orders as they came in. My thought process was that I’d spend a year or so operating this way to learn the ropes and get a feel for what my audience was interested in before investing the money to operate like a more traditional bookstore.

But, of course, things weren’t so simple. Insert plot twist one. This distributor carries almost any in-print title you can think of, and their technology is garbage, meaning I couldn’t simply integrate with my Shopify site directly. For a while, they offered their own e-commerce platform, built directly on top of their systems, but they weren’t allowing new stores to use it, which meant it wasn’t an option for me.

My best option was to hire a third-party service for database management. Essentially, I paid a guy on a monthly basis (and I want to be clear– he was great, responsive, helpful, and not the problem in this situation) to prepare inventory update files for me. I’d give him the parameters of what I wanted to carry, and he’d run a SQL query against the distributor’s licensed data. Then, he'd send me all the data I needed for my inventory in a tidy CSV file. Throughout the week, he’d send updates of titles the service no longer carried that I needed to remove from my shop, inventory updates, and new titles that met my criteria.

As orders came in, I’d log into the distributor’s site, pull up the title, choose to ship it directly to my customer’s home, and then put in all of their shipping information. Again, part of the process that should be easy to automate with a few API calls, but the distributor made sure that was impossible. Allegedly, there were ways to integrate with Shopify for direct purchasing, but this came with a setup cost of several thousand dollars. Given what I’ve seen of this distributor, I would not trust the reliability of that integration.

So, the book order process has been incredibly manual and time-consuming. I largely didn’t mind, though. It still felt good to be selling books.

Plot twist two. Because I was getting SQL queries containing several thousand book titles at a time, I couldn’t review all of them. The way that this distributor set up their book data also meant that the level of specificity about what you wanted to carry in your shop was pretty broad.

I realized this when orders started coming in for titles that I didn’t want to carry– blatant pseudoscience making claims about apricot seeds curing cancer, antisemitic titles that echoed Nazi ideology, books that the Southern Poverty Law Center has cited for encouraging race wars.

Blindsided, I canceled and refunded orders, removed titles from my shop, and updated my data guy that I didn’t want to carry those ISBNs anymore. And yet, what I then realized was that often these titles are distributed under multiple editions, meaning multiple ISBNs, so it was like playing a game of bullshit whack-a-mole to find all of the garbage that I had unknowingly been carrying.

What’s particularly frustrating about these titles isn’t only that I didn’t want to list them to begin with, but also that if I had kept them, they’d be my store’s best sellers. My podcasting, blogging, and newsletter efforts didn’t result in sales of titles that I wanted to sell– books about writing, classic literature, essays, poetry, or groundbreaking fiction. What actually brought people to my shop… the low-quality, conspiratorial titles that had slipped into my inventory by mistake.

What’s particularly frustrating about these titles isn’t only that I didn’t want to list them to begin with, but also that if I had kept them, they’d be my store’s best sellers. […] What actually brought people to my shop… the low-quality, conspiratorial titles that had slipped into my inventory by mistake.

Plot twist three comes into play now. I made strides in removing the unwanted titles (I actually found a good use for AI here and was able to use it to audit my inventory programmatically to flag titles that met hate speech criteria or were written by anyone from Fox News), but the issues weren’t over. The distributor I was working with had a really inconsistent schedule for actually sending out my orders. Some customers’ orders would be in the mail within a day. Others… three, four, even five days. And then, I had a few cases where customers got the wrong book altogether. Reaching out to the distributor was a crapshoot. They didn’t make it easy to actually get support from a human, instead trying as hard as possible to send you to their outdated knowledge base articles first. When you finally did get ahold of an actual person, it was usually not very helpful. You’d get generic answers that didn’t seem to relate to the question you asked directly or the delays would be so long that nothing was relevant anymore.

“Could you let me know when order 1234 will ship? I can see that it has been marked as processing for a few days now, but it looks like that title should be in stock.”

*3 days later* “Processing means that we’re getting your order ready to ship.”

