In this episode, I'm sharing the four investments I come back to again and again in my work with authors. These aren't things I learned from a course. They're the things I see actually move the needle for the women who are serious about building real, sustainable author careers.

We cover:

• The money mindset shift that changes how you invest in your career

• Why I recommend getting a coach sooner than feels comfortable, and what it actually gives you

• What retreats offer that no online experience can replicate, and the connections that change careers

• Why showing up at conferences and industry events is one of the most strategic things you can do

• The manifesting practice I recommend to students and what it actually does for clarity and confidence

• The identity principle that connects all of it

If you're ready to stop waiting and start building with real strategy and support, I'd love for you to look into The Author CEO Private Mentorship. Applications are open at serenadepublishing.com/the-author-ceo.

Links:

The Author CEO Private Mentorship: serenadepublishing.com/the-author-ceo

So today's episode is for you. It's the advice I give my students. The stuff I come back to in almost every conversation. The investments and the mindset shifts that I've watched change the trajectory of careers, again and again.

Some of it is practical. Some of it is going to feel more like a mindset conversation. All of it is honest.

Let's get into it.

When a new client comes to me, one of the first things I do is listen to how she talks about investing in herself.

Not just financially, though that's part of it. I mean more broadly. Does she treat her writing career like something that deserves real resources — time, money, energy, attention? Or does she treat it like something she'll get serious about once she's earned the right?

Because here's what I've noticed. The writers who are stuck are almost always stuck in a holding pattern of their own making. They're waiting. For the manuscript to be finished. For the savings account to look a certain way. For life to get a little quieter. For something outside themselves to say: now. Now you're allowed.

And I understand that deeply. I've been there. But what I know from years of working with authors is that the waiting doesn't protect you. It just delays you.

The four investments I'm going to talk about today are the ones I come back to most often in my mentorship. They're the ones that, when a client finally commits to them, I watch everything start to shift.

So let's go through them.

SECTION 1: MONEY MINDSET & MANIFESTING

The first thing I talk about with almost every author I work with is money mindset. And before anyone switches off, stay with me for a minute, because this is not abstract.

Here is what I see constantly. A woman who is talented, who is serious, who has a genuine vision for her author career, but who is running a very old story about money in the background. A story that says: spending money on yourself is indulgent. That responsible people wait for proof before they invest. That you earn the right to be supported by first doing it alone.

That story is costing her. Not just financially. It's costing her time, direction, momentum, and the kind of clarity that only comes when you stop trying to figure everything out by yourself.

What I tell my students is this: investment is not a reward for success. It is often the mechanism of it.

The authors who build real, sustainable careers don't wait until everything is already working before they put resources in. They decide what they're building, and they fund it with intention. They treat their creative career the way any business owner would treat a business they believed in.

And alongside that, I talk about manifesting. Not in a passive, vision-board-and-wait kind of way. In a practical, identity-based way.

What I encourage my students to do is write about their author life in present tense, as if it's already happening. Every morning. Describing the books that are out in the world, the readers they're connecting with, the career they're actively building. In as much detail as they can access.

What this does, and I've watched it happen over and over, is close the gap between who they are right now and who they're becoming. It trains your nervous system to believe that what you're building is real and possible. And once your nervous system believes it, your decisions start to reflect it.

The principle I come back to is this: belief comes before the proof. You don't wait for evidence that it's going to work and then commit. You commit, and the evidence begins to arrive.

That's not magical thinking. That is how every serious creative career I've ever watched get built has actually worked.

SECTION 2: GET A COACH

The second thing I tell every author I work with is this: get a coach. And get one sooner than feels comfortable.

I'm not saying this because I'm a coach, though I understand that's how it might land. I'm saying it because of what I've watched happen to writers who finally have a thinking partner in their corner versus writers who are still trying to piece things together from blog posts and Facebook groups and borrowed advice from people who are also figuring it out.

The difference is not subtle.

What a good mentor gives you is not just information. It's perspective. It's the ability to look at your specific situation, your books, your goals, your timeline, your strengths, and give you a direction that is actually calibrated to you. Not to what worked for someone else. Not generic advice dressed up as strategy. Yours.

The women who come to me and make the most significant progress are not always the ones with the most books published or the most experience. They're the ones who are genuinely coachable. Who come in ready to make decisions, not just gather more information. And very often, they come having already invested in mentorship before, which means they already understand the value of that kind of support.

I had a client recently, and I'll keep the details vague to protect her privacy, but she had been circling the same publishing decision for almost a year. She'd asked everyone she knew. She'd done all the research. She still couldn't move. We resolved it in one session. Not because I'm magic, but because she needed someone who could look at the full picture with her and help her see what she was actually choosing between.

That's what coaching does. It collapses the timeline on clarity.

Now, the objection I hear most often is: I can't afford it.

And I want to sit with that honestly for a moment, because I take it seriously. I know that coaching at this level is an investment. But here's the question I always ask back: what is the cost of not having it?

The publishing decisions made without the right information. The months spent going in circles. The launches that underperform because the strategy wasn't there. The creative energy that goes into self-doubt instead of building. Those things have a price too. They're just harder to see on a spreadsheet.

The right coaching investment returns on itself. And the clarity it gives you, you carry it forward. You don't have to buy it back every time you face a new decision.

So my advice: find the mentor who is genuinely a few steps ahead of where you want to be. Someone whose career you respect. Someone you trust. Have the conversation. Stop waiting until you feel ready, because readiness is built by doing, not by waiting.

