When the Writer Puts on a Marketing Hat: A Ride on the Emotional Roller Coaster
Ads, AI, criticism, panic—and learning to keep going
Week 5, Aug 14, 2026
My dear,
Another update from me.
This week is marketing week.
My ads are running, and so is my mood.
Oh God… I want to escape this journey and call it quits. Honestly, imagine the emotional roller coaster this has put me through.
Especially when the ads land in front of people who don’t like them.
People who hate the use of AI.
People who have strong opinions about what I’m doing.
And suddenly, all those opinions are sitting there, looking back at me.
At first, my instinct was to delete those comments and let them disappear, just as my dad always taught me in his Zen Buddhist way.
But then something in me said:
No.
This is exactly the moment I need to stand by myself.
Not as a softer, more polite version of myself who makes sure everyone is comfortable.
Not as someone who needs everyone to agree with me.
But as the woman who created this work.
The woman who believes in it.
The woman who is willing to let it exist in the world.
So I decided to create another piece of art, another AI video, in response, and pair it with the caption:
I am here to stay.
You are free not to like it.
You are free to disagree with me.
You are free to have your opinion but it doesn’t get to take me out of my game.
And that realization felt surprisingly empowering.
Because perhaps this is another part of putting my work into the world that I didn’t fully understand before.
It’s not only about learning how to market.
It’s learning how to remain myself while being seen.
To hear criticism without immediately questioning everything I believe.
To let someone dislike what I created without deciding that I must have done something wrong.
To keep going even when the world doesn’t immediately say yes, while a faint echo of my dad’s voice whispers in the back of my mind: “Come back.”
So yes, I am still figuring this out.
Some days I want to run away.
Some days I feel completely overwhelmed.
But I’m here.
I’m standing by myself.
I’m standing by my work.
I’m standing by what I believe.
And this time, I’m not walking away from myself.
Chill, chill.
Hold on to your opinion.
I’m ready to fight.
No—not the fight you think.
The fight in my marketing game.
So let me share with you a closer look at how my ads are performing.
Let’s look at the overview first.
My aim is simple: I want people to visit my website and, eventually, discover the free Explorer episode.
Here is the website result so far, up until today, August 14.
I’ve had a total of 1,266 visits.
Surprisingly, most of them came from Facebook, even though I was mainly focusing on Instagram.
That made me think that perhaps I need to rethink where I’m putting my focus.
Here is where people are checking in from.
It’s no surprise that Cyprus is number one, since I’m actually only targeting Cyprus at the moment. I live here, so I wanted to start where I am.
There are also quite a lot of views from Indonesia. That one was my mistake. I accidentally clicked the wrong setting on one of the ads.
Oh, my bad!
The overall result came from two main videos.
The first one was the video I put up and ran first.
I spent around $30 on it and got about 15K views, with 747 visits (From Cyprus) to my landing page.
But so far, no one has entered the free Explorer episode.
My first thought was: perhaps the landing page isn’t impactful enough yet.
But I don’t want to jump to that conclusion too quickly.
Then I created a second video and started testing different settings.
For this one, I tried two different approaches.
The first sent people directly to the chapter 1.
It got around 10K views, 427 website visits (From Indonesia), and cost only about $6.
The second approach used a mix of different actions (from Cyprus).
That one performed much worse when it came to sending people to my website. It got around 6K views but almost no additional website visits.
So clearly, I wouldn’t continue with the mixed-actions approach.
Overall, I still need more information.
I also need to learn how to plan my ad testing better.
This is my first week doing this. Some of the parameters weren’t fixed consistently between the different tests, which means the results aren’t truly comparable yet.
And strangely enough, looking at all of this has done something much more important than giving me marketing data.
It calmed my panicked mind.
A few days ago, my mind was saying:
“It’s not working.”
“It’s a failure.”
“Maybe the whole idea doesn’t work.”
But now I can look at the numbers and say:
No.
We are working on it.
We have data.
We have evidence.
We have things to learn.
We have things to test.
And that feels very different from reacting to an emotional trigger or an old piece of programming or one random comment on the internet.
Maybe this is also part of learning to put my work into the world.
Not every uncomfortable feeling is a sign that I should stop.
Sometimes, I just need to take a breath, look at the evidence, and keep going.
And before I go…
Thank you for being here and witnessing this journey with me.
I know I’m sharing a lot of things that are still unfinished.
The novel is out in the world, but I’m still learning how to let it find its readers.
The marketing is running, but I’m still figuring out what works.
Some days I feel confident.
Some days I completely lose my mind.
And perhaps that is exactly what I want this little space to be.
Not a place where I come back every week with everything figured out.
But a place where I can tell you what is actually happening.
The beautiful parts.
The messy parts.
The things that work.
The things that don’t.
And what I learn somewhere in between.
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for witnessing.
And if you’re still here next week, I’ll have another story to tell.
Until then,
I’m going to keep making the work, keep learning the game, and keep coming back to myself.
Love,
Lalita Janette