Last week I was at a hair appointment when the beautician and I somehow got on the subject of the decline of creativityand how our lack of pursuing creative endeavors could bring about the fall of humanity in the near future. Obviously, this is not idle chit-chat one would usually have with someone who cuts her hair. Or really, with anyone they only see once every few months.
However, I kept thinking about this subject long after I left with my hair looking fabulous, by the way. Then I got the call out for this opportunity to write something for this blog and for all you readers and writers.
Is the Decline of Creativity Actually Happening?
Now, surprisingly, my beautician’s point of view on this subject was somewhat negative and dystopian or cyberpunk in direction. And while I could definitely see her points on the decline of creativity affecting the world as a whole, I would rather look at it from a constructive angle.
So, I went to AI to see what the almighty destroyer of creative thought in the future has to say about this subject. Of course, it (I say “it” because it has been referring to itself as “me” way too often for my own sensibilities) starts with some scientific research, saying that “human creativity and divergent thinking have been declining steadily since 1990, even as general intelligence scores continued to rise.”
Apparently, according to some researchers, the number of ideas humanity has produced had peaked around 1990. They also have hypothesized that while AI-assisted writing has increased the expansion of vocabulary usage, it still reduces actual creative ideas.
I know some college teachers who have been fighting AI use for writing for some years now and are no further ahead of the statistic that 67% have been reported to have used it to write their assignments. Of course, I wonder about these students’ intelligence in admitting this to any researcher.
We All Started Out as Creative Geniuses
Now I promised a less dystopian view of our creative endeavors in humanity while still keeping this article less like a college thesis, so here it is.
When we are at the kindergarten age as children, our creative testing is found to be at genius levels. Roughly 98% of us were geniuses in the creative department when we started our lives, but we dive to just 2% of us keeping that sense of creative thought by the time we become adults.
What Is Driving the Decline of Creativity?
I keep wondering why our society has seemed to lose that creative mojo steadily since 1990. So, I asked AI again what societal drivers have caused this decline since the year 1990 in humanity's creative endeavors?
It came back with the researchers’ findings that there has been a “multifaceted cultural shift in how society values time, how media is consumed, and most critically, how children are educated.” There has been a loss of passive playtime.
I’m leaving the educators to consider this shift in education because I’m not an educator, nor do I have a degree in education. And because I really do not want to get into fights with anyone on this subject.
However, I have an education in mass communication and have been a published author for decades now. I have seen and witnessed firsthand the increased frequency of people who have passed by my table at events and, when asked, “What do you like to read?” more often, they smile and tell me (sometimes with some pride in their voices) that “I don’t read anything now that I’m an adult.”
When did they give up doing anything creative, or when was the last time they took on a creative project on a weekend just to make themselves happy in the act of accomplishing something?
Apparently, according to researchers and AI, this shift away from creative endeavors over to watching television, streaming movies, playing video games, or even just daydreaming about your own future started our society in creative decline back in 1990. Remember that most of us were creative geniuses back when we were five years old.
Finding Our Creative Mojo Again
I’m not saying you should be writing, because really, I have plenty of competition in this creative endeavor. However, at some point you had the aptitude for expressing your ideas through painting, dancing (visual arts), decorating, flower arranging, or even spoon carving.
Whatever it is that can bring you some joy, because the alternatives are driving our collective society to letting AI do it all for us. There will be no joy in continuing down that road. It took a beautician to make me consider that road.
As I always tell people who bother to ask me why I write stories, “It brings me personal joy and because it’s much cheaper than therapy!”
What’s one creative thing you loved doing as a child that you’ve stopped doing as an adult? And what would it take for you to pick it up again?
About Pattie
Pattie (PJ) Hulstrand is an author of Time-Travel Romance, Paranormal Urban Fantasy, and an upcoming extreme sports suspense/thriller series. She also has an award-winning non-fiction, “The Jungle Survival Guide to Media Kits for Authors,” and a little duck book series for children.
