Guest Post: How Reading More Helped Cure My Indie-Author Burnout

A Month of Rain and Reads Features6 months ago8 min readAdd comment

Welcome to A Month of Rain and Reads, a celebration of self-published and indie SFF throughout the entire month of November. To find out how you can take part and view the whole list of content, visit our introduction post.

Today, we have a guest post by Angela Boord on the topic of how reading more can help with writing and publishing burnout for authors.

Thirteen books.

That was how many books I read for myself—not beta reads, not business, not to my kids, for myself—in 2021.

Some of you are thinking 13 sounds okay and some of you are aghast at how few books I read, but for me, 2021 was the low point of a streak that lasted a few years. By 2022, I barely recognized myself. I was the kid who had always had her nose in a book. I started writing books because I loved to read. Up until I published my own book in 2019, I’d read more—much more—even though I was parenting nine kids.

To be fair, Goodreads tells me that I actually read 34 books that year, but most of my reads were for or because of other people: 4 beta reads, 9 read-alouds to my boys, 2 audio books chosen by my husband on a cross-country trip, 2 self-publishing business books. 1 was my own book that I read multiple times before releasing it, so it doesn’t count. I enjoyed all these books, but they weren’t books I chose myself for entertainment or to satisfy my own curiosity. They weren’t really mine.

Who was this person who read so little?

By the end of 2022, she was an indie author who’d published three books (two of them chonkers, one of them a SPFBO Finalist). She had a story in Grimdark Magazine and another in an anthology that had done well on Kickstarter. She’d seen her oldest graduate college and sent two more kids off to school, but she was still homeschooling six younger kids, including the youngest with Down Syndrome who had developed a mysterious regressive disorder. And she felt like she was running on a hamster wheel.

I couldn’t write fast enough or be online enough; I was multi-tasking my way through my kids’ lives; my disabled daughter got 4-5 hours of sleep on an average night and so did I; sales were declining even though I had released more books; I’d started drinking more to deal with the stress… and I wasn’t reading.

I told myself I didn’t have time to read anymore. Because what indie author does, really? There’s always the temptation, the pressure to do more—to write more, to write faster, to market more, to learn another platform, to network more, to do more for your fellow indie authors… But in 2022, after I rushed my giant Cold War portal fantasy into print (and regretted it, but that’s another story), I finally had to admit that I was beyond burnt out, I was actually charred to a crisp.

So I made a Goodreads challenge goal of 100 books for 2023.

I know it seems counterintuitive but stay with me here. I’d started writing as a kid because I loved reading. My mom and dad recently brought me a box of my stuff from their attic. In it was a notebook where I’d spottily kept lists of books I’d read from the ages of 12-16. If those lists were average, I was reading well over 100 books a year—re-reading my favorites until the covers fell off, haunting the library so often the librarians let me check out my own books. I read everything and anything, from The Golden Guide to Mushrooms and Fungi (cover to cover) to books by Robin McKinley, Stephen King, Barbara Hambly… and a suprising number of Doctor Who novelizations.

I was pretty sure that kid was still in there somewhere, but the grown-up had seized control and burnt out the motor because she was always working instead of having fun. (Or, you know, sleeping.) As an adult I had somehow forgotten the importance of having a safe space to get lost in, to think my own thoughts, to try out ideas and experiences and emotions far outside the walls and social media platforms I was living in. To be honest, I didn’t think I could actually read 100 books in a year. I figured I would fail miserably and that would be that. But I also thought it would be fun to try and thank God for once I let the kid grab hold of the wheel.

I did end up reading 100 books in 2023. Not all of them were for pure entertainment (remember, I’m the kid who read field guides for fun), but almost all of them I read because I wanted to. And I think making time to read—which meant taking time off social media—contributed enormously to healing from burnout. My daughter really didn’t sleep much better over the course of the year, but as I read more and spent more time with myself inside the covers of other people’s books, thinking my own thoughts and calming the noise in my brain, I felt better and I wrote more of my own books. In fact, I finally figured out how to fix a book I’d been spinning my wheels on for years and published that book in 2024.

So, do I think everybody should be reading 100 books a year?

No.

Do I think reading ought to be a non-negotiable part of the day if you’re a writer, not a luxury but a necessity, practically on the same order as food and sleep, to be defended like you’re a feral cat?

Pretty much.

Now I read about an hour a day—thirty minutes at lunch, thirty minutes at night—sometimes more, sometimes less if I’m trying to finish a book or I need to hit a deadline. Writers are like corvids (pick your favorite—are you a raven, a crow, or a magpie?) We like shiny things, all the bits and bobs of life that can be tucked away just in case a future story comes looking for them, the way my grandmother collected rubber bands in a junk drawer. Some of the shiny bits come from living our lives, but reading is also a good way to shovel a bunch of shiny ideas into the story closet all at once. I think everybody in the world would benefit from some mood reading, a little time to follow your curiosity, even if it is to pick up The History of Underwear (an indispensable reference book on my shelf, actually) –but I think it’s even more important for writers because if the closet is empty the next time you go looking for an idea, that’s going to hurt. A lot.

So, if you need permission to get off the indie writer hamster wheel—consider this your permission slip. Never feel guilty about picking up a book. It’s good for your mental health and good for your stories. Read everything—the book that has five ratings and the book that has 500,000, books in your genre and books so far outside your lane you’re kind of embarrassed to be seen reading them. Fiction, non-fiction, old, new, classics, smut—whatever. Everybody thinks writers are a little strange anyway.

I believe the books we need meet us when we need them, but we have to be there and be willing to be met. Next year maybe I’ll set my goal at 80 books. Or 150. Or maybe I’ll just concentrate on reading 10 big books. Maybe I’ll go back to writing down titles with a cheap Bic pen in an old notebook with green-tinted pages.

All I know is that I’m leaving the kid in charge. She knows what she’s doing.

About Angela Boord

Angela Boord is a hopeless romantic, a nerdy introvert, and the author of SPFBO5 Finalist FORTUNE’S FOOL. She can usually be found with her nose in a book when she’s not writing her own dark fantasy epics of hope, redemption, and relationships in all their messy glory. Angela and her husband live in northern Mississippi in a house full of children, books, and innumerable quantities of Legos.

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