Posted: 10 May 2014 10:21 PM PDT
I
get a lot of emails from authors who are just starting out, or who are
on the road but frustrated at the level of success they’ve seen thus
far. I wish I had more time to correspond with everyone, but the truth
is I’m usually slammed with writing/publishing related tasks, and don’t
have a lot of opportunity to do more than offer a brief sentence or two.
But the last few missives I received got me thinking about what I
wish someone had explained to me before I started self-publishing in
June, 2011. So here’s my top 10 list, such as it is:
1) There are lots of talented writers out there. Lots. And it seems
like everyone’s now got a book, or books, on Amazon. Being good isn’t
enough to guarantee you anything but satisfaction for a job well done.
It should, but it doesn’t. Don’t take it personally.
2) There are lots of crap writers out there. Lots. And while many
sink to the bottom of the swamp with nary a whimper, some sell well, and
some even become bestsellers. This is because the world’s unfair and,
depending upon the genre, oftentimes readers don’t care much whether
they suck or not, as long as the story entertains or reaffirms some
conviction or bias the readers have. These authors succeed in spite of
their abilities, rather than because of them. Don’t take it personally.
3) The internet is filled with gurus who know nothing. It’s hard to
turn around without bumping into a writing or self-publishing expert.
Most of them are completely full of shit, and don’t sell many books –
but that doesn’t stop them from trying to get you to part with your
money to hear them tell you what you need to do to sell well. Whenever
you hear advice, consider the source. If it’s a million selling author,
that means more than from someone whose work ranks slightly lower on
Amazon than the collected love poems of Adolf Hitler in original German.
Seems like everybody but me is selling seminars, courses, or how to
books that promise much and deliver nothing. Must be a good business
there, but I prefer labeling my fiction as such and putting in a car
chase or gunfight rather than trying to trick the dim or desperate out
of a few bucks.
4) You need to be able to put out books at a decent clip. Sure, you
might hit huge off one, but probably not. You’ll be building your
readership the hard way, which means one reader at a time, and the more
quality books you have on your virtual bookshelf the more likely one
will catch someone’s eye. This doesn’t appeal to a lot of authors’ wish
that they could write a book every year or two and have a nice living.
Sorry. I have yet to see that happen. But it’s a seductive siren song,
so lots of newbies listen to it like it’s still a viable way to go. In
self-publishing, not so much.
5) Most authors will mistake causality for coincidence. And most will
use the inverse of this to rationalize to themselves why their
approach, even though it hasn’t yielded fruit, is still viable. Drives
me crazy. I’ve interviewed dozens of successful authors (not successful
defined as “if I feel like a success, I am one!”, but rather successful
as in having multi-year careers earning six or seven figures
self-publishing) and they all have one thing in common: they all work
their asses off with single-minded determination. And while they have
that in common, they don’t follow anyone else’s path – they blaze their
own, paying attention to whether what they’re doing is getting them the
results they want, and if not, they change on a dime. They don’t take
philosophical stances or make ideological points with their careers.
They’re pragmatic, business minded, and are some of the most
aggressively competent folks I’ve met. And they didn’t get that way
buying someone’s course or book or tuning in on their blog. They
researched, figured out for themselves what works or doesn’t (and they
change when tactics stop working), and are hard at it early and often.
In other works, they augment their literary flourishes with very
determined marketing and promotion efforts, and don’t view some things
as beneath them or unimportant compared to writing. They do everything,
and most of them do everything well.
6) Screw moral support. You don’t need a village to raise an author,
and there shouldn’t be any requirement for hugs to make you feel good.
This is a very hard business to succeed at, and you need to lose the
need for affirmation and community. It will do you no good but connect
you with thousands of other authors who aren’t selling anything, either.
If you want to feel good, write something really meritorious and put it
out there, and then do it again and again until someone notices how
good your work is. I’m not saying you should shun the company of your
fellow scribes, rather, I’m saying that being the most popular person in
the soup line is still a lousy place to be. So aspire to greatness, and
do whatever it takes to get there. Every hour you spend on Facebook or
Twitter or some forum mewling to other kindred spirits about how your
sensitive inner self sometimes gets so confused is an hour of your life
wasted that you could have put to good use improving your craft. I’m not
saying don’t participate in social groups. I’m saying it shouldn’t
matter to you, and you shouldn’t need constant stroking. If you do,
fine, join a support group, but don’t mistake being an author for going
to meetings.
7) Time is not infinite, and it goes by quickly. Don’t waste it.
Don’t write crap, don’t put out stories that are forgettable or that you
wouldn’t read if you weren’t the author, and don’t take your audience
for fools. Their time is valuable. More than yours. They are paying for
your work – you aren’t paying them. That makes them the customer, and
you should hold your customer in high regard because without them,
you’re nothing. So don’t waste their time with sub-par dross, and don’t
waste your own on work that isn’t your very best. You have no idea or
guarantee how many breaths you will take between when you read these
words and when you keel over. Don’t act like you have forever. You
absolutely, positively do not, and the great lie, the most destructive
conceit, is that there’s still plenty of road left. No, there isn’t.
