My Book Changed My Life Before Anyone Even Read It
Hello, dear readers,
There are so many stages to writing and publishing a book that I never even knew existed when I started. Every single one of them taught me something, and every single one put me in a position where I had to face one fear or another. I think this article is really about the emotions that follow you throughout that entire process. Or at least, these are the ones that followed me.
Let's start with actually writing the book. As I've said many times before, my writing process was chaotic. I didn't follow an outline. I didn't follow a plan. I did almost none of the things I normally do when working professionally with clients. There was no proper structure. There was barely anything resembling a system. And that was intentional, because even I didn't know where the story was going, and I didn't want to know.
The story felt far too personal for that. It felt as though I was fighting demons inside myself that I didn't fully understand yet, and that affected the writing process enormously. A manuscript I could probably write for a client in three or four months took me years to write for myself. Apparently, I had accidentally found a form of free therapy. Because by the time I finished the book, I wasn't the same person who had started it. I understood myself better. I understood the story better too, because in some strange way, I had lived through it alongside my characters.
There were countless moments of fear, doubt, creative blocks, rewrites, and the occasional horror of looking at something I'd written and thinking, None of this sounds good, and I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to fix it. But eventually, Draft One was finished.
And then came the revisions.
I will tell you this with complete sincerity: by the end of them, I wanted to cry and throw up every time I looked at this book. I was sick of it. I didn't want to see it anymore. Every day meant editing, rereading, changing things, rereading them again, and consuming yet another enormous serving of self-doubt.
Then I reached the wonderful stage of: It's finished! Now I'll publish it. Adorable.
Suddenly there was an editor. A proofreader. A cover. Formatting. Social media. Content creation. A website. Marketing. Design. And approximately several thousand other tiny things I had never considered when I first sat down and decided I wanted to write a book.
And suddenly, I, a person who can be shy and would normally rather avoid unnecessary social interaction, had to put my face online. I had to film myself. Post myself. Talk about my work publicly. Speak with professionals. Connect with other authors. Talk to readers. Ask questions. Make decisions. Defend those decisions. Somewhere along the way, my life started looking completely different.
But something else came out of that entire process too: a version of me who is more confident. A version who believes in this story and wants to bring it into the world in the best form I possibly can because I want readers to experience the whole thing, the story, the visual identity, the design, the world, all of it.
I proved to myself that I could be persistent. That I could work incredibly hard and keep going long after the initial excitement disappeared. And I think I was able to do that because, for once, I was working toward something I genuinely loved and believed in. The motivation wasn't money. It was never about money. It came from feeling that I was building something bigger than myself.
And maybe that's the strangest part of this entire process. The Puppet King isn't even published yet. There are no sales numbers. No reviews. No rankings. None of the things we usually use to decide whether a book has been "successful." And yet, it has already changed my life.
Because of this book, I started doing things that scared me. I started showing my face online. I started talking openly about my work and standing behind my opinions. I started connecting with other writers and readers. I invested in something without any guarantee that the investment would ever come back to me. And perhaps hardest of all, I learned how to say publicly: I wrote something, and I believe it's good.
I don't know how many copies my book will sell. I don't know what the reviews will look like. I don't know which characters people will love, which ones they'll hate, or which scenes will make readers want to find me personally just so they can yell at me. And for the first time, I'm realizing that I don't find that nearly as frightening as I once did.
Of course I want the book to succeed. I want people to read it. I want them to talk about it, argue about my characters, send me angry messages about their decisions, and wait impatiently for the next story.
But success is no longer the only thing that can prove this was worth doing.
Because this book gave me something long before it ever reached a reader's hands.
It proved that I can finish something that once seemed impossibly large. That I can learn things that intimidate me. That I can allow myself to be visible. That I can invest time, money, effort, and years of my life into something simply because I believe it deserves to exist.
When I started writing The Puppet King, I thought I was creating a book. I didn't realize that, all along, the book was creating a new version of me too.
Maybe one day I'll hold the physical copy in my hands, and that's when all of this will finally feel real. But whatever happens after that, there's one thing I already know for certain.
This book was a success for me long before anyone ever read it.
If you’d like to follow the journey of the book I am writing and see how it’s coming together, you can find more here:
But if you want to, you can see more about my work as a ghostwriter here:
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