Talent Isn't Enough (And It Never Was)

On indie burnout, learned helplessness, and why good writing won't save you

Last week after reading my article on paywalls (and writers not needing to apologize for them), an exceptional author threw up his hands in despair and quit everything. Deleted his Substack, canceled his subscriptions, walked away from his dreams of being an indie author.

His final post before deleting was a full-on manifesto of why he was done with it all: the audience is fickle, the algorithms are rigged, AI is flooding the market, everyone wants everything for free, and the “business” of writing is beneath the dignity of someone who just wants to write well.

I read it twice. The first time with sympathy, because indie publishing is brutal and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t felt every one of those frustrations myself. The second time was with a sick sort of familiarity. Because buried in that rant was a belief I’ve seen sink more writers than any algorithm ever could: the idea that good writing should be enough. That talent will find its audience. That if you build it, they will come.

It won’t, it won’t, and they won’t. And pretending otherwise will destroy your mental health and self image.

In a moment of reflection, I wondered if I had been a bit too upbeat on the prospect of being independent, of walking away from the traditional publishing world. Not my intention, but maybe I haven’t been as nonsense-free as my branding would suggest.

In case that’s what happened, I’m going to lay it all out for you:

1. Why indie publishing has no shortcuts

2. How to protect your creativity when the grind gets dark

3. Why learning the business side actually reduces anxiety instead of adding to it, and

4. How to earn money writing without becoming a marketer.

There Have Never Been Shortcuts—Not Even in the Good Old Days

The romanticization of the past is a writer’s occupational hazard. We love the myth of the pulp era: writers banging out stories on typewriters, mailing them off, cashing checks. Hemingway in Paris. Steinbeck discovering the common man. The image is seductive because it’s stripped of all the parts that didn’t involve putting words on paper.

But that’s not what happened. There was never a time when some plucky writer was spotted typing at a tea house and whisked away to the nearest publishing house. Never a time where some starving author handed his manuscript to a stranger on the street and it just so happened to be a famous literary agent.

Never. You hear me? That shit never happened.

Those pulp writers you get all moony over were were hustlers. They knew editors personally, hung around newspaper offices, pitched constantly, studied what sold, and wrote under multiple names to flood the market. Hemingway had personal connections and worked as a journalist to pay bills. Even in the trad-pub heyday, writers who succeeded were the ones who understood that publishing was a business—they built relationships, they promoted, they showed up.

The difference now isn’t that the business side matters more. It’s that the business side is more visible and you can’t outsource it to a publisher who may or may not do it well on your behalf. You have to learn it yourself, and that feels like a betrayal of what you signed up for.

It’s not. It’s just what it’s always been, with the curtain pulled back.

The writer who quit talked about not having the skills to be a “shifty, hustling fast-buck artist.” But learning to build an email list or understanding how Amazon’s algorithm works isn’t even hustling—literally the bare minimum of professional competence. A carpenter learns to sharpen their tools. A chef learns to source ingredients. A writer who wants to reach readers learns how readers find books. This isn’t some new indignity. It’s the job. And it always was.

Mental Health and The Thief of Joy

Here’s what I noticed in that writer’s final post: every sentence dripped with resentment. Resentment at the audience for not paying attention. Resentment at other writers for playing the game. Resentment at the platforms for changing the rules. Resentment at himself for not having skills he’d never tried to learn.

That resentment didn’t build overnight. It accumulated over months or years of battering himself against a wall, expecting different results, and interpreting every failure as evidence that the system was rigged against him specifically. I don’t need to tell you his decision to torch his Substack and his nascent career was not a tactical decision; it was a full-on emotional spiral, the kind some of us pay good money to therapists to help us find our way out of.

Protecting your mental health as an indie writer isn’t about “self care,” like that Instagram stupidity with the bubble baths and affirmations. It’s about recognizing when you’re in a doom spiral and having the self-awareness to course-correct before you burn it all down. Or at least being able to pause and breathe before you take drastic measures.

That means:

Setting boundaries that actually protect your creativity. If checking your sales dashboard every morning makes you spiral, stop checking it every morning. If Twitter replies are turning you bitter, get off Twitter. If writing to market is making you hate writing, stop writing to market. You can’t create good work from a place of constant anxiety and bitterness.

Separating your worth from your metrics. Your subscriber count is not your value as a writer or a human being. It’s a lagging indicator of how well you’ve figured out marketing, which is a separate skill from writing. Bad writers with good marketing do better than good writers with no marketing. This is annoying but it’s not a commentary on your talent.

Knowing the difference between a rough patch and unsustainability. Every indie has moments of “what’s the point?” The question is whether you can push through to the other side or whether you’re actively damaging yourself by continuing. If writing is making you miserable more often than not, if you’re sacrificing your health or relationships, if you’ve started to hate the thing you used to love—those are signs to reassess, not to grit your teeth harder.

The writer who quit was in pain, and I don’t minimize that. But he also let himself stay in pain, convinced that admitting he needed to learn new skills or change his approach was somehow admitting defeat. Far from protecting your mental health, that’s positioning yourself as a martyr. And martyrdom doesn’t make you a better writer. It just makes you gone.

Self-Learning Is the Anxiety Cure, Not the Anxiety Cause

The writer said he had “zero skills” at business, that he’d never been interested in “the business thing,” that he lacked the tools to be successful in the internet age. And then he... did nothing about it. Just accepted it as a fixed trait, like eye color.