***

“My customer changed their mind about order 4567 shortly after I entered it. How can I cancel this order so that it doesn’t ship?”

*A week later* “What do you mean? That’s already shipped. Pay for the customer to send it back to you, then you can send it back to us, and get a partial refund.”

***

“Hi, can you tell me about the bookshop starting inventory program mentioned on the website? From what I understand, you all have a program for helping bookstores get started with their initial stocking needs, and I’d love to learn more about the costs and how that works.”

*several days later* “Account number.”

“Oh, sure, my account number is ABC1234.”

*several days later* “I’m not the right person for this question.”

“Could you please point me to who is? This is the email address on the website for this program, by the way, so if the program has changed, that may need to be updated.”

“You need to talk to the rep for your region.”

“Great! Who is that? I’m in Kentucky. I don’t see regions or reps listed on the website.”

*ghosts me*

Celebrating books, literature, art, and literacy is one of my chief joys in life, but working with this distributor was quickly draining me of that joy. And the amount of time I spent stressing over my bookstore, which, by the way, doesn't turn a profit most months, meant that that was time I wasn’t spending reading or writing.

That brings me to plot twist four: the changes I’m making to get back on the wagon.

How I’m Reprioritizing My Creativity

The product manager side of my brain doesn’t turn off. Ever. So, a part of me thought that as I digested all of the frustrations I have with the book distributor I’ve been working with, I’d be cooking up a business plan for what a better alternative would look like. Unfortunately, this particular distributor has a bit of a monopoly on book distribution in the United States, and it would be delicious to launch an enterprise that could challenge them.

But! My biggest focus right now is my own creativity. Developing the business plan, securing funding, and establishing the necessary supply chain management systems to compete would be an ungodly amount of work. It would be a full-time career for several years to get started.

As a result, I have chosen a very organic and honest response to those ideas: nah, fuck that, we’re writing.

Later this month, I will officially retire my Shopify site and will, instead, leverage Bookshop.org’s referral system to build out browsable bookshelves and promote the books I want to.

Additionally, I’ve returned to using my sunrise alarm clock, which sits on the far side of my room. It lights up and makes bird noises, and because it’s on the far side of the room, I can’t just reach over to my bedside table and snooze it like I can my phone. Since it makes me get out of bed to silence it, it’s easier to stay moving. As a bonus, unlike when I use my cell phone for my alarm clock, there’s no temptation to start scrolling after I’m torn from my slumber. I tumble out of bed, turn off the alarm clock, stumble to the kitchen, and start brewing that first cup of ambition.

That’s when I do my morning pages. I don’t want to dive in my manuscript as soon as I’ve woken up because my brain needs a little time and a lot of caffeine to come into itself, but I can still grab a journal and set an intention for the day– what kind of day do I want it to be? What’s on my mind? What did I dream about? And so on.

After morning pages, it’s newsletter or manuscript time. I’m trying to alternate days so that I get in a better cadence of working on both, but there’s part of that scheduling that I still need to figure out. For example, if I wake up thinking about my manuscript but it’s a newsletter idea, I want to make sure I capture that spark; at the same time, I want to be disciplined and consistent about when I show up for either.

The podcast is still a bit of a wild card. I would love to find a cohost and shift the show to us talking about what we’re reading, what we’re working on, and having a dialogue about what’s going on in culture and publishing. Scouting for and recruiting podcast guests is very tiresome and I don’t enjoy solo episodes where I monologue. I need to figure out a better cadence for brainstorming, doing outreach, and recording episodes since I’m pretty inconsistent and fly by the seat of my pants at this point.

But, I’ll get around to it. For now, I want to focus on reinvigorating my writing and getting to a place where I enjoy writing online and maintaining my website again– all without the added frustrations of working with Ing… oh wait, I said I’m not going to name the distributor, right, right, right…

What About You? How Do You Balance Creativity with Everything Else?

That’s where my creative journey is at currently. I’m curious, dear reader, how do you approach balancing your creativity with all the other responsibilities and distractions in your life? What are some of the tactics you’ve tried that you’ve found to be particularly helpful?