SECTION 3: GO TO THE RETREATS

The third investment I talk about constantly, and the one that I think is most consistently underestimated, is the retreat.

Not a webinar. Not an online summit, though those have their place. I mean the in-person, sleeping-somewhere-beautiful, fully-present, out-of-your-ordinary-life experience. The kind of gathering where you're in a room with serious, creative women for several days, and something in you genuinely shifts.

I host retreats. And what I watch happen to the women who come, every single time, follows a pattern.

They arrive a little guarded. Still carrying the noise of their regular lives. Still in the mental mode of: I'll just slot this in alongside everything else. And by the second day, that's gone. Something has opened. They're thinking bigger. They're talking about their work with a confidence and a specificity they didn't have when they walked in. They're making decisions they'd been sitting on for months.

Part of that is the facilitation. Part of it is simply being removed from the environment that keeps you small.

But a huge part of it is the other women in the room.

The connections made at retreats are not like the connections you make online. They go deeper, faster. You're sharing meals, sharing writing time, having the honest conversations that don't happen in a comment section. The woman sitting next to you at dinner might become your most trusted accountability partner. The conversation on the last evening might be the one that finally helps you articulate what you're building.

I have watched collaborations start at retreats that have genuinely changed the shape of people's careers. I have watched women leave with a level of clarity about their work that months of solo effort hadn't given them. And I have watched the confidence that comes from being in a room full of people who take this as seriously as you do, spill back into everything they do when they get home.

Your environment is always communicating something to your nervous system. When you put yourself in a room full of women who are investing in their work, who speak about their writing with conviction, who are building real things, you start to carry that frequency back into your daily life.

So what I tell my students is this: put the retreat on the calendar before you feel financially ready. Save for it specifically. Treat it as a non-negotiable line item, not a luxury you'll get to eventually. Because not one woman has ever left one of these experiences and told me she wished she hadn't come.

SECTION 4: SHOW UP IN THE ROOMS

The fourth investment, and this one ties closely to retreats, is showing up at industry events. Conferences. Festivals. The rooms where your field actually gathers.

I host the Sunshine Coast Fiction Festival, and one of the things I see year after year is the authors who keep coming back. The ones who make it a fixture in their calendar. And what I've noticed is that it's not just the sessions that bring them back, though the sessions matter. It's the calibration. Being in that room once a year recalibrates something in them that ordinary life slowly erodes.

Here's what industry events give you that nothing else does.

They give you real-time intelligence about the publishing landscape. This industry moves fast. What's true about distribution, about reader behaviour, about platform algorithms, about which genres are growing and which are contracting, this changes constantly. The conversations you have in a conference hallway are often more current and more specific than anything you'll read in an article. The offhand comment from someone who's just come out of a meeting at a major publisher. The indie author who's just cracked a strategy that nobody's talking about yet. That kind of information circulates in rooms. You have to be in the room to get it.

They give you a sense of proportion. When you're working alone, it is very easy to lose perspective. To feel like what you're building is fragile and uncertain and maybe a little unlikely. Walking into a room of hundreds of authors who are all doing this, all taking it seriously, all building something real, does something to that feeling immediately. It reminds you that this is a real industry and you belong in it.

And they give you relationships. The kind that develop over years and become genuinely foundational to your career. I have made connections at industry events that changed the direction of what I've built. Introductions that led to things I couldn't have predicted. Friendships that have become part of my professional community in ways that still surprise me.

What I tell my students is: stop seeing the conference ticket as a cost and start seeing it as access. Because that's precisely what it is. Access to information, to people, to relationships, and to a version of yourself that has been reminded she belongs in these rooms.

And go with an intention. Know what you're there for. Know what questions you're sitting with. Know what kind of conversation would make the whole trip worth it. That intention shapes what you find.

Money mindset. Manifesting. Coaching. Retreats. Conferences.

If I had to name the single thread running through all of it, it's this: identity.

Every one of these investments works because of how it changes the way you see yourself. The author you become when you have a mentor who believes in your potential. The author you become when you've sat in a room full of serious women who are building real things. The author you become when you stop waiting for external permission and start operating from a deeper belief in your own work.

This is the thing I come back to again and again in my mentorship. You don't wait to feel like an Author CEO and then act like one. You act like one, and the identity follows. The investments, the rooms, the practice, they're all in service of that becoming. They're how you close the gap between where you are and who you're actually building toward being.

That's the through-line. And once you understand it, the investments start to feel less like costs and more like steps.

Warm, conversational. A continuation of the conversation, not a gear change.

If today's episode has resonated with you, I want to tell you about the most intimate way I work with authors right now.

It's called The Author CEO Private Mentorship. It's a four-month, one-on-one experience where we design your author business from the ground up. We work through your identity and vision, your publishing strategy, your business model, and your execution roadmap. You leave with a clear 12-month plan, a completely different relationship with your author career, and the kind of clarity that means you're never making decisions in the dark again.

This is the container where all of the things I've talked about today get put into practice. The mindset work, the strategic thinking, the kind of support that actually changes the trajectory.

It's offered by application only, because I work with a small number of women at a time and I want to make sure every person I say yes to is someone I can genuinely serve.

If something in today's episode made you think: this is the year I stop waiting, I would love to hear from you.

The details and the application are at serenadepublishing.com/the-author-ceo. I'll link it in the show notes.

Thank you for being here. Share this one with a writer in your life who's been sitting on the fence about investing in her career. Because she's exactly who I had in mind when I recorded it.

I'll see you in the next one.