Laterpress Weekly: May 14th, 2026 (Issue #188)

Nate's Notes:

Nobody wants to feel like a failure. We work hard on our books. We care about our characters and universes, and want readers to love them as much as we do. Writing can be creatively fulfilling, but publishing as a whole is an industry where results are not guaranteed. How hit-driven traditional publishing is makes that perfectly clear. In such an environment, it’s understandable to be afraid of trying so hard and failing to accomplish everything someone wanted to.

The fear of failure can manifest itself in multiple forms. This list is not all-inclusive:

1. Fear of finishing. An unfinished book can continue to exist in an author’s mind as a perfect idea. When a book is done, it’s necessary to accept the positives and negatives of the real thing.
2. Fear of choosing wrong. This is insecurity that leads to second-guessing creative or business decisions.
3. Fear of judgment which keeps a writer from showing their manuscript to anyone. This can also be a fear of publishing, because once the book is out of the world, the public’s reaction to it is beyond an author’s ability to control.
4. Fear of wasting time. Why bother writing a book if demand for it is unknown?
5. Fear of marketing. Many authors and artists feel like “sellouts” advertising their books, as if it’s shameful to want to be paid for the fruits of their labor.
6. Fear of not being “a real author.” This a sub-branch of the fear of judgment. Rather than caring about how readers feel about a book, this is about perceived acceptance amongst one’s peers.
7. Fear that asking for help in itself is a failure. As if benefitting from other people’s wisdom is a sign of a lack of intelligence or competence by the person asking for it.
8. Fear of financial loss. Who wants to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars producing a book, only to never earn that back? I imagine most of us would like to profit or at least break even on our publishing endeavors, not treat it as an expensive hobby.

If I attempted to address every specific avenue by which a fear of failure can manifest itself, we’d be here all day. Instead, I want to reframe how we think about failure itself, and explain why I’m not afraid of it.

Look at success and failure in other contexts. In pro baseball, coaches will be happy with any player maintaining a .300 batting average. Batters who fail to get on base 70% of the time are still considered great batters. In the NBA, anyone making 50% of their shots on the floor had themselves a good night.

Don’t care about sports? Consider science. Was the lightbulb invented on the first try? Absolutely not. But every failed attempt was another step on the road to figuring out what would work. Britannica says that for every 5000-10000 potential chemical compounds that are screened for drug research, perhaps five will reach clinical testing. The whole process can take more than a decade. When scientists conduct an experiment and things don’t go as intended, they study the results, determine if there was an error with their equipment, methods, or ideas, refine their procedures, then try something else. Scientists learn from failure all the time!

What does all of this mean? Failure isn’t a sign of inferiority. It’s the scientific method. Make the best decisions possible with the data available, analyze the results, learn, and do better next time. And as pro athletes show us, it’s possible to fail a lot and still be one of the best in your field. Think about your favorite author. How many books are they well known for? How many other books have they published that almost nobody talks about? Scientists, athletes, and successful authors all show that success comes to people who don't let failure stop them. Not every choice they make is a wild success, but they keep going.

Failure is only a problem if nothing is learned from the experience.

Is a book not landing with readers as intended? What went wrong, and what lessons can be applied to the next one? Did a live event fail to meet expectations? If so, why? Was the book a bad fit for the event’s audience? Poor event attendance or organization? Were readers not responding positively to the book’s cover or the pitch for it? I’d encourage anyone who thinks they failed at something to take notes about the experience and learn from it. Then carry on.

Go out there. Try new things. Make mistakes. Learn. Level up. Lived experience is worth its weight in gold. Learning through failure is not a character failing, it’s proof of effort. (But where money is concerned, “fail within your means” please. Keep a budget in mind. I would not encourage anyone to spend an unaffordable sum on cover art or editing on a debut novel, spend too much on ads without experience, print 1,000 copies with no distribution plan, etc.)

