I keep thinking about the Audra Winter BookTok drama (in summary, young author self-published a very hyped book she has been working on for ten years that readers were very disappointed with, Reads With Rachel has a long video about it here.) I think the drama is a tad overblown and I've no desire to jump into adding to it, I think there are some good takeaways from the whole thing.
Trope-based vibes cannot be the only thing you have. Traditional publishing is currently plagued with this, so it's not surprising it's an issue with indie publishing too, but listen. You gotta have more than tropes. You need real characters and a story to move the story forward. This truly is the danger of marketing books based on tropes - you get books that aren't anything but that, and that rarely works.
The longer you work on a book has nothing to do with book quality. I do understand having a story you've thought about for ages and worked on for so long, but time spent on a story alone does not make it worth reading. We really overhype the idea of a work of genius decades in the making, and that is just not true. The ability to tell a good story, no matter how long you've been working on it, requires continual improvement of your writing skills. Which leads to the next point...
If you can't compromise, you shouldn't sell it. Winter apparently did have an agent, who she left, presumedly because that agent told her she needed to make major changes she did not want to make. I cannot stress this enough, that story in your head, the one that is beautiful and perfect and amazing, will not translate to the page in one piece. The ability to take feedback and adjust, even if it means cutting out parts of the story that mean a lot to you, is one of the essential skills of writing that you must learn.
I'm a huge believer in being able to write what you want. Fear of being a 'bad' writer shouldn't hold you back. Post that fun little drabble! Send that silly poem to your friends! But no amount of nice art, popular tropes, and hype can make up for a poorly-written story, especially if you are charging money for it.