A couple of years ago, author marketing burnout nearly convinced me to walk away from writing altogether. A couple years ago, I had a day when...
I was done.
Done writing. Ready to quit, unpublish everything, clean off my shelves, get my room back, and fully retire from it all. I wanted out of the prison of shoulds.
I had officially hit author marketing burnout.
But then, I acknowledged I love to write. Every new book published was a goal achieved!
How had I imprisoned myself so badly? What could I do differently?
Looking back over my writing career and the many shoulds I had tried—advice from successful authors and experts where some shoulds I was still struggling with, some I had failed at, and some I still hadn’t attempted—had become a huge tipping point of anxiety and frustration.
The list was long. Podcasts, interviews live or recorded, blogs, social media, street team, ARC team, paid ads, promotional posts, videos, major book launches, creating pages and groups and moderating them, book signings, blog swaps, websites... Most of these pertained to marketing and promoting.
Knowing no two writers share the same path to best-selling status and that my path has been unlike that of other authors, why was I taking their shoulds to heart? Admittedly, I never enjoyed selling. So, why was I shoulding myself onto their paths?
That day when I had hit peak author marketing burnout and was overwhelmed by the list of tasks, having just published a new book, I had only one question: What was really going on?
The year before, I had created a spreadsheet to track my writing hours. I now had data to analyze. My frustration revealed itself in the spreadsheet totals. I was writing only 60% of the time. Promos were 30%. Everything else was 10%, including meetings and teaching.
I wanted to be writing 80-90% of the time! Why? Because it’s new books that generate excitement among readers, which leads to the discovery of a backlist and creates a following.
Identifying those shoulds I did and those I didn’t, I saw:
I wasn’t solid about my why.
I was comparing my activities to those of other writers. Such comparisons are never good. How many times have I given that advice to other writers?
So, I asked myself two questions:
Question #1: Why Do I Write?
I write because I have to. It’s my purpose for being here, along with teaching. My goal is to entertain with fiction and share what I’ve learned in nonfiction. Strangely enough, after two decades of publishing, teaching writing as a degreed writing professor became a priority. Promoting was never a part of my why. That realization explained why my focus was strong in writing and publishing but weak in promoting.
Question #2: What Should My Shoulds Look Like?
A simple answer that came quickly. I wanted my promo shoulds to be easy and not require lots of time doing them. I didn’t want my shoulds to remain as the detested chores they had become.
I was working hard but not working smart. With marketing not my forte, I was trying to do too much. I needed to simplify my shoulds.
Realizations Since That Day
Today, publishing has become a fluid endeavor. What works today won’t be the same tomorrow, as websites and platforms come and go more quickly. Many of the businesses we use and love are changing their policies and increasing costs.
Newsletters once ruled how authors contacted readers. Today, readers scroll to find new books and join groups where they ask for referrals.
I needed to change my shoulds to better reflect industry changes. I had a strong writing and publishing process that worked well but had a haphazard promo process.
Where Are My Readers?
Researching where readers browse particular genres helped me decide which social media platforms to use and which ones to leave behind.
Social Media Longevity
Additionally, I researched social media in depth and learned that they, along with blogs, have different longevities. To work smarter, I should spend more time on longer-longevity sites and less time on others.
TikTok, Snapchat, and X/Twitter have short lifespans of a few minutes to less than an hour.
Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram have mid-lifespans of about one to five hours. LinkedIn has a lifespan of about half a day.
Pinterest, YouTube, and blogs have long lifespans of weeks, months, and even a couple of years.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Blogs and webpages that use SEO have the best extended shelf life—years! Once I discovered Pinterest operates as a search engine, Pinterest became a should priority. I took a class on how to best use it.
Moving Out of Shouldshank and Past Author Marketing Burnout
So began my re-evaluation and acceptance that my shoulds were okay not looking like those of other authors. I didn’t have to do big launches, paid ads, multiple signings, and other shoulds that didn’t work for me.