This is learned helplessness dressed up as integrity.

Nobody is born knowing how to build a Substack, optimize a book description, or design a cover. Nobody inherits SEO knowledge or email marketing strategy. These are learnable skills, and they’re not even particularly difficult—they’re just unfamiliar. The learning curve feels steep because you’re starting from zero, not because the skills themselves are arcane.

What actually causes anxiety isn’t having to learn these things. It’s refusing to learn them while simultaneously resenting that they’re necessary. It’s the cognitive dissonance of wanting results that require skills you won’t acquire. Every time something doesn’t work, you don’t know why, and you can’t fix it, because you’ve decided the problem is that you shouldn’t have to know this stuff.

That’s what I mean when I say you’re choosing to be in pain because if you ever did learn, the anxiety around building a platform would decrease, if not disappear. Not because publishing gets easier, but because you understand what’s happening. When your launch flops, you can look at your email open rates and your ad targeting and your cover design and identify what went wrong. You can test a new approach. And because you’re indie, you can throw that speghetti at the wall as many times as it takes.

I’m not naturally a business-minded person. I’m a writer who wanted to write. But I learned how Amazon ads work (sort of. passingly. sparingly). I learned how to design a newsletter sequence. I learned basic graphic design, if you can call using templates design. I learned how to read analytics. Not because I found it fascinating but because not knowing made me feel helpless, and helplessness made me miserable.

The business side of indie publishing isn’t an unfair burden. It’s the price of admission for complete creative control and keeping the majority of your earnings. You can resent it, or you can learn it. One of those options leads to a sustainable career. The other leads to a final post about how the system is broken and you’re done.

How to Earn Money Writing Without Building a Platform

A big part of my brand as an editor is that I have been a writer and editor for nearly 20 years. But I didn’t have any kind of a platform until 2020. Most of the money I’ve made writing was from employment.

Here’s the part nobody wants to hear: if you want to make a living with your writing, you need either a platform or a client. Preferably both. The fantasy of being “just a writer” who produces work and has someone else handle everything else (with no out-of-pocket expenses from you) died with the mid-century publishing model—and even then, it only worked for a small percentage of writers.

But let’s say you genuinely can’t or won’t build a platform. You don’t want to be on social media, you don’t want to manage an email list, you don’t want to think about marketing. Fine. Here are ways to earn money as a writer without building an audience:

Ghostwriting. Someone else’s platform, your words, their credit. It pays well if you’re good, and you never have to worry about marketing. You’re a hired gun. This is how I built my editing business—by writing for people who had the audience but not the time or skill to produce the content themselves. AI has reduced the volume of ghostwriting clients, but this is still a viable way to earn money, both for employers and for private clients.

Technical writing. If you can make complex topics clear, companies will pay you to write documentation, user guides, training materials. It’s detailed work, but it’s reliable and well-compensated. And no, you don’t need to be a software engineer to do this work. Some technical writers are also experts on the subject they’re writing on, but most aren’t. They’re writers who sit down with subject matter experts and translate their incomprehensible engineer-speak to something a layman can understand.

Editing and consulting. This is my day job when I’m not writing fiction or essays. Writers need editors. Businesses need content strategists. If you’re good at structure and clarity, you can build a service business that pays the bills while you write what you want on the side. Yes, I have my own business, but I also take on 1099 contract jobs for corporations. You can too.

None of these require you to build a personal brand or maintain a social media presence. What they do require is treating writing as a profession instead of a calling that should sustain itself on merit alone. They require you to pitch, to meet client needs, to deliver on time, to handle the business side of freelancing.

If that sounds like too much work, then the problem isn’t the modern publishing landscape. The problem is that you don’t actually want to be a professional writer—you want to be a hobbyist who gets paid like a professional.

There’s no shame in being a hobbyist. Hobbies are great. But hobbies don’t pay the mortgage, and pretending your hobby should generate income without you doing the work to make it a business is a recipe for burnout and bitterness.

Ideas are Worthless and Talent Doesn’t Mean Shit

The writer who quit was talented. I meant that. But talent has never been enough, and it’s never going to be enough. The world is full of talented writers who never build an audience, never make money, and eventually give up in frustration. What separates them from the ones who succeed isn’t some mystical quality or unfair advantage. It’s willingness to learn the parts of the job that aren’t writing.

You can hate that this is true. You can think it shouldn’t be true. You can argue that the system is broken and writers deserve better. I reckon you’re right. But while you’re waiting for the system to change, other writers are learning to navigate it, and they’re building careers.

If you’re not willing to learn the needed skills, that’s your choice. But don’t convince yourself the choice is being made for you. You’re choosing to stay helpless.

I hope the writer who quit finds peace. I genuinely do. But I also hope he eventually realizes that the problem wasn’t that he couldn’t succeed as a writer. It’s that he refused to do what succeeding required, and then decided that made him noble instead of stuck.

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A Final Note

Speaking of learning new skills and adapting to where your audience actually is: I’m launching the Nonsense-Free Kristin podcast. Same interviews with independent authors and creators that I do on YouTube, now in audio format across all major podcast platforms for people who’d rather listen than watch.

Why? Because some of you have been asking for it, and because meeting your audience where they are instead of where you wish they were is exactly the kind of practical business decision that keeps an indie career sustainable.

The podcast launches November 5, 2025 (Remember, remember the fifth of November…). I’ll be hosting it on Substack but you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and we’ll keep talking about how to build something that lasts without losing your mind in the process.