However, there also is wisdom in benefitting from others' knowledge to avoid or mitigate some failures. If someone says they do an event every year and sell X books, perhaps don’t print 2X books for that same event. If multiple authors agree omniscient narrators are not commercially viable right now, and you can’t find any recent bestsellers using that POV, is that what you really want to write if you’re seeking broad market appeal? In my mind, asking questions and cultivating a growth mindset primed for constant learning is the best attitude to have. The kinds of folks who act like they’re the smartest person in the room and have nothing to learn from anyone make things harder for themselves than they need to. And in a constantly changing industry, anyone with rigid thinking about processes, workflows, or marketing tactics will be ill-equipped to deal with changing conditions.

Listening to the advice of others is good, but not if it turns into a game of “Follow the Leader,” where folks only follow advice without trying to innovate for themselves. We all write in different genres, have different styles, seek different audiences, and have different attitudes about how much personal information we want to reveal, or how we will interact with readers. What works great for some folks absolutely won’t work for others, so we can’t rely exclusively on “received wisdom.” Which brings us back to the need to try things, experiment, adapt other people’s ideas to our own aptitudes, potentially fail, and come back better informed to do even better next time.

Failure is proof of effort. It’s lived experience. It’s educational. That mindset can help kill the fear of failure. Every time I make a mistake, or something didn't go as planned, I trust myself to come out the other side smarter than I was before and feel better equipped to take on future challenges. By learning from each other, we can avoid some failures and mitigate others, but nobody in this industry succeeds at everything they’ve ever tried. The more comfortable someone gets with the concept of failure, the more likely they are to last in the industry long-term.

None of this is meant to brush aside that failure can hurt the ego, the wallet, or both. It's never fun. Nobody looks forward to it. But setbacks also aren't permanent, so long as we keep trying.

In closing, to prove I'm as imperfect as anyone else, I thought I'd share a few of the failures I've had along my indie author journey so far:

1. Claiming my own Goodreads author profile. It took me three of four tries to Goodreads to accept that I am who I say I am. I've blocked the specifics of that ordeal from my memory to preserve my sanity. We can say I learned patience and perseverance, I guess?
2. I've applied to be a speaker at Author Nation multiple times. Never been selected. Since something like 85-90% of all session pitches are rejected, failure is actually the expected outcome. My feelings were not hurt about it. Each time, I learn more about how to craft a session pitch and what convention organizers look for. Beyond Author Nation itself, those lessons will come in handy pitching panels to other conventions.
3. I overprinted for JordanCon, and so spent too much shipping extra books home. That was an expensive lesson on inventory planning and shipping logistics for long-distance conventions. Won't stop me from doing another when I feel ready for it.
4. My first author website, through Wordpress. It was ugly, hard to manage, and I'd built a site before I really needed one, so I could argue I'd given myself unnecessary costs, too. I gained a sense of what I will and won't tolerate from website builders, how much work I'm willing to put into website maintenance, and now better understand some of the technical things that go into maintaining your own website.

Live Stream Update - I will be live tomorrow at 3pm Central, continuing our series on co-writing an urban fantasy romcom with the assistance of the Laterpress AI story tools. Next week, we will start doing two streams a week, one on Tuesdays from 3-4pm Central, and the other on Fridays from 3-4pm Central. We also have a playlist put together for these streams, for anyone who wants to follow along after the stream and see how the book evolves. We're treating it like a "Season" in a TV show. When this book is complete, we'll start a new playlist to show to work on a different project.

Interesting News and Stories from Around the Publishing World:

​Defendant Pleads Guilty in $48 Million Nationwide Book Publishing Scam Targeting Hundreds of Seniors - The US courts have hammered down another notorious scammer. Michael Cris Traya Sordilla, a 34-year-old citizen of the Philippines, pleaded guilty today of running a scam operation that bilked over 800 victims to the tune of $48 million dollars. Sordilla established a network of call centers whose operations would impersonate literary agents and convince aspiring authors that publishing companies and movie studios wanted their books. Of course, there would be fees to make that happen. Money from the victims was then laundered through an array of bank accounts and paid to co-conspirators in an effort to mask the trail.

