Why does the publishing industry feel more chaotic than ever, and what can writers do about it? How do you know if you're truly burned out or just creatively empty? When should successful authors start saying no instead of yes to every opportunity? Becca Syme shares her hard-won wisdom about navigating burnout, embracing unpredictability, and knowing what to quit (and what not to quit) in your writing career.

In the intro, Frankfurt Book Fair AI and audio [Audible, Publishers Weekly]; Free Reads by BookBub; Halloween book sale; Writing Storybundle;

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Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of the Better Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the Dear Writer series of non-fiction books. She's also the host of the QuitCast Podcast.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Identifying burnout vs. creative blocks. How long symptoms last and checking for biological/life transition causes first.





• The transition from saying yes to saying no. Learning when you've reached the point where selectivity becomes essential for sustainability





• “Loki is in charge.” Why publishing is unpredictable and when to stop analyzing what went wrong.





• Increased chaos or increased visibility. Whether publishing really has more unpredictability now or we're just seeing it more clearly.





• What to quit doing. Book signings as investments and judging other authors online, plus the dangers of social media dysregulation.





• What not to quit. Writing itself and maintaining hope for the future, regardless of industry changes.

You can find Becca at betterfasteracademy.com/links.

Transcript of Interview with Becca Syme

Joanna: Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of the Better Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the Dear Writer series of non-fiction books. She's also the host of the QuitCast Podcast. So welcome back to the show, Becca.

Becca: Thank you so much for having me again. I love being here.

Joanna: You were last on the show in March 2024, so I guess around 18 months now. Give us an update.

What has changed in your writing and your author business?

Becca: So I've started writing more fiction again. I think the last time I was here I was doing almost zero fiction writing, just because I was so busy. And I went through burnout, which is not going to surprise anyone. I think we've all been there.

One of the things I decided as a post-burnout goal was to try to write fiction every day. I don't every single day do it, but I do it often enough that it feels like I'm doing it every day. So I'm happy about that.

Joanna: That's interesting because you hear people saying, “Oh, I've got a block around writing fiction” or something. How do people know if they are in burnout versus they are just empty, or perhaps they have other reasons?

How do people tell where they are and the reason why they can't write?

Becca: How long it lasts is usually the biggest indicator for me. Because if you're empty and you try to fill again, right? Like, let's go reading, let's go watching, and it doesn't come back, then it's more likely to be burnout.

Burnout itself, like the kind of extreme burnout that we hear about where you can't get up off the bathroom floor, that kind of thing, will be real evident when you're in what we call “all systems burnout.”

Usually a burnout that is a creative burnout or a physical or emotional burnout can have other potential causes. So I would always go looking for things like, “Am I in perimenopause?” I joke with people, “Is it burnout or am I in perimenopause?” because it feels the same.

So I always want to check biological first, or if I'm in a life transition, that's often the reason why I'm more blocked. So I want to look outside at environmental first to see if there's a cause. If there is, then I want the cause to get dealt with. But it's usually time. How long is it lasting?

Joanna: How long does it last? I think that's so important.

It seems like people blame writing before anything else. I had a friend who had a death in the family and was like, “Oh, I just can't write.” And I'm like, “Give it six months.” Grieving is another reason.

There are lots of reasons why your whole self might be like, “Now's not the time to write a cozy mystery” or whatever.

Becca: I don't think we consider enough how different it is to be a creative person versus other things you might do for work. If I'm grieving, I can probably still show up to my Starbucks job and do a reasonable job of making coffee most of the time, right?

So I may not be as affected in my ability to go to the grocery store or my ability to paint houses or something. But all of our work comes from our brain, so anything that impacts our cognition, anything that impacts our processing time.

Honestly, if the stakes go up even just a little bit in our real life, there's a likelihood that it's going to impact our creativity to a point where sometimes, “I'm afraid I might lose my job,” then all of a sudden the creativity dries up and goes away.

Or “I'm afraid of what might happen if…” and then insert a million things here that can be making me feel afraid. Creativity can just go away because, again, it's Maslow's hierarchy, right?

I know it's not 100% one layer at a time all the time, but if your base level foundation is being attacked, if you don't know for sure how you're going to make your mortgage next month, it's going to be real hard to reach creative freedom if you're worried about stuff.

Joanna: Thinking about ourselves as whole people rather than like you can just turn on the writing even if everything else is kind of crazy.

I've got to ask you, Becca, since you are a coach, you're a very wise person, you've been on this show lots, and you've helped me, helped many people that you coach, and you've talked about avoiding burnout before—

How on earth did you end up in burnout?

Becca: So some of it is high stakes, right? It's not uncommon for people when they see a lot of success in their business to be overwhelmed by all the things that there are to do, to have a hard time delegating.

It's kind of in the phases of a business and the way businesses grow. There's a phase that is like massive growth. Infrastructure causes massive growth.

Then if you don't adapt to that easily or quickly by either offloading things off your plate or lowering the financial stakes, a lot of people will get burned out when they have to make all of these decisions about money. Money stresses them out.

So you have high stakes, that means the stress goes up, which means it costs me more energy to do things that I would have done previously with less energy. It can kind of sneak up on you if you're not conscious about it all the time.

Then, of course, you have to quit stuff. You would think being the quit coach, I would be really great at that, but it's really hard to quit something that has been good or beneficial, even if