It Wasn’t the Writing That Nearly Broke Me. It Was Everything Around It.
Week Six of the £1.5M Project: the machine behind the words.
If you’ve ever tried to grow something from scratch—a business, a book, a persona—you’ll know there are weeks where nothing looks impressive. No grand post. No launch. No inbox full of wins. Just quiet work, pixel by pixel, word by word.
This was one of those weeks.
It’s been seven weeks since I decided—publicly, against my better judgment—to try and earn £1.5M from my writing business in twelve months. No smoke. No mirrors. Just the systems, stories, and stubbornness it takes to build something that makes money without selling out.
This is your update. And yes, it’s a slow one. But it’s where most of the good things actually live.
What the Numbers Say (Even When They Whisper)
I earned a total of £76.54 this week from actual, traceable revenue.
Substack: one yearly subscriber at £48.86, and two monthly at £4.18 each.
KDP royalties: £19.32
Affiliate income: £0, despite telling the world how to use Scrivener without crying.
Audible: the audiobook for The Private Dining Room is finished and submitted. It’s currently stuck in ACX’s quality assurance queue, which is where good recordings go to wait indefinitely.
Ten new free subscribers joined the main Substack. Instagram followers increased by 462, and Pinterest pins are now rolling out via Metricool, whether anyone’s watching or not.
That’s where we’re at. No major breakthroughs. But enough movement to suggest the machine is slowly beginning to hum.
The Week That Looked Like Marketing, But Was Infrastructure
It would be generous to call this a writing week.
I didn’t add a single scene to The Fifth Rule—Lillianna’s next book, but I did flesh out my FMC and started plotting. I didn’t touch my screenplay. I didn’t draft a short story or open a document that began with “Chapter One.”
But I did this instead:
I built a Pinterest board for Lillianna Vale and scheduled weeks of content through Metricool. I created image assets for both Pinterest and Instagram—quote graphics, branding visuals, tone-building slides that may or may not go semi-viral in two months’ time. Every one of them was built with both aesthetic and utility in mind.
I posted two reels to my Instagram account and engaged every day—commented, responded, and followed up. Grunt work.
I launched The Vale – The Lillianna Vale Collection on Substack, giving Lillianna a proper publication of her own. The Private Dining Room now lives there, serialised for the kind of readers who want darkness in episodes. Her next full-length novel, The Fifth Rule, will be published the same way—serialised first, then formatted for KDP.
I built the onboarding. Designed the emails. Welcomed the new fans.
This was a week of invisible moves. Of laying track. Of preparing the platform that will hold future revenue.
And honestly? It nearly broke me.
The Energy of Building Without Immediate Return
Here’s what no one wants to admit: when you’re in the early stages of building anything digital, it often feels like failure dressed as productivity.
You can spend six hours designing assets, uploading to platforms, and configuring email flows—and still feel like you’ve done nothing.
You haven’t made a product. You haven’t earned. You haven’t even written.
But you’ve moved your business forward in a way that will let all of those things happen faster, cleaner, and more often in the future.
This week was about making the future inevitable, not immediate.
Lillianna Is No Longer a Side Character
Lillianna Vale was a pen name. Now she’s a brand. She has a tone, a space, a strategy, a following. She’s serialising fiction on her own publication. Her aesthetic is clean, seductive, and luxurious. She has quote graphics, scheduled pins, and onboarding emails that sound like velvet and warning bells.
She’s become one of the most concrete pieces of the £1.5M strategy. (So far.)
I’m plotting her next release (The Fifth Rule) now. It’s sharper. Stranger. Structurally tighter. The sex is still charged, but this time the power dynamic isn’t just intimate—it’s tactical. It’s not about pleasure or pain. It’s about surveillance. Obsession. Control. Who holds it. Who loses it. And who pretends to play along.
The Private Dining Room gave her a voice.
The Fifth Rule gives her leverage.
What I've Shared Publicly
Even though it felt like a background week, I still published:
A detailed breakdown of how to pitch a TV series—laying out what goes in a treatment, show bible, series overview, pilot sample, and personal statement.
A longform feature on Stephen King for my Big Earning Authors series. (Spoiler: he got rich by writing stories people couldn’t ignore, and negotiating like someone who knew it.)
Read: How Stephen King Makes Millions from "Welcome to Derry" Without Writing a Word
My weekly TikTok update that goes to Instagram too, and a trending Propaganda I’m not falling for — writer edition TikTok & Reel.
These posts take time. Time to research, write, film, edit and produce. Every line earns its space. Every paragraph either teaches or pushes something forward.
This is a writing project, yes. But it’s also a publishing one. And if you don’t hit publish, nothing compounds.
Momentum Isn’t Always Sexy—But It’s Still Momentum
What I’ve learned this week is that friction doesn’t mean failure. It means you’re making contact. And I feel like I’m building forward, no matter how slowly it may feel.
I’m juggling three identities: the novelist, the digital business owner, the strategist. Add a couple of pen names and a running screenwriting submission list, and yes, it’s chaos. But it’s controlled.
I’ve built the bones. Now I’m adding muscle. And if it looks like slow progress, so be it. I feel like I wouldn’t have made a quarter of this progress without this little deranged project.
The Real Takeaway
Week six was not a headline week. It was a foundation week. A back-end, background, build-the-systems week.
It’s not flashy. But this is what it looks like to turn creative work into a business.
It’s not the writing that’s hard. It’s showing up for the structure, even when the rewards haven’t arrived yet.
Next week will be different. Or it won’t. But the tracks are laid. The engine’s on.
And the project rolls forward.
— H.J. x
New to me and my writing?
I’m H. J. Smith-Williams: novelist, screenwriter (in progress), and founder of the £1.5M Project—a year-long experiment to see how far words, wit, and stubborn execution can go.
You can expect fiction, industry breakdowns, unapologetic ambition, and the occasional author confession.
If that sounds like your kind of chaos, you’re in the right place.
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