As part of his plea deal, Sordilla has agreed to forfeit the $2.7 million he pocketed from the scheme, and he’s been ordered to pay an additional $48 million in restitution. It’s a legal win, for sure, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to find the money through legitimate sources to pay back his victims.

​The Self-Pub to Trad Pipeline for Romance - It is no longer true (if it ever was) that self-publishing makes someone “untouchable” to major publishers. In fact, indie authors who can prove their books sell probably have an easier time moving to traditional publishers than authors trying to get their attention from the start. Publisher’s Weekly highlights multiple examples of romance authors who found success on their own before going trad, mostly to benefit from their scale with print distribution. While PW obviously favors traditional publishing, you can see the power these successful authors had in negotiations, being able to retain rights to other formats, or continue to control their marketing messaging.

​Amazon Reviews in 2026: Get More Without Getting Banned - If you're selling book on Amazon (which, statistically speaking, we're sure a lot of you are), then you may want to get more reviews on your books there. Reviews act like social currency, proving that people are reading the book, and giving future readers an idea what to expect. So, how does one get more reviews without breaking Amazon policies? In this video, Dale Roberts does a deep dive on the topic, covering why reviews matter, what actions can get folks in trouble, and several ways to go about getting more reviews on your titles. There are a lot of smart ideas in here.

​The 100 Best Novels of All Time - The Guardian asked 172 authors, critics, and academics to pick their top 10 favorite novels of all time, published in English, and to rank them in order of preference. They compiled those picks and rankings to create this top 100 list. Every day, they’re revealing 20 books until the list is complete. Click on each title listed to learn about it and see who from The Guardian’s pool of voters chose it. They also have an menu that lets you scroll through the list and click on the ones you’ve read to see how many of the books you’ve read. If you really, really want to deep dive on this, it’s possible to look up all 172 voters and see their individual selections, too. (In case you really want to know Stephen King’s top 10, for example.)

At the time this newsletter goes out, they have revealed 60 of the 100. Of those 60, I've read two. (Dracula and Heart of Darkness.) Maybe I'll have more in the top 40, once they're revealed.

​Am I the Literary Asshole For Thinking Most Writers Are Trash, Actually? - This is an advice column from Lit Hub, featuring three different reader-submitted questions where each person wonders if they’re in the wrong. One person got chewed out for feedback given on 25 pages of an author’s work that they edited for free. One author thinks their writing sucks… but so does everyone else’s. The last person feels like too many books are “about nothing,” and wonders if anyone knows how to plot anymore. Read on to see how Kristen Arnett addresses each of these questions or complaints.

This Week's Featured Story:

Farley Street, by Zane Zubin

FARLEY STREET is a genre-bending, coming-of-age, urban fantasy novel—a universal story of finding one’s true self against overwhelming and insurmountable odds. Born in the quaint and picturesque town of Mackinaw City, marked by a supernatural storm and a maternity clinic that magically disappears, little Zeke Tartal slowly discovers he is a “starseed,” a chosen light being from an ancient star system and the reincarnation of a mighty galactic warrior. As the memories of his past life return, he learns he must confront the enemy he has been waging war with since the beginning of time—a dark, evil Reptilian emperor deliberately preventing the purest human souls from ever ascending to their true celestial origins. Zeke continuously struggles to balance his earthly existence with his galactic duties and ultimately discovers that light and dark are constantly at war—not only in the universe but within himself.

FARLEY STREET blends space opera, magical realism, paranormal, and dystopian elements, bringing the reader into an enchanting world of angels and demons, dragons and dungeons, and pirates and princesses. Spiritually hungry youth, fans of the supernatural and time travel, and teens dealing with family dysfunction, first crushes, and unrequited love will undoubtedly be the page-turners of this book.

Meme of the Week: