1.6 The Aligned Author Alchemy Series: Balance is Bullshit

Allison Martin shares her personal journey from a medical scare that forced her to quit publishing entirely to a sustainable, balanced approach to writing and publishing. She introduces her 5S author blend concept—Self, Story, Support, Service, and Sales—to help authors integrate their craft into a fulfilling lifestyle.

Grab this free PDF on the 5S Author Blend that will help you see which areas of your publishing are taking over, and which are being neglected.

Balance is bullshit. Blend instead.
– Allison Martin

Episode transcript

Balance is bullshit.

Striving for it in your author career is holding you back.

I’m Allison, a witchy black cat author with 20 plus years of experience in branding, design, advertising, and publishing. I wrote and illustrated my first book at 11, published 16 novels, and studied visual communications through design, film, photography, and fine art. I’ve worked for newspapers, libraries, bookstores, and even designed covers for a big five publisher. After trying to be like everyone else and throwing myself into hustle culture and rapid release, I burnt out. My body shut down, and I had a reckoning with my own spirit that forced me to quit writing until I got my act together.

Now I’m back in the game, doing this gently and on my own terms. I’m learning to fall in love with the act of writing, the process of bringing worlds to life, and the quiet rebellion I want to see happen in the publishing world. So if you’d like to join me, this is the perfect place to start. Overthrowing the idea of balance as something to strive for.

Instead, pull up a seat, pour a warm cup of tea, and get ready to sustainably blend your publishing into your lifestyle with my 5S author blend concept.

Building a career out of writing books is perhaps the most complex, tangled, and overwhelming undertaking one can ever engage in. Is that dramatic? Yes. Do I believe it? Yes.

There are so many moving pieces that the idea of balancing them is absurd. All I can see in my head is the circus acrobat on a high wire holding up a bunch of spinning plates. Do you know how much effort and training it takes to do that for just a few seconds of performance? Why do we expect to be able to do something like that every day, all day for the rest of our lives?

My day job as a librarian is very much in the publishing space, but it is not complex. I go to work, do my tasks, and then I come home. I don’t think about the library when I’m not there. My tasks don’t haunt me like my characters do. My responsibilities live within the building, not within my brain and body. My health can affect my ability to do my job, of course, but a lack of sleep or a lingering cold only makes me slightly less personable, whereas they can render me completely incapable of writing any words that make sense if I write any words at all.

When I am sick, there are on-call librarians who show up and do the job for me, but no one shows up to write for me when I am not at my computer. Writing books isn’t just writing books. As an author, I feel like you get it. There are so many layers to writing, and within each layer, there are hundreds of tasks. Then you jump on the internet and are inundated with millions of sound bites of advice, thousands of freebies that promise some six-figure author career, and arguments, hundreds of comments deep about which method or structure or framework or whatever is the right one.I didn’t start this podcast to add to that noise. I’ve struggled a lot with how to create these episodes because what I want for you is to do less. To ignore 90% of what you hear or read, even if that means ignoring me. My little witchy writing methods aren’t for everyone. I want you to know that it’s okay to slow down. How do I convey that in a world that is telling you to speed up? In a world that tells you to use soulless technology to mimic your deepest purpose as a real-life person. I want you to go analog, at least for a minute, to reconnect with your humanity. That’s what storytelling is for, in my opinion, to help us understand what it means to be human.

What I truly want for you, with my whole heart, is to tell the stories the way you need to tell them. I want you to feel peace in your process. I believe this is possible if we ditch scarcity and kind of chill out for a second and breathe. I say that as a person who has no chill. I want to walk the walk and walk beside you, even hold your hand if you need, while you re-regulate and align yourself with your ambitions. I have unlearned a lot over the years because I was forced to, and it’s not easy, but it is worth it. If I can spare you even a little bit of the grief that I went through, that’s a win for me.If you love the hustle and it makes you feel alive to be crushed under looming deadlines and tight turnaround times, then that’s awesome. Go forth and hustle. There are plenty of communities out there to support you, but I will be nothing but a source of frustration for you. I have had many a writer roll their eyes at me and be like, “Well, how do you expect to make any money if you’re not gonna blah blah blah blah blah?” But honestly, I actually make more money now doing damn near nothing than I did at the height of my hustle, and it just works for me. If it’s not for you, that’s okay. May we peacefully part ways at this crossroad, but if you are burnt out, overwhelmed, or even if you just know that you don’t fit in the fast lane, I’d like to offer you a warm hearth to sit at. A place for your cramped typing fingers to catch your breath and rebuild your career over a nice cup of tea.

I want to lay out for you how I structure my own writing and publishing life now. These things aren’t frameworks per se, and they are definitely not prescriptive. This is how I have broken things down after years of trying and failing and trying and failing and trying again and figuring it out. You can take it, leave it, or, my favorite, restructure it to fit your own life. So what is IT? IT is replacing balancing with blending. Your life, health, ability, resources, creativity, everything you need to tell stories are not fixed resources. They change, grow, get depleted, and they also need varying levels of focus or attention depending on what season you’re in. It feels like a lot.

This is why I sought to simplify the process for my ADHD, which is where this all started. I took a long, painfully long list of tasks that I needed to do to sustain my publishing and broke them into categories. This method that I use is the 5S Author Blend. And aside, if this language doesn’t fit for you, you can use anything you want. I see these categories as ingredients, as if I was blending my own tea. But you can choose to see it as a hierarchy, as pillars, as containers, facets, honestly, whatever fits your brain. I am only here to share the concept. I am not here to gatekeep the strategy.