Joining genre reader groups became a new should activity. To engage as a reader, not as a writer. To let them discover I’m an author on their own.
My website became a stronger promotional foundation. Now, rather than listing links to books, blogs, classes, announcements, etc., I use one URL. One link. To my website. Two links if a book’s direct buy link is needed.
When WordPress morphed my website’s blog into a blog/newsletter combination, I was ecstatic. I got rid of my third-party platform newsletter, which made my website more powerful. Now my audience is led to the announcement-only blog/newsletter page where they can follow or subscribe, or do both.
Maintaining three other blogs, I had already changed one blog into a landing page. The other two blogs stayed the same. I write on those blogs when I have something to say rather than sticking to a stressful, rigid schedule.
To simplify promo postings, I use a simple scheduling program where I can create and schedule posts that go out to half a dozen different websites and social media at the same time. The goal is to create evergreen posts I can reuse and schedule on different days at different times.
For now, other shoulds will be considered as they cross my path.
Am I doing the right thing by not heavily promoting, knowing I’m going against the norm? Maybe, maybe not. That said, I’m close to hitting that 80% mark of writing time, and that makes me happy.
The Redemption
By committing to what feels right for me, I’ve been able to dial down the author marketing burnout and keep myself from returning to Shouldshank. Now, I control the shoulds, rather than them controlling me. My redemption is complete.
How about you? Do you feel imprisoned by any of the publishing and marketing shoulds? What writing task should have you added, changed, or deleted? Is there one you’d like to try differently?
About Diana
An award-winning writer, author, screenwriter, and former English professor of writing classes, Dr. Diana Stout, published her second thriller, When the Walls Listen, recently. Her third mystery/suspense/thriller, Buried Trash, will be published this winter.
Future writing plans include adding books to both her Finding Your Fire Series and her Grammar & Writing Rescue Series this year, along with a suspense/mystery/thriller. With a couple other thrillers lined up, along with a historical based on a true event, she keeps eyeing the newest puzzle she just cracked open, wondering when she’ll start piecing it together.
Self-publishing tools have never been more available, more refined, or more capable. At the same time, self-publishing itself is becoming both more attractive and more difficult as technology and the industry continue to evolve. Distribution channels are plentiful and accessible, and there’s an entire cottage industry of editors, artists, publicists, marketing gurus, and other vendors ready to help you get a book into the world.
There’s also an army of other skilled writers, not to mention the constant flood of spammers, scammers, and slop-artists fighting for their slice of the pie. It can feel a little daunting, especially if you don’t know how or where to get started.
For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume you’re brimming with ideas and enthusiasm but new to the logistics of getting your novel out into the world. This is a nuts-and-bolts look at the self-publishing tools you can use to take a manuscript from initial draft to finished book. At every stage, we’ll look at at least one self publishing tool that doesn’t cost a dime, and we’ll even end with my own occasionally ludicrous method of drafting and releasing a novel.
For the Non-Typers
If you want to get your book on shelves, be those shelves digital or physical, you’re going to have to get comfortable with a word processor. But interesting enough, you don’t necessarily have to start with one. I’ve spoken to quite a few people over the years–including my own older brother–who would love to write a story, but don’t feel comfortable typing. Good news! Typing is now almost entirely optional.
My first book–actually, my first three books, but at the time I thought it was one long one–was written longhand. It filled nearly a dozen spiral notebooks. When the story was done, I was faced with the daunting task of typing the whole mess. In order to do so in less than a decade, that meant I also had to learn to type, since hunting and pecking was getting me nowhere fast. Nowadays, there’s a better option.
Dictation
Dictation isn’t new, but it has never been cheaper or more accurate. The options are nearly limitless, too, but I’ll go through the ones I feel are most accessible and most worth your time.
