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In March last year, we started a garden renovation at our place.

A project that started off as a garden path and some steps that has since turned into three terraces, an outdoor kitchen, an astro-turf area for the kids and 700 square meters of patio area.

The first few months were exciting. Then it turned grim.

Diggers tearing everything up. Mud everywhere. The dogs tracking it through the house. What used to be a perfectly functional — if uninspiring — garden was now just a building site. 

And for what felt like the longest time, it stayed that way. It still is to some degree. 

Weeks would go by and I'd look out of the window and think, is anything actually happening here?

The builders would come and go. Things would shift slightly. But it never looked like progress. It just looked like a different arrangement of the same mud and rubble.

My wife and I had the same conversation about it more times than I can count.

"Do you think it's going to be done soon?"

"Who knows."

Then, Something Changed

Gradually — over the last few weeks — something changed.

Not a dramatic before-and-after moment. More like one morning I looked out and thought: oh. It's actually starting to look like something.

The patio goes down in the next couple of weeks. More than a year on, the end is finally in sight.

I See This With Authors, Too

Authors do the work. Set up the ad campaigns. Make the decisions. And then they stare out at what they've built and think: is anything actually happening here?

The data ticks along. Some days look better than others. But it never quite feels like progress. Just a different arrangement of the same uncertainty.

The Thing Nobody Tells You

Here's what I wish someone had told me when my wife and I started her author business back in 2020:

Most of the work of building something is invisible.

The foundations being laid beneath the surface. The algorithm learning. The audience compounding. The system quietly doing its job while you're standing at the window wondering if it's working.

It doesn't look like progress.

Until one day, it does.

The In-Between Part

If I were starting over, I'd spend less time worrying about the tactics and more time preparing myself for this part.

The in-between part.

The months where it looks like nothing is happening — but everything is.

Because the authors who build real, consistent royalties aren't the ones who found a secret strategy nobody else knew about.

They're the ones who stayed in long enough for the work to show up.

Most don't.

Not because they got the ads wrong.

Because they mistook the slow middle for failure — and walked away before the patio went down.

To Your Success
– Matt