I have been pretty strategic this year towards my writing, or at least this is what I would like to think.

At the start of the year, I set out to learn how social media works. I posted for 100 Consecutive Days on three platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn). I learned the benefits of learning in public, being a part of a scenius, and the art of self-promoting.

Four months later, I decided to up my game with Medium and publish 100 articles in 100 days. I got better at writing articles, reduced the time of writing an article to 1–2 hours, and build myself a system to write on Medium effortlessly.

In both these cases, I didn’t follow the common advice to succeed on the platform and pretty much did what I felt was right.

I am glad I made my own rules and set my own parameters of success.

The ultimate goal is learning, and success is when I have learned a certain skill.

To build a big following on Medium, you need to publish in big publications, but I chose to stay with smaller publications while learning the craft of article writing.

To earn a big check each month, you need to write articles that most readers want to read. I chose to write what I wanted to write, sharing what I was learning at that point in time.

Once again, I find myself at a crossroads where I am picking the path I think is the right one for me.

After spending two years on content writing, I think it is not the right path for me.

The demand to continually keep churning out content is too much. I somehow can cope with that. But what I can’t cope with is stagnation.

I am finding I am not growing by writing the same kind of articles all the time.

I think I am ready to move to my real passion — fiction writing.

I have been postponing fiction writing to learn to blog, audience building, and online marketing.

So much so that for the last two years, I have not touched fiction writing at all. I am afraid it will take me a long time to get back into it. It will be like walking through hell but that is exactly what I am going to do.

I will continue to write on Medium but put my primary focus on writing fiction.

I will continue to share my learning with you here in Authorpreneurs publication.

I am also working on a few non-fiction books, which I will be alternating with fiction work.

These books are based on the articles I have written so far. I have 350+ articles on my website and about 200 articles on Medium. Unfortunately, this backlist of articles will not get read again. They will keep sitting on Medium servers for eternity. The best way to preserve them is to turn them into books.

Books have a much longer shelf life than articles.

By turning them into books, we can reach a completely new set of audience — the book readers.

I believe we all need to look at turning our work into books.

In my next post, I will write about the process of writing a book.

It is not as hard as it might sound.