First, if you have a phone, I guarantee there is some way to convince it to transcribe your voice. Android phones have a voice-typing option built into the keyboard, and dedicated transcription apps are simple to find. The best I’ve used is one simply called “Recorder”, though that seems to be limited to certain Google-specific devices. Many word processors have built in options as well, but we’ll be going into those tools in the next section.
If you’re looking for something a little more potent, two dedicated transcription programs I’ve found enormously useful are Vibe, for transcribing pre-recorded narration, and Handy, for transcribing on-demand. Though each of these are the product of AI, they come from the interpretive side of the technology rather than the generative side, so you don’t have to worry about them doing any thinking for you (unless you turn on features which I personally avoid). As a person who chooses to avoid LLMs, these are tools that I’m comfortable including in my pipeline. They can run locally, they don’t phone home, and they don’t editorialize. Your words remain your own.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
Another option for getting hand-written words into the computer is OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Even the best of these tools are a little hit or miss with handwritten text, though, so I hesitate to recommend them. If you’re interested in giving it a try, Google has a few free options that you can sample. Opening a photo in Google lens will let you extract text to copy and paste. Saving a photo to your Google Drive, then right clicking on your PC and choosing to open with Google Docs will do full page OCR. If you have good luck with either of those, maybe you can succeed where I have failed regarding efficient handwriting-to-text. But either way, once you’ve got the words onto the PC, it’s in the hands of the main tools of any writer.
Self-Publishing Tools: Word Processors
Whether you’re transcribing from a written page, working from speech-to-text, or drafting directly, by volume a word processor is where you’ll be doing the bulk of your work. The industry standard (for now at least) remains Microsoft Word. DOCX is a document format that nearly everyone who works with files can open and work with. That said, to be perfectly honest it’s been years since Word was my primary tool. We’ll get into my foolish endeavors at the end of the blog.
If you’re looking for a free alternative to Word, LibreOffice is generally what I use as a stand-in for the Microsoft product. It’s got a robust spellchecker and grammar checker, which can get you halfway to a clean edit. It also saves in all of the relevant formats for loading into publishing backends or distributing to editors. I wouldn’t say it’s feature-for-feature equivalent to Word–it can be a little finicky and has a learning curve if you’re used to Microsoft–but it’ll get you where you need to go and it’ll do it for free.
Another popular option is Google Docs. It’s a little lighter on features (but only a little) and adds dirt-simple document sharing and automatic cloud backup to the mix. It’s also web-based, so using it off-line can be tricky. You are also beholden to whatever Google decides, so there is a potential future where it’s taken away from you or put behind a paywall, so plan accordingly as with all software as a service options on these lists.
If you’re looking for something a little more authorly, a huge swath of the writers I know swear by Scrivener. It’s Mac-native, but has a Windows port, and I have written quite a few novels in it. It’s not free, but at a $60 one-time purchase it won’t break the bank. For that price you get a suite of features including templates, organization for notes, auto-complete for character names, and so on, and so on. It really is a powerful tool and it’s easy to see why so many writers rely upon it.
Another option I used for writing novels for a few years is Atticus. Like Google Docs, it lives in the cloud, with all of the plusses and minuses that come with that. The $147 price tag is a bit more of an obstacle, but it’s a capable word processor, and an even more capable finishing tool, as we’ll see in the next section.
Self-Publishing Tools: Converters, Compilers, and Formatters
It’s a little hard to get people to agree on a name for this next bit. I’ve heard them called everything from “eBook creators” to “Mastering Software.” But regardless of the name you choose, these are the tools that take the output of a word processor and convert it into an ebook or a print-ready PDF. For the budget-conscious, Calibre is an impressively powerful and completely free tool. Feed it almost any book or document format and it can spit out just about any other. If you want to produce a slick, polished output, you’ll be doing a great deal of manual pre- and postprocessing, but with enough time and energy, this can achieve almost any result. If you want something that is a bit less of a swiss army knife, Adobe InDesign or its open source alternative Scribus will give you bare metal access to every switch and knob associated with the formatting, layout, and production of print-ready PDFs.
