Why I Published a Book I Secretly Regret—and What It Taught Me About Success

Writers don’t become writers when they love their books. They become writers when they publish the ones they hate. And write the next anyway.

Let me back up for a second.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. At first, I just consumed books the way some eat chips: one after another, not stopping until the bag is empty.

My mom worked a lot, so every summer I was sent off to my grandparents’ village. No internet. The TV was always taken over by my grandpa, who only wanted to watch biathlon. So my escape was reading.

I’d get on my bike, ride an hour to the school library, and come back balancing a tower of novels. Genre didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Except reading.

The stories I read felt too small for my imagination. I didn’t just want to read. I wanted to live inside them. To spend nights arguing with characters in my head, like they were real people sitting next to me.

So I wrote. A lot. If we’re counting the books I created, the number is impressive. If we’re counting the ones I actually published? Zero.

Until now.

Sick, Stuck, and Suddenly Project-Managing a Novel

Everything changed when I got sick.

Covid. Two weeks of fever and coughing. My team was patching holes without their product manager. (They did fine, by the way. Probably better than I wanted to admit.)

And me? I was stuck in bed, alone with my thoughts. No meetings. No Jira tickets. Just me, Covid, and the stories in my head demanding to be seen.

Somewhere between coughing fits, my imagination staged a hallucination:

I send my manuscript to a famous publisher. They call me the next morning, breathless. “This is incredible! We’re paying you half a million dollars and scheduling your book tour immediately!”

Spoiler: that’s not how publishing works. New authors aren’t greeted with champagne and confetti. Nobody’s waiting for your draft like it’s the iPhone launch. The reality…