My twin guiding lights for my independent author career

Okay, today's all about my overall guiding principles.

Or what I call my "twin guiding lights."

These are the two principles that I'm building my writing/authoring business on:

1. Create a premium experience for myself.
2. Create a premium experience for my readers.

Let's dive deeper into each one.

But first a little disclaimer: This is how I see things right now, in September 2026, ahead of the Great Big Relaunch of The Eversfield Academy Vampire Hunters books and of their standalone prequel series Eversfield Academy: Vampire Origins and of the books and stories about my Nightstalker vampire hunters in general.

It's also before I've made a living wage off my books, which make no mistake, I want to do. And so I'm not sure how or if I'll have to change things to become that elusive author making a full-time living off her books, especially since I can only produce about one book per year to the quality I want without stressing out. Of course, I hope not to have to change these guiding lights at all!

So yeah, a quick caveat due to that pesky need to make money to feed, water, and shelter myself and my family.

1. Create a premium experience for myself.

This guiding light is almost entirely about pleasing my brain. As I've detailed here, I'm a Type 1 Enneagram (we'll use "Perfectionist" as the label here since it's the one that's most applicable in this context), and I love to learn and to think and to do #AllTheThings.

And those #AllTheThings are far from being limited to writing or even publishing books and short stories.

To create that premium experience for myself, I:

• Write the books and stories that call to me, give me energy, give me joy, however you want to say "make me happy," lol.¹
• Take the time to get my books "just right." I'm a slower writer, at least partially because I love going deep, deep, deep into a world and characters and weaving together several plots that extend and develop over several books in a series (think epic fantasy style plots often in an urban fantasy world). And partially because I'm a Perfectionist. Because I love my books so much, I'm allowed to go full² Perfectionist mode on them versus taking things to that 80% good in 20% of the time that I'm aiming for in most of the non-writing things I do. Either way, I wait until the books are ready without an arbitrary deadline dictating to me when they're ready.³
• Take the time to do #AllTheThings. I like to have my hands in many different buckets, all at the same time. But I stick to my 80-20 rule to make sure I don't accidentally go all Perfectionist mode on everything and as a result, get nothing done.

So those are some of the rules for me regarding this "guiding light," but the main idea is that I check in with myself to see whether a certain decision is more or less likely to give me joy or energy/more or less likely to result in that premium experience for myself while I create these books, series, and stories.

2. Create a premium experience for my readers.

I want you, my reader, to love reading my books and shorts, such that you return to them again and again.

Given that I naturally want to create the best books I can (see above), this fits in pretty easily.

But beyond the books themselves, it's things like:

• Using Vellum to format my books, as a professional book formatting software instead of doing it by hand myself.
• Adding chapter titles to my books despite the extra time it costs because I think it pulls my readers in deeper and creates a better experience for them.
• Avoiding pop-ups on my website no matter how they increase "conversion" since they annoy me as a reader and I'm guessing they would annoy my readers too.⁴

So again, this is something I can use to check in with when I have to decide on something.

To sum it up, for every activity I do, I want to check in and ask:

• Is this creating a premium experience for me? Is this activity likely to bring me joy and/or energy?
• Is this creating a premium experience for my readers? How likely is this to make a reader enjoy my books and shorts even more?

And of course there is one last question to ask even if the answers to both those questions is no: Is this required for me to do for my author business?

And yeah, that last one is mostly about the annoying admin stuff like doing taxes and the like.⁵

Next time: My goals and ambitions for my independent author career.

The epic list of side notes and digressions

1. This doesn't mean I won't ever "write to market" (as defined in Chris Fox's Write to Market book), but it does mean that doing so is a secondary concern.
2. Or full-ish, lol. The Perfectionist in me will always find something to improve if left to her own devices.
3. As I've said in the past, I'm highly internally motivated so I don't need an external motivator like a deadline to get me working. Deadlines also stress me out and go against that "creating a premium experience for myself" guiding light.
4. Okay, yes, fine, this may change, since (a) I often hear that pop-ups are the way to go in a business-sense and (b) I could be unique in my hatred of pop-ups, lol.
5. As I wrote this, I put things down like "maintaining my website" and "uploading my books to the various retailers" and "tracking sales," but technically none of those have to be done. Which is kind of wild honestly. All of those are thought to be must-do's on the surface, but when you question the premise as Becca Syme would say, you can see a world in which you choose not to do those things. Again, wild to me, but true in my opinion. (Note: This does not mean I won't do these things. It just means that doing them is not technically required, unlike something like doing taxes, and therefore doing them (or not) is a choice.)