Life as an author takes resilience

By Caitlin Rother

In 2006, I quit a full-time job as an investigative newspaper reporter to pursue my dream of making it as a full-time author.

My old job came with health insurance, a vested pension, a 401K, and a schedule that required me to work in the office for a set number of hours so the editors could make sure I was working. My new job came with no guaranteed salary, health benefits, or safety net, and it required me to pay quarterly estimated taxes. But I was free of the chains and the watchful scrutiny of The Man over what stories I wrote and when and how I worked.

Before I left, I made sure to form a contingency plan. My first book, POISONED LOVE, had sold well for a first book, and to this day I’m grateful for that or I wouldn’t be where I am today. I had my second book contract in hand for TWISTED TRIANGLE, my first hardcover, and my agent had also been shopping another true crime proposal out for the book that is now titled BODY PARTS. I had a novel, NAKED ADDICTION, that my agent was shopping as well.

With this many planes on the runway, I felt like I had a good chance of seeing this plan come to fruition. This had to work. I needed it to. It was my dream. But I was taking a huge risk and giving up everything to follow it.

A week after I gave notice to my employer, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and signed the contract for TWISTED TRIANGLE, my new editor told me we weren’t going to adhere to the book proposal he’d just bought. He wanted to write the book an entirely different way. That’s when I learned my first lesson about publishing: Just because an editor buys your proposal, which outlines every chapter, and your perspective on the story, that doesn’t mean he can’t pull the rug out and tell you to do something else. Or fight with you on every chapter and all the research you’d already done. It got to the point that I had to take a Xanax just to talk to him on the phone.

Meanwhile, I got an offer for BODY PARTS, which was exciting and made me feel like I’d made the right decision. The risk was paying off. Only I couldn’t accept the offer, because that would require me to write two narrative nonfiction books simultaneously.

It pained me to do it, but we had to turn down the offer. As it turned out, though, this was a good thing, because we were able to send out an updated proposal some months later, which led to an even bigger offer, because I’d had great sales on the first book and now I had a hardcover coming out with a larger publisher.

I’m telling you all this because I was off to an auspicious start and I thought things could only get better. I figured that the more books I could produce, the more sales I’d get and the bigger my name would be. That’s what we all live and hope for. The next book is going to hit. Big. Right?

But success in book publishing often doesn’t look like a diagonal line that’s always trending up. Of course, that may be the case for some big authors, but that is the exception. The reality is, there are many ups and downs, and quite a few squiggles marked by churning chaos. For most of us, especially those known as mid-listers, becoming and staying a published author takes a lot of work. You can’t just write books and watch the books sell themselves. You also have to promote yourself, do podcasts, events, and media interviews to stay relevant while you’re spitting out good books that people will want to read. And if you don’t sell enough of them, you can’t get more contracts, so there is a constant pressure not just to be good, but to be better, to keep reaching.

Now, that’s not entirely a bad thing. But the truth of the matter is that life often gets in the way. Writing a book or more a year for several years ended up causing me physical pain. Chronic pain. My body basically gave out on me, and that caused psychological effects as well.

I’ve also done research and worked on several books for one or two years that never got published for a variety of reasons I won’t go into, but suffice it to say that I have had some dry years due to pain. Rejection. The state of the economy. Disappointment.

I’ve also fallen victim to forces beyond my control, that had nothing to do with me, which delayed my pub dates several times, causing a loss of momentum and made it very difficult to pre-sell and promote my books.

I’ve almost given up my dream of being a full-time author many times, but somehow, some way, something happened to get my hopes up again. A sign, or an omen, that I had to pick myself up from the curb and keep going. Find a new book idea. Sit down at the computer and write enough to sell it to a publisher. And sometimes, to do it with no guarantees, just the confidence in yourself that someone will buy it.

That’s basically what happened over the past five years. The only way I could stay sane while I isolated in my house during the COVID pandemic was to keep working. Things didn’t get any easier when I lost two book contracts, one due to COVID-shutdown financial issues and one for reasons I won’t go into.

But I did manage to land a new contract, my first solo hardcover deal, for a book about the McStay family murders, titled DOWN TO THE BONE. That said, it wasn’t easy to get my research done when courthouses had limited hours due to COVID. Limited staffing meant people, especially those in government jobs, which includes judges, prosecutors, detectives, and court staff, took forever to respond. I also didn’t want to get sick so I did what I could to stay safe, which meant working almost solely by phone from home.

Once I finally managed to finish the book, I was pretty exhausted (see my previous post about the other challenges of writing this book), so I took a break for a few months. And to cleanse my palate, I got back to working on the novel I’d been rewriting for the past fifteen or sixteen years in between my true crime books.

When the pub date of DOWN TO THE BONE was delayed, then again, and yet again, the only way I could keep myself from giving up — or going insane — was to keep working. So I finished the novel (then titled DOPAMINE FIX, and now titled HOOKED) and submitted it to my agent, who is very busy and took eight months to read it. It was a year before he agreed to submit it, telling me that the crime fiction market was very crowded and competitive, and, essentially, to have realistic, i.e., low, expectations.

By the time we got an offer from Thomas & Nelson on the novel, it had been something like fifteen months of seemingly endless waiting, during which time I’d written a second novel in the series, and half of a third. I’d been manifesting a two-book deal, so we asked for one, and within a few weeks, we got it. I was ECSTATIC.

Years ago, I had to set aside my original dream, which was to be a crime fiction author, and use my existing skills and talent to write true crime books. My first novel, NAKED ADDICTION, took me seventeen years to publish, and although I’d hoped to make it into a series, that was not to be. I simply didn’t have the knowledge or skills to do that at that point in my career. It took me another seventeen years of writing books about real homicide detectives and investigations to get the second novel to where it needed to be.

So, today, I feel like I’m getting a second chance to follow that dream. It’s not an easy thing to switch genres when you’re well-known in another, but as I’ve explained in this post, I am not one to give up easily. As the saying goes, I have to hope that if I follow my bliss, happiness and success will come.

That has involved some manifesting. I manifested a two-book deal to start a series, and now I’m manifesting a second two-book deal to keep it going. So, while my editor was on maternity leave, which meant the editing process for HOOKED was delayed for a few months, I started a fourth novel in the “Katrina & Goode” series, which is named after the two protagonists, the investigative reporter Katrina Chopin and the surfing homicide detective Ken Goode.

I just finished a second draft of that book, and am trying to find ways to improve it as I’m brainstorming ideas for books #5 and #6. We will submit #3 and a synopsis for #4 later this year, hopefully with rough elevator pitches for the next book or two, to make my dream a reality.

DOWN TO THE BONE, which comes out on June 24, is available for pre-order now, as is HOOKED, which comes out January 13, 2026. The sequel to HOOKED will come out later in 2026.

Books sell by word of mouth, so I hope you all will help me make my dream come true.