Suffering a Career Setback

How do I move forward from here?

After I read the Bible during an admission to psychiatric hospital in 2007, my whole perspective on my life and existence in general was radically transformed. The focus of my life shifted from career aspirations and dating to matters of religion. I had entered into a personal relationship with God through repentance and a new found belief in the person and teaching of Jesus Christ.

This pivotal event in my spiritual journey led me to want to grow in my faith walk, so I returned to university to study Philosophy and Religion. I realised that my true passion in life was philosophical theology, and after graduating I embarked upon a career as a self-publishing author. This is because the insights I had gained from reading the Bible, studying philosophy and religion, and immersing myself in Christian living had so powerfully and positively impacted my life that I wanted to share that passion with others. I felt that in writing books about philosophical theology, I had found my calling.

I took my journey into the world of self-publishing seriously. I am a perfectionist by nature and took care to try to write and publish books that were well written and well presented. I spent countless hours thinking through ideas, refining those ideas, writing drafts and editing them, working with editors, designing and redesigning book covers, and ordering proofs to check my books looked good and were as error-free as possible. I joined a community of self-publishing authors and spent hours in forums researching avenues for distributing books and trying to find the best way to reach readers who would genuinely benefit from my writing. I ran all kinds of promotions and undertook various advertising campaigns to try to ensure my books would gain the readership I felt they deserved after all of the time and effort I had put into creating them.

I enjoyed some success as a self-publishing author. My books have been either downloaded or purchased around 15,000 times at the time of writing, which for an independent author writing in a niche area, feels satisfying. There was a time when my books were being distributed widely, I was enjoying consistent sales, and had the feeling that I was on the road to establishing a career as an author and making writing my full-time job.

But then, in 2023, my life took an unexpected turn. After a period of being very active in evangelistic activities, I experienced a season of intense spiritual attack and ended up self-harming severely. This led to an admission to hospital and a spell in intensive care in which I experienced the worst suffering of my life. I have written about this experience in other articles, so I won’t elaborate here, but despite making a good recovery over a period of weeks and months, I was left traumatised physically and emotionally by the experience.

After I returned home from this hospital admission, I struggled with deep feelings of anger and abandonment. During this time, I made a lot of decisions that were motivated by anger, and one of those decisions was to take all my books off sale from all retailers. From what I can recall, the cause of my anger was frustration over the lack of helpful customer service from distribution companies and retailers and technical difficulties related to their online platforms.

While some of the concerns that led me to be angry with these platforms are valid and understandable, in time my decision to remove all of my books from sale resulted in a deep depression and sense of loss. This is because I had channeled so much energy into every aspect of the writing, distribution, and promotion of my books, and it felt as though all of those efforts had been to a certain extent wasted due to my anger-fuelled decision to unpublish my books. There were times when I considered starting again from scratch and beginning the process of distributing and promoting my books again, but technical problems related to ISBN numbers as well as the cost and effort that would be necessary for me to do this made it seem like a very tall order.

I reassessed the situation and decided that the best thing I could do would be to set up a personal website through which to sell my books exclusively. The advantage would be that I could make more money from every sale (without retailers and distributors taking a cut) and it seemed to be a much simpler option than redistributing my books to retailers and distribution companies, and this was especially appealing because I was still going through a process of recovering from trauma and my energy levels were relatively low.

I launched StevenColborne.com last year and made the website the exclusive place of retail for all my books. I was careful to create a site that I was happy with, and I hoped that there would have been enough momentum from my previous self-publishing and promotion endeavours to generate some income through sales in my online shop. However, in the nine months or so since launching the website, I haven’t made a single sale.

When I researched ways to promote a Shopify store (my website is hosted with Shopify) I found that one of the top recommendations is to use social media, but I made the decision to come off social media a few years ago because I was unhappy with the way platforms like Facebook and Instagram have evolved. I didn’t have a budget to pursue advertising and other paid marketing endeavours, and the process of continuing to write articles on my blog to promote my website led to little interest and no sales. It also seemed to me that people are in general more cautious about buying products from a Shopify store than a large retailer like Amazon, due to slower delivery times and less of an infrastructure for returns, customer support, etc.

Yesterday, I was thinking about the situation I am now in with my books and felt really sad. I recalled all of the effort I had put into establishing a career as a self-publishing author and how I had been on the right path to fulfilling my dream of supporting myself financially from my writing. I felt anguished that due to the impulsive decision to take all of my books off sale, my author career has suffered a major setback.

I find myself in a season where I am reassessing my career and trying to see a clear way forward. Writing has consistently remained my passion throughout my adult life and I truly believe my books contain insights that can make a positive difference in the lives of readers. My experience with writing daily weekday articles on Substack has been positive and its possible that this could turn into a source of income in the future. I also have ideas for two more books I would potentially like to write. The question is whether I want to make every effort to revive my career as a writer and self-publishing author, or whether I need to change my life focus and career direction. I will have to continue to prayerfully consider what to do.