Resilience tips from author who faced endless barriers before selling a million books

Steffanie Holmes faced years of disappointment and rejection before breaking through as a best-selling author pursued by major publishers. Unable to find work in her initial career choice of archaeology due to a rare condition called achromatopsia which renders her legally blind, Holmes turned to writing where her talent and steely perseverance eventually paid off. Now the author of more than 50 books, with more than one million copies sold, she lives on the Kaipara Coast in an off-grid house she built with her husband, and below shares priceless pearls of advice for those who dream of writing success (or reaching any kind of goal at all).

If you’d told me 20 years ago – when I was crying in my husband’s arms because no one would hire me – that I’d become a bestselling romance author with over a million books sold, I wouldn’t have believed you.

My dream was to be a museum curator, but after graduating uni with an honours degree in archaeology , I spent 18 months being rejected from every job I applied for, because “we think you’re a health and safety risk”.

And so I decided to pursue another life-long dream – one no one could tell me I couldn’t do. I sat down and polished the manuscript of a vampire novel I’d been working on, sent it off to publishers, and acquired my first of hundreds of rejections from that industry, too.

I wrote more books, acquired more rejections and, in 2015, decided I was sick of waiting for permission. I self-published my first romance novel under my pen name, Steffanie Holmes. To my surprise, this quirky tale about a fox shifter and his fated mate sold 1000 copies in a week, and I realised that this dream could become a reality.

So I kept writing, 2000 words a day, every day, fitting them in on my commute, hunched over my laptop on the bus. I self-published one novel every two months until my 30th birthday, in February 2018, when I gave myself the best birthday gift ever and quit my day job as a copywriter at a tech company.

It’s been a wild ride. I’ve had books release into the top 20 of Amazon. I’ve had books I absolutely loved flop so hard I debated applying for a job at McDonald’s. And, after years, of self-publishing, I’ve now signed a three-book deal with a major publisher for my brand-new vampire series.

In 2024, I celebrated a very special milestone. I sold my one-millionth romance book.

That numbers still blows me away. And it isn’t even the best part of what I do. That’s when readers email me or hug me at events and tell me that my characters make them laugh or helped them through a hard time. It’s having a reader gift me a crocheted willy. It’s leaping out of bed in the morning so excited about what I get to write today. It’s falling in love with new characters over and over again. It’s going to the Air NZ lounge before a signing and eating as much fancy cheese as I want.

So how did I get here? I’ll give you some more numbers:

It involved around 5.5 million words written, 57 books published, six bottles of absinthe, 13 viral TikToks, at least 28 pivotal scenes deleted by cats jumping on the keyboard, too many friends and mentors to name, and countless gallons of blood, sweat, and tears.

All of us have dreams and goals, and I think we can all learn from the journeys of others to avoid potholes and bar fights along the way. So I collected some of the wisdom I learned along my tumultuous publishing journey:

My whole career has been a series of miracles – just when things get their darkest, a TikTok takes off or a new contract comes in. My husband suggests that maybe I should do something with that vampire novel I’m always working on (and he turns out to be right).

There is always an element of luck – right place, right time, right idea. But those miracles happen because I show up every day and I never give up. For every miracle, there are ten “wrong” books. But every book teaches you something, especially the “wrong” ones. I wrote 33 novels before one hit the top 20 on Amazon. What if I’d quit at book 31?

And what if, like me, you follow that hit with the biggest flop of your career?

Don’t quit before the miracle

How do you not quit? That’s the hard part. I find motivation comes from action - it’s not the cause of action. I make myself write, even when I don’t want to, and showing up for the project whenever I can and seeing progress gives me motivation to keep going.

And I love the books I write. I don’t write stories I hate because I think they’ll make a lot of money. No one gives out rewards for sado-masochism.

During the pandemic, I realised that I wished I had a group of writers at my level who understood the industry and the unique challenges. I made a list of ten authors in my genre I admired and contacted them to ask if they wanted to join a weekly Zoom chat about writing and publishing. Every one of them said they always wished they could be part of a support group, but no one had ever asked them before.