The gold standard of turn-key tools for ebook and print production is Vellum, which produces slick and professional results effortlessly, though ironically I can’t personally vouch for it as it’s locked into the Apple ecosystem of which I am not a part. More recently Atticus has revealed itself to be a suitable alternative that is platform agnostic.
All of these, to some varying degree, can handle images, which is good, because every book has got at least one of them, which means we now move onto…
Self-Publishing Tools: Image Editing
The industry standard here is, alas, Adobe Photoshop. This is another industry standard that I have never actually used. A free alternative, if you’ve got the grit for it, is the GNU Image Processor (GIMP). It is a few notches lower on the user-friendliness scale, but I continue to do all of my short story covers with it. Canva is also an option that many folks swear by.
Putting it all together
Now you know your options, but how do you put them together? Well, that’s up to you, but for the sake of fulfilling the premise of this post, I’ll take you on a whirlwind tour of my dilapidated and inadvisable pipeline.
Step 1: Outline/Notes
This is done with good old pen and paper. The pen tends to be a Twsbi Eco fountain pen loaded up with Diamine Writer’s Blood ink, and the paper is generally a top-bound spiral memo pad. I jot down ideas until I feel like I know the full structure, then I move onto…
Step 2: Setting up the files
My system for typing has evolved, or some might say mutated, over the years. I started on OpenOffice, then moved to Microsoft Word, then to Scrivener, then to Atticus. Now I do my typing in Nano, a command line text program. (Don’t do this. Like the fountain pens, I do this because it makes me feel fancy and requires me to focus.)
I got used to having my notes available when I was using Scrivener, so I like to keep a separate file with my notes/outline in it so I can check it quickly and easily. I have it open in a separate tab of the terminal and mark off plot points as I complete them.
Step 3: Drafting
This is, naturally, using the aforementioned files and programs. Yes, I do my whole rough draft in Nano, and I do my formatting using markdown. Don’t judge me.
Step 4: Revision
When I’m done with the rough draft, I run my file through another command line tool called Pandoc to make it into a DOCX file. This is the point where I return to a sane pipeline. Once I have the DOCX file, I open it in LibreOffice to do spelling and grammar checks. Beta Reader Copies are produced via either Calibre or Atticus so that people can read them in their format of choice, and when I’ve got it buttoned up, it’s off to my editor.
A professional edit is generally the most expensive part of my production pipeline, and I only do it for my novels (not my short stories). That said, I’ve learned the hard way not to skip this step. I am pathologically incapable of producing copy that’s clean enough to be sold without intervention from an expert.
Step 5: Second Revision
When the editor gives the file back, I do a final pass to address their changes in LibreOffice again. As with Word, LibreOffice will let you work through tracked changes and comments, so you should be able to use it with anything your editor might send back.
From here, if I’m doing this through a publisher, this is the file I deliver to them. If I’m self-publishing…
Step 6: Format
I’ll take the cleaned up DOCX and dump it into Atticus again to produce both PDFs and Epubs using lightly modified versions of their templates.
Step 7: Cover
I let the professionals handle the covers these days. It begins by working up a brief to send to an illustrator or graphic designer. When they’re through, sometimes I’ll take the files they provide and do some light reformatting for the paperback covers or to produce assets for ads.
Step 8: Publication
Easier today than it has ever been, self-publication for me takes the form of four uploads. Draft2Digital, Amazon KDP, and Google Play each get ePub copies of my books. For paperback, I lean on Ingram Spark, which needs a PDF instead.
And that’s that!
Hopefully this gave you an idea of where to start and what to do when it comes to turning your ideas into releases. And if you’ve got any alternatives/favorites self publishing tools, I’d love to hear them!
About Joseph
Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Find Joseph and his books on his website at bookofdeacon.com.
