Lindsay Ellis recently published a video about the gauntlet of finishing a book, finding representation, and finally a publishing deal for her upcoming book Axiom’s End. The whole process only took ten years! I found Ellis’ honesty refreshing. At the same time, it was a discouraging reminder that so many of our projects take convoluted creative journeys before they ever see the light of day. Your book idea may have germinated ten years before you had the creative means to bring it to the page. It may be another ten years before your story reaches its target audience. If you’re willing to do that much unpaid work, suffer that much rejection, and all without the guarantee of being published, then you may have that special brand of masochism called ‘the drive to be a published writer.’

There are very lonely, discouraging valleys in every author’s saga. Your grit can help you through these valleys. A writing community is even better, and when you’re working on a specific project, you’ll need a specific set of tools. In the digital age, there are so many tools that you’ll be overwhelmed if you’re not extremely intentional about what your writing goals are. Which tools best serve each step of the journey?

Part of the work of writing is learning which tools work best in the researching, drafting, editing, pre-publishing, and post-publishing stages. In the research and editing stages, developmental editors used to be one of the only options available to authors. To be frank, many developmental editors are only available to writers with a decent amount of money to spend. We didn’t use to have blogs, YouTube tutorials, Reddit, Google, and Facebook communities, all for free. Now, we have all of these things, plus book coaches and systematic audience demographic testing like ours.

Last week, Jennie Nash and I gave a webinar about the difference between book coaches and beta readers. I loved what Jennie said about our guest author Samantha Specks’s intentionality. Samantha is a historical fiction author who used both Author Accelerator and The Spun Yarn’s beta readers as tools in different parts of her process. You can tell just by listening to her talk about the research stage of her novel that Samantha is a very methodical, measured writer. You don’t have to have that personality, but it behooves you to employ that mindset if you want to make sure your manuscript is ready before you blow your shot with your dream agent.

I defy you to find two identical creative processes in the Paris Review’s volumes of interviews with famous authors, but you do have to define A Process that works for you. That’s the beauty and the overwhelming nature of being a writer today. Your potential toolkit is bigger than it’s ever been, and so is your responsibility to be intentional about filling it with the right tools. If you think of your creative journey as the sum of its discrete stages, which tools serve you best in each? If beta readers are part of your process, add them to your toolkit.

—Sarah Beaudette, Spun Yarn Editor-in-Chief