When the CEO Became Part of the Author Journey
When I started writing my first book in 2023, I wasn't trying to become a published author.
Honestly, I was just proud that I wrote a book.
It started as a fun side project. Two friends chatting and creatively collaborating while we worked. There wasn't a publishing plan attached to it. There wasn't a company waiting on the other side.
There definitely wasn't the Daughters of Violence Universe.
There was just a story.
And for a while, I thought the path in front of me was pretty simple:
Write → Publish → Write the next book.
Then I decided to self-publish.
And the entrepreneur in me woke up.
I Was an Author, But I Already Knew How to Be a CEO
By the time I started writing, I'd already spent nearly a decade as an online entrepreneur.
I'd learned a long time ago that I needed CEO days.
There were days for doing the work and days for stepping outside of it long enough to look at the business itself.
What's working?
What's not?
What needs a system?
What am I doing repeatedly that could be made easier?
Where am I going?
That knowledge naturally followed me into self-publishing.
Except publishing wasn't the business world I'd spent years working inside. I couldn't just copy and paste everything I knew into authorship.
I had to shift it.
Reform it.
Alchemize it into something that actually supported the kind of author I wanted to be.
And for a little while, that derailed the simple writing career I'd imagined.
Because suddenly I wasn't just figuring out how to write another book.
I was figuring out what I was building.
Then Summer 2025 Happened
The birth of DOVU took me by storm.
One book had become three.
And then those stories started reaching outward.
Characters connected. Families appeared. Organizations started carrying histories of their own. A person from one storyline suddenly had a reason to exist inside another.
The world kept getting bigger.
Today, there are twelve books inside DOVU. One is published. Several others exist in different stages of writing, development, revision, and reader feedback.
That wasn't the career I imagined when I started writing in 2023.
But somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't just want to publish books.
I wanted to build this.
Something that could grow with me for the rest of my life and career.
Something that could eventually outlive me.
Something my children could inherit if they wanted to.
The deeper WHY behind DOVU started becoming clearer.
And in a strange way, it felt like answering something I'd heard a very long time ago—the part of me that started telling stories when I was twelve, long before I understood what any of this could become.
The Belmonte Trilogy Became the Center of the Map
There is a reason I still consider the Belmonte Trilogy the primary baseline of DOVU.
It was first.
Baby Girl. Gone Bad. My Forever.
Everything else grew outward from there.
I've always been a visual person, and whenever I think about the structure of DOVU, I think about the concept maps we used to make in school.
One idea in the middle.
Lines reaching outward.
Another bubble.
Another connection.
Then another.
Until something that looked relatively simple at the beginning had become an entire web.
August 2026 version →
That's basically DOVU.
She Rides with the Devil.
Never in Control.
Between Worlds.
What They Stole From River.
No Place Like Home.
Feels Like Coming Home.
The Black Thorne Hotshots.
The stories that haven't even been written yet.
Different books. Different corners of the universe. Different people living their own lives.
But somewhere, there is a thread.
Sometimes readers will see it immediately.
Sometimes they won't know the connection matters until much later.
And sometimes I don't discover it until I'm standing at the whiteboard in my home office following another line.
The Author Still Has to Be Allowed to Make a Mess
This is where separating the Author from the CEO became important.
Because I don't write books the same way I build businesses.
I don't write from detailed outlines.
I write from emotional anchors.
I know the moments that matter.
I know what something needs to feel like.
I know pieces of where we're going.
Then I let the characters take me there.
That's where some of my favorite connections inside DOVU have come from.
CEO-me would probably prefer a neat timeline and twelve perfectly organized manuscripts moving through production one at a time.
Author-me apparently looked at that idea and laughed.
So I stopped trying to make one of them control the other.
Instead, I built systems around the creativity.
I Built a Business That Protects the Books
Doing everything alone is exhausting.
That became obvious pretty quickly.
Thankfully, systems, problem-solving and technology are some of my favorite things.
So I started taking everything I'd learned from years of helping online businesses and asking a different question:
How can this make authorship easier without making creativity smaller?
Slowly, the pieces found their places.
I built a repeatable process for writing, editing, reader stages and publishing.
I built systems for readers.
I built an email ecosystem.
I built a website that could grow with the universe.
I created publishing checklists and a sales process.
I'm still developing the marketing side as I find my author voice and learn what readers actually want from me on social media.
And I'm sure parts of all of it will continue changing.
But I intentionally tried to stay away from building around trends and fads.
Those things are temporary.
I'm not building DOVU for the next six months.
I'm building the career I hope to have for the rest of my life.
That's the Funny Part
I built a whole business without it really feeling like I was building a business.
It became part of the adventure.
There are days I can disappear into a manuscript and just be the Author.
There are days I put on the CEO hat and look at DOVU from thirty thousand feet.
Usually, I only need those CEO days a couple of times a month.
That's enough to keep the business moving without asking the business to consume the reason it exists.
Because the Author still comes first.
She has to.
Without her, there aren't any stories for the CEO to build around.
And the more I've separated those two roles, the more I've realized they aren't actually competing with each other.
The CEO creates the structure.
The Author fills it with life.
My Book Version of Disney
I've joked before that I'm basically trying to build the book version of Disney.
Not because I expect DOVU to be Disney.
Because that's the easiest way I know to explain what I see in my head.
There isn't one world.
There are worlds within the world.
Different stories. Different families. Different tones. Different places. Different entry points.
You might fall in love with one corner and barely visit another.
Or you might start following the threads and realize just how much is connected underneath.
That's the part that excites me.
I don't know what DOVU looks like ten years from now.
I don't think I'm supposed to.
I just know that what started in 2023 as two friends playing with a story became a published book.
That book became a trilogy.
The trilogy became a universe.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the CEO became part of my author journey.
Not to take over the creative process.
To make sure the Author has enough space to keep building whatever comes next.
Made with love, AM 🖤
