Hey Reader,

Quick fun bit before today's update: the polls from my last email are in. I'd asked how many of you had actually read the three portal fantasy books that made me want to write the genre:

• Mordant's Need: 14.3% have read it
• The Darwath Trilogy: 0% have read it
• War of the Flowers: 14.3% have read it

Almost nobody has read them, which tracks. They're buried treasure. If any of them ended up on your list because of that email, I'd love to hear how it goes.

Okay, the actual update. I didn't write much this stretch, and I'd rather tell you where the time actually went than pretend otherwise.

Part of it was health: I got bit by a cat a few weeks back, it turned into a bacterial infection, and I spent four days in the hospital because of it. My hand still isn't fully back. That ate a chunk of time on its own.

But the bigger reason is that when I did have hours to work with, I spent almost all of them on marketing instead of the manuscript. I'm not thrilled about that trade, but it's the honest one, so here's where it went:

I finally killed Facebook ads. They'd been quietly losing money for months. I let them ride longer than I should have, hoping they would turn a corner, but they didn't. Amazon ads are the opposite kind of stuck: I'm not losing money there, I just can't figure out how to spend more without the return falling apart, and I've been chewing on that puzzle for weeks. (I even built myself some AI tooling to help make sense of it—turns out it's much better at telling me what's failing than what's working, which is its own depressing kind of useful.) And this month I'm trying something new on top of all that: a book tour. No idea yet if it was the right call, but worth testing.

None of that put words on the page. But the stretch wasn't a total loss—a few things moved forward:

• All four Guardian League books are now on Audible (Thaumatropic Roots is next in line)
• Most of the catalog is out in other languages
• Oh, I made my image library available to the public: https://app.sjmorriswrites.com. You can find the same on my Pinterest page, but many of the images are buried in carousels there, and my app page lets you filter on series and topic and such.

I also ran a small experiment: Mother of Trees already has a hardback, but I tested a new printing company (BookVault) that could open the door to real collector editions—decorated or sprayed edges, that kind of thing. I keep circling it and talking myself out of it. The price and the production effort aren't small, so it's still just an idea I'm turning over, not a promise.

So here's the part I don't usually do: I considered asking for a short-term accountability partner. Someone to check in with, compare notes, maybe just tell me to get off the ad dashboard and back into the manuscript. I also suspect I would kind of hate that. But I could use some help getting moving again.

​All books by Steven J. Morris​

Previous Newsletters

• ​Three books, one obsession: portal fantasy​
• ​I built something weird. Want to help me break it?​
• ​What comes after Thaumatropic Roots?​
• ​The Truth about Dragons in Thaumatropic Roots​

May you get lost this week in another world,

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