14. Pulling the plug

When I sent my last newsletter almost a year ago, I outlined the changes I needed to make to keep the Scriptorium alive. Today, with a heavy heart, I’m announcing I’m pulling the plug after four years and 168 posts.

For some context, I began blogging in 2007, and in retrospect, I peeked in 2018 in terms of output and revenue. By 2019, however, I realised I had two distinct audiences— blog readers and book readers — which my analytics suggested did not overlap. Trying to please both camps caused me quite a headache, and I realise now that I failed at both.

2020 was, quite frankly, a clusterfuck. Covid locked me down at home, and I’ve worked there ever since. My health and well-being took a nose dive, thanks to a sedentary lifestyle, isolation and a growing malaise. Despite this, I launched Scriptorium and moved from a static-site generator to a self-hosted Ghost instance. I hoped to capitalise on my traffic and turn my blog and stories into a subscription-based newsletter and serialised fiction business.

At first, I enjoyed a small measure of success—enough to encourage me to continue. But when you start a subscription business, people quite rightly expect regular content updates. For a while, I managed, thanks to the flurry of creativity, when I started writing the Codex of Destiny.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t sustain the pace, and my output declined. You can probably guess the main reasons: work, family, competing interests, et cetera. These lead, in turn, to creative and cognitive fatigue. Then, when your subscriptions and traffic inevitably drop, it’s easy to start questioning your motivations.

And that’s when the danger sets in. Creative writing is a terrible way to make money. The creative process is slow, painstaking and thankless. Turning words into a product is time-consuming and expensive. Your end product is less valuable to readers than a $5 coffee. In short, the ROI is crap unless you’re one of the lucky or persistent writers who can climb above the rest.

In any case, hacking out a career as an indie writer means playing the long game by investing lots of time and money. Success depends on cultivating a community of readers through exhaustive newsletter swaps, blog tours, social media posts and advertising — activities I hate. But even that counts for nothing unless you are prolific enough to keep feeding people’s interest and the algorithms that drive content to users.

Writing became a grind because I turned it into a business. It stopped being something I enjoyed and became an obligation. This was a mistake. I have a successful career in the tech industry that pays far better than any creative side hustle ever will. I no longer feel the financial pressure to ‘make it’, and I like my job at Canva. Once I accepted this, I knew there were better ways to spend my time — like with my family and improving my health.

So, does this mean I’m giving up on writing completely?

I can’t answer that—at least not from where I stand today. Last year, I all but decided to postpone writing my Weaver books indefinitely, and this week, I admitted I’m unlikely to write any time soon, try as I might. Moreover, I don’t think I can until I completely divorce myself from the prospect of writing for money or readership.

Perhaps what’s most telling, though, is that I’ve been happy doing other things. I’ve returned to martial arts after a 22-year break, and it’s transformed my health and wellbeing. For a creative fix, I’ve been running D&D sessions for my kids, using my writing skills in a more satisfying and rewarding way than seeking validation through publishing.

Anyway, to those of you who have supported my writing—be it through patronage, readership, or kind words—I give you my eternal thanks. I’ll keep the Scriptorium running until the end of the month, after which I’ll delete it along with all my posts, stories, and any data of yours (namely email) that I hold. I’ll keep my two published books live on their respective retailers, but I’ll make them perpetually free and release them under a Creative Commons license.