In this episode, I’m just gonna briefly touch on each of them, and then I’m gonna do one episode for each of the five S’s and go deeper into what they mean. They are self, story, support, service, and sales. Everything I do can be slotted into one of these categories. So here we go.

Basic rundown.

Self, our creativity comes from within us. Our motivation and drive and ability to write is very much influenced by our actual bodies and lives. Personally, I find this category to be kind of the most ignored, especially in hustle culture. Sleep, nutrition, movement, hydration are probably some of the first things that come to mind, and these are extremely important. Like I work out for my energy levels, I sleep for clarity, I eat to focus. Not always and not perfectly. I am not suggesting even a little bit that you have to maintain some fitness influencer level routine. I mean, drink a glass of cold water before you write. It will crisp up your thoughts. Run on the spot or do some arm swings or something every 20 minutes. This helps kind of clear your head and get you writing.

The mind and the spirit are also important here too. So what are your values? How does your brain work? What are your boundaries? These are all part of the self category, and knowing these things about yourself helps. If you are ADHD like me, there are tons of writing advice that I pass over because I know it is not how I function. There are ways that I have to set up my working space just to be able to get out the words. Without knowing or working on these things, you will continually just copy other people’s frameworks and wonder why they don’t produce results.

The second is story.

This is all about writing, obviously. This is creativity and craft, research, outlining, drafting, editing, reading, and working on just the basic quality of your writing. It could also be any education that you take that improves your writing systems. For example, I took an archetypal tarot class because I use tarot in my writing process. I study psychology as a part of my quest to understand why humans do things, which is why I write stories.

The third S is support.

Support is often the one that has the biggest impact on authors when I work with them on my blending system. Because support itself is four tiers, and they all serve very different purposes. The first tier is peers. Other writers in similar places to you are your peers. These are the folks you trade beta reads with or start group chats where you can bitch about whatever thing is frustrating you at the moment within the writing world. The second tier is mentors. These folks are usually further along than you, either in how many books they’ve published, how long they’ve been at it, who they work with, whatever. They are here to help you in your own writing. You will probably pay them or at least offer them something in return for their emotional labor of helping you. The third tier in the support is readers. This is the support that sustains you, so act accordingly.The fourth tier is personal. This is family and friends, the people in your real life that aren’t necessarily helping you be a better writer, but maybe they look after your kids so you can write, or they go for coffee with you so you can kind of clear your head. Every support system is important, but they are very different and they serve different purposes.

The fourth S is service.

Creativity is collaboration. You can sustain a career on being a taker, and some do, but it kind of flies in the face of my own personal morals and values. So giving back to the community not only feels good, but it actually does make you better at your job. I think it was Simon Sinek who said, if you want better friends, you need to be a better friend.

And that works here too. Offer to help new authors, be present in the community, write a blog. My service to writers is being lived out right now in this very moment by way of this podcast. And to my readers, I have an email list where I give away stories, backstage passes to the writing process, and lots of first looks and exclusives. And this doesn’t mean you have to do it all for free either, although I suggest a mix of both. It is okay to be compensated for your time and attention if you want to be.

The fifth and often where people put most of their focus, but I personally think this is sort of the after effect, the one that is helped by having solid by getting yourself solid in the first four S’s.

The fifth S is sales.

There are a lot of things that fall under this category, but even then, really can be broken down into branding, marketing, and advertising. My kind of very basic way of explaining it is branding is about identity, marketing is about interest, and advertising is about value. These catch-alls do have some overlap, and it is definitely not as clean cut as I’m making it sound here. But we’re just gonna leave it at that for now, and I will go much deeper into it when I do that.

But this is things like where you choose to sell your books and how you choose to market your books and where you choose to show up on the internet or in person in order to build your revenue. Right?

Okay, so now that you know all these ingredients and I’m telling you to stop trying to balance them but to blend them, then okay, that’s cool. But now what? Like what do I do with this knowledge? How do I use this concept within publishing?

And the first is to accept that you can’t balance them. And that one is actually fairly tricky.

A publishing career is a moon cycle business, not a sun cycle business. So when you are drafting, yourself and story categories will be the most important with a high dose of support. When you’re getting ready for a launch, sales is gonna dominate everything with some support and service in there to kind of get the word out, right?If you are a brand new author, support and story will be your focus. You are looking for peers. You are looking for people to be in the trenches with you. You are looking to become a better writer. And if you’ve been at this for a hot minute, refining and creating better sales systems and taking better care of yourself might be where you need to be. Maybe you are like I was and burnt yourself out on the story and the sales. And now you’re kind of taking a step back and you need to take care of yourself and build up those support systems again.

But you can also use this system to evaluate where you are right now and which categories are helping or hindering you. And I know as a personal example, when I’m stuck in my story, I decide it would be a great idea to redesign my whole website, which is never necessary, by the way.

Or, again for me, I had health issues and I became so focused on and obsessed with my health and my self category that I wasn’t writing or marketing at all. I was actually hiding in this category waiting until I “felt ready” to push my writing to the next level. So in the show notes, I will throw a PDF of a quick check guide where you can assess which category you might be hiding in and which category you might be neglecting.Okay, I’m gonna stop rambling now, but I will be back to go deeper into these five ingredients. So be sure you’re subscribed here or following on Instagram @quillandkettlepod to be notified when the new episode lands and we will see you next time.