by Lisa Norman

I started my publishing company in 2011, when the general instructions I read started with, “Don’t even try.” In 2016, after five hard years of learning, I published a series of books about indie publishing. Everything I knew at the time, five volumes of it, written for others so they could avoid the headaches I’d had.

This year I finally had time to bring them all up to date.

I expected to need to change a ton of things, and I did, but what surprised me was how much I deleted. Publishing is a lot easier now than it was before.

After I cleared out all of the obsolete information, I had time to think more about the new gold rush that we're in the midst of.

Alex Newton of K-lytics, who has been tracking the Kindle marketplace since 2014, calls it Gold Rush 3.0. According to Alex, the first rush was the Kindle launch. The second rush lasted through the pandemic. This rush arrived with generative AI, and you can measure it in supply: the number of new thrillers published on Kindle each month has gone from around a thousand to over seven thousand. (I read this in Jane Friedman’s newsletter, where Newton talks through his numbers every summer. If you aren't subscribed, you may want to! Jane's newsletter is brilliant.)

Have you seen the get-rich-quick ads posted on your social media feeds? Build your cozy mystery empire. Write an entire book from one keyword. And they’re about as accurate as those original gold-rush ads were.

Those ads brought a lot of starry-eyed miners west with a pick and no plan. Many of them died of pneumonia because nobody had told them that after a day working in a stream, they should dry off before going to bed at night.

What I Cut from my Publishing Plan

One of those books had a worksheet walking you through installing Joomla so you could have an author website. Yes, it was THAT old. Step by step, patient, thorough, and long. In 2016, an author who wanted a website had to become a practicing geek first. Then we moved to WordPress, and there were still a lot of technical bits to learn.

Today? Gone. Most of that technical website time wasting geekiness is no longer needed. We have much better tools. Friendlier tools.

I had worksheets for uploading and publishing to six different stores, each with its own click-path. Every one of those paths has since changed, and most of them don’t exist anymore. Now I can skip the click-paths entirely, because they go out of date before anyone has time to take a screenshot. The steps have changed and they're so much simpler.

We no longer have to format for mobi, because Amazon retired the format.

The social media chapter walked you through Google+, which Google shut down. The print worksheet walked you through CreateSpace, which folded into Amazon’s own program. Whole platforms are gone while others have grown, and the way we interact online has changed fundamentally in those ten years.

Two of the five books lost about forty percent of their length.

What Didn’t Change

I opened the technical volume, the HTML and CSS tutorial, and braced myself. Ten years of web technology. Surely that one was rubble. Maybe I'd delete the whole thing.

I changed some tool names, but that was mostly it.

HTML (the language of the web) is still HTML. An ebook is still a zipped-up little website in a trench coat, and knowing how to look inside is still the difference between waiting three days for a support ticket and fixing it yourself before lunch.

The chapter on telling gold from iron pyrite came through nearly whole. So did the one on pricing, and the one on where your money sits between the sale and your bank account.

The Publishing Geology Is the Same. The Equipment Changed.

The basic things we need to do haven't changed in a decade. You still have to know who you are and what you write. You still have to stake a claim somewhere you own, make the book, price it, and watch where the money goes.

The tedious middle processes, though, those are now often done for you.

The formatting you used to do by hand is just a button press now. The website that needed a weekend and a database now takes an afternoon. The distribution maze used to need a map to find your way through. We have fewer choices now, and they aren’t nearly as complicated.

Every one of those worksheets gave instructions for a chore. The chores are gone, simplified, automated. The craft of storytelling is right where it always was. In some ways, craft is becoming more critical and fascinating, but that’s for another post.

Why The Publishing Industry Isn’t Get-Rich-Quick

So the wall got lower. It’s easier to write and publish a book than ever before. And no, that statement doesn’t sell a lot of classes.

Because a lower wall lets everybody over it.

That’s what Alex Newton’s supply numbers are. Not readers appearing. Writers arriving to what they expect to be a publishing gold rush, and a great many of them showing up with a tool that writes fast and a course that promises an empire.

Making a book got easier. Being found got harder.

Somebody Already Wrote This Down in 1849

I’ve been quoting a miner’s handbook in my classes for years. It’s 177 years old and still wise. Here’s what it says about a rush:

Much time is lost by miners because they listen to every rumor of exaggerated success. They leave a passable claim to seek a better spot… These stories are often made up by traders in the new place trying to lure customers to their stores. I have noticed that those who remain in one spot are most successful.

Read that again: Traders in the new place, trying to lure customers to their stores.

Think about that the next time you see an advertisement stuck to your social media saloon wall.

The people shouting loudest about the new gold field are, with remarkable consistency, the people selling passage to it. That was true in 1849. It was true in the Kindle boom and it is extra true this year.

Your existing claim is still valuable. It may be the most valuable thing you own right now, precisely because everyone else keeps abandoning theirs to chase the shiny bits downstream.

Putting Things Down

In July, I wrote about not picking up every skill that gets waved at you. You only need the next small step rather than the entire collection of skills.

This is the second part of that concept.

Some of what you’re carrying was necessary once. You learned it because it was genuinely required. You were right. But it may have stopped being required while you weren’t looking.

It's okay to put that load down.

Those of you who always meant to get to those things “someday” can also put down the guilt about never getting to them. You can even quietly consider yourself efficient for not wasting that time.

I wrote those worksheets. Taught those processes for years. Watched many authors succeed following them. Deleting them meant admitting that a great deal of careful work was simply no longer required. That felt weird. And yet good, too.

Let it go.

Hope on, hope ever

There’s another story from that handbook: A man dug part of his claim, hit water, got discouraged, and walked away. Three others went in behind him and pulled out nearly twenty ounces in a few hours.

The advice that follows is “Hope on, hope ever.”

Your writing claim is still good. It’s the same claim it was ten years ago, still with the same gold buried within it. You just don’t have to dig it out with a spoon anymore.

Now, go bank some gold.

* * * * * *

The class those books came from is open again, updated for 2026, rebuilt with the same goal in mind, but showing you a much easier path to get there. The books are back too, wherever you buy your ebooks, shorter than they were and priced accordingly. I even have the entire set out in one print book.

About Lisa:

Lisa Norman has been working this claim through two of these rushes now. She writes fiction as Deleyna Marr, owns Heart Ally Books, LLC, and teaches writers the technical side of publishing at her school, NoStressWriting.com.

Her book, The Work of Joy, is for when you need a little joy in your life. She's also at deleyna.com. And on Substack.

Images from Deleyna via Midjourney.