If you crave something in your life, don’t wait to be invited. Do the inviting. The worst people can do is say no.

We come from all corners of the world, but we’ve been able to meet in person at book signings and for writers’ retreats. If I don’t know how to do something, someone in our group will. Each of us have different strengths and strategies. Everyone knows how hard things are, and we lift each other up and remind each other that we are awesome. All that positive energy has power.

In 2019, I wrote a romance with a heroine who’s fired from her dream job in the fashion industry because she’s going blind, (a completely made up thing that never happens). She ends up working at a magical bookshop that brings infamous fictional villains from classic literature to life, and so she solves quirky supernatural murder mysteries with Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, and a shy raven named Quoth from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem.

I love the Nevermore Bookshop Mysteries – they’re fun and funny and deeply personal and combine my love of the supernatural, classic literature, and murder. But they never sold well. They’re a little too quirky. They don’t fit in. Kind of like me. So I put the series aside for a few years and wrote more popular things.

But I never stopped believing that Nevermore Bookshop could find its readers.

In 2022, I decided to run a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to produce fancy hardcover editions of those books, complete with foil details and gilded edges. I had new covers made, and on a whim, I changed the covers on the Kindle ebooks to match. That same week, I had my first-ever viral TikTok on the series.

The new covers and new audience shot book 1 into the top 500 books on Amazon, and turned Nevermore Bookshop into my bestselling series overnight. This series alone has made me over one million dollars.

I’d told myself a story about how these books didn’t fit anywhere, but it wasn’t that the books themselves were bad. I hadn’t packaged them in a way that appealed to their ideal readers. If something isn’t working, don’t throw it away. Maybe all it needs is an outfit change.

It’s hard when it feels as if everyone around you is succeeding with their creative projects. You feel like an imposter. (This never goes away). You assume that success means you have to be everywhere and do everything. And in trying, you spread yourself too thin and burn out your light.

If I start to get this lingering dread in my gut about all the things on my plate, I ask myself:

1. What is moving me in the direction I want to go?

2. What is distracting me?

3. What is exciting me?

And then, I take things off my plate. I used to mentor other authors and I loved it, but I gave it up because if it’s between helping other authors and helping my stories soar, I’m choosing my stories (sorry, other authors). I outsource things like advertising and shipping because they’re boring. I have an incredible business manager, Amy, who runs my whole business and makes sure I always have my glasses. I gave up the career I studied because it no longer fit what I wanted to be.

When you say no, when you walk away, when you change something, the universe steps up to meet you. To create a fun, beautiful life, the things you say no to might be more important than the things you say yes to. Keep it simple, intentionally focus your energy, and leave room for the magic.

When you think about your creative project, ask yourself, ‘why is this meaningful to me?”

The tropes we love resonate with us because they’re part of our personal story. I love the ‘who did this to you’ trope. The love interest finds the novel’s protagonist injured, upset, or hurt by an enemy. “Who did this to you?” they rage.

They find that person and MESS THEM UP.

In one of my novels, the love interest feeds the heroine’s enemy to a lion.

I don’t condone this in real life. What if the lion gets food poisoning? I love this trope because when I was a kid being bullied, the thing I wished for more than anything in the world was someone who would stick up for me. And in real life, that might look like a partner supporting you, but in a book, it can look like a hero tossing the limbs of your enemies to a giant hungry cat.

Find the emotional resonance – that beating human heart – at the centre of your story, and write THAT, or create THAT. That’s how you connect with an audience.

Pursuing a creative project or career isn’t easy. But if it were easy, that would take a lot of the fun away. The triumphs and disasters we face become part of who we are. We make incredible friends who walk with us when we need them. We experience miracles. We give a reader somewhere in the world the chance to be the heroine or hero in their own story.

If you take away one thing from this article, it’s ‘don’t get between Steff and her Air NZ cheese unless you want to be fed to a lion.’

If you take away a second thing, it’s this – don’t quit before your miracle.

Steffanie Holmes is the creator of Rage Against the Manuscript, an online community for writers to learn about self-publishing, finding their readers and building a brand.