Everything I Am Besides an Author (While Writing the Royals of Marvidinia)

There's a moment, somewhere around midnight, when I'm trimming a fifteen-second video clip frame by frame, trying to get a confetti drop to land exactly on the beat of a voiceover line — and I catch myself thinking: this is not what I pictured when I decided to write a book.

I pictured writing. Just writing. A quiet room, a manuscript, maybe a nice cup of coffee going cold beside the keyboard while a royal family's secrets slowly came together on the page. And that part is real — it's still the heart of everything. But somewhere along the way, I also became a video editor, a sound engineer, a marketing manager, and a web developer. Nobody warns you about that part in advance. So here's the part nobody tells you.

The Writer

This is the job I signed up for, and it's still the one I love most. Drafting a scene, untangling a plot thread, finally landing on the line of dialogue that makes a character feel real — that's the work that started all of this. It's also the work that gets squeezed the hardest once everything else piles on, which is exactly why I protect it fiercely. Everything else in this list exists in service of getting the story into readers' hands. But the story comes first.

The Editor

Finishing a manuscript doesn't mean the manuscript is finished. There's a whole second act nobody sees: read-throughs, beta feedback, tightening pacing, catching the continuity slip you didn't notice until book three when a location that's been established for two books suddenly needs correcting. Editing is quieter than writing, but it's just as demanding — and it's where a book actually gets good.

The Video Editor & Sound Engineer

This is the hat that surprised me most. A few years ago, "marketing a book" meant a static graphic and a caption. Now it means learning CapCut well enough to cut fifteen-second reels with clean transitions, sourcing or generating voiceover with tools like ElevenLabs, timing music to hit emotional beats, and exporting in formats that won't choke on upload. None of that came naturally. I spent real hours — the kind of hours that could've gone into drafting — just figuring out how to make a video look like it wasn't made by someone learning as she went.

The Marketing Manager

Somebody has to plan the content calendar, decide what gets teased and when, track what's actually landing with readers versus what just feels like it should, and keep launch week from turning into chaos. That somebody is also the person who wrote the book. It's a strange kind of whiplash — moving from a character's internal monologue to a spreadsheet of posting cadence in the same afternoon.

The Web Developer (Sort Of)

And then there's the website. The newsletter sign-up. The back-end pieces that have nothing to do with storytelling and everything to do with making sure the story can be found. This is the least glamorous and (at least for me personally) the most frustrating hat of the bunch and also, quietly, one of the most necessary.

The Real Hurdle

Here's what I've learned: none of these skills are hard to pick up individually. What's hard is picking them up while you're also trying to finish a manuscript, get through editing, commission cover art, and format a book for publication — all on the same timeline. The learning curve is steep precisely because it doesn't happen in isolation. You're not just learning CapCut; you're learning CapCut at 11pm after a full day of edits, three weeks before a launch date that isn't moving.

But here's the other thing I've learned: once a tool clicks, it stays clicked. The hours I spent fumbling through my first video edit are hours I no longer have to spend — that skill is banked now, ready every time I need it. The same is true for every hat on this list. The steep part is temporary. The tools stay useful long after the learning curve flattens out.

So if you're reading this as a writer wondering whether you have to become five different professionals to publish a book — you probably do, at least for a while. But you don't have to become all of them at once, and you don't have to be great at any of them right away. You just have to be willing to be bad at something new for a little while, in service of a story you actually care about.

That part, at least, has always been worth it.

Want the behind-the-scenes version of all this — the reels, the process, the occasional 11pm CapCut crisis? Sign up for the Palace Insider newsletter to follow along.