There might be, but there also might not be, and nobody knows for sure.
So don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today, and prioritize
your shit so you’re doing things that matter, like you’re only going to
be around for a few more hours or days. If you’re wrong, nice surprise.
If you’re right you won’t have frittered away what you had left playing
some idiotic game or staring at the tube or exchanging vapid
pleasantries online. Treat your time as precious and use it wisely.
8) Being a successful author is not a game or a scam or some lucky
break. It is a job, just like any other (if you’re lucky) and it
requires lots of application and concerted effort, or you’re fired. You
are the CEO of YouCo, Inc. and as such have to stay ahead of all curves,
drive yourself to consistently outperform, and master new and
uncomfortable skills. That’s the gig. If you don’t want to do it, start
querying agents in the hopes one of them decides you’re the next
Hemingway and he/she is going to make you a massive star. Be sure to let
me know how that goes.
9) The quality of your writing, in your ability to turn a phrase, to
spin a yarn, is massively important. It can seem as though it isn’t,
especially if you listen to all the morons out there advising you that
you need to spend N hours on blog tours or giveaways or X hours on
social media or Y assembling street teams or Z pricing your work as
though you were Ludlum and chasing down distribution so you can compete
for physical shelf space with the 300K trad pubbed books that will
release this year. But while anything can happen, usually your ability
to make a real go of this will come down to how good your storytelling
is and how relevant you can make yourself to your readership. All the
rest of this nonsense is like cheap icing on a birthday cake. Your job
as author is to ensure that you can make a cake like nobody’s business,
and once your target customers taste it, they recognize its superiority
and come back for more. The notion that you can just fart out cakes that
are half-baked is as destructive as any corrosive ideology I’ve seen.
Some authors can put out a consistent stream of high-quality work on an
aggressive schedule, but they are in the slim minority. Most who do so
have to work very hard to keep their quality high, and it’s
mind-numbing, demanding work. I’ve had a number of articles and
interviews devoted to my publication speed, but guess what? That’s not
the story. The story is not being able to release 10 books a year. The
story is being able to release 10 books your readership thinks are good
and thus sell well. Don’t confuse yourself, and don’t settle for good
enough. There’s no such thing as good enough. There’s as good as you can
possibly do, and nothing less.
10) Pick a genre that’s large enough to support you. Understand the
genre well before you try to write for it. Don’t chase fads. See my
point #7 again. Don’t waste your time. Write every book as though that’s
the one that’s going to be the breakout. Because neither you, nor
anyone else, knows whether or not it is. But if you didn’t put your all
into it, it probably won’t be. And there’s a small universe of potential
readers for your work when you’re starting out, and they are leery of
trusting you. They have good reason to be skeptical. They’ve been burned
too many times. So they’re looking for reasons to hand you your head
and dismiss your work as garbage. Don’t give them the ammo with which to
do so. Know your genre cold, make damned sure you’ve read hundreds of
books in your genre, and ensure that your audience, should your work be
well received, is large enough to keep you in pens and paper.
A caveat: don’t genre jump. You’re not an exception. Sure, you feel
like you are, because you’re so special and different, but the only ones
who are going to agree with you are other authors who also aren’t
selling anything, and maybe your mom. Pick a genre that’s a decent size,
write appropriately to it, spend time letting your potential readers
know your work’s available, and find a system that you can live with. I
counsel spending 25% of your time on marketing/promotions/production
work, and 75% on writing. I’ve found that a good mix. You may feel
differently. That’s fine. Figure out what works, and I do mean really
think about it hard – as though your life depended on it – then work
your system, and pay attention to whether or not it’s delivering
results.
If it isn’t working, change it up. Not after fifteen minutes, but if
you haven’t gotten where you want within a realistic period of time,
find a better way of doing it, because otherwise you can spend years
spinning your wheels. Nothing wrong with that, but I prefer results over
effort, and I value outcome over process. If my process isn’t working, I
find something that is, usually by modeling successes in the field and
analyzing what they’re doing right.
And my bonus item:
11) Which I never needed anyone to tell me, but still: It’s possible
to do it, and it’s possible that you will be the one to do it. It’s more
possible that you won’t, but that’s what makes it interesting. You need
to find inside of yourself the stuff that matters and do it for real.
While that’s no guarantee, there are so many who don’t do it all out,
who phone it in or kinda sorta do it, just being one of those who does
it balls out can be an edge. You’ll need all the edge you can get, and
being willing to do whatever it takes is certainly an edge. So the good
news is that every month, someone does it. Every. Single. Month.
Question is what you’ll do to make one of those your month, and once
you’ve had your month, what you’ll do to have a career of ‘em.
That’s what I wish someone had told me three years ago. Now I’ve told you.
Go back and read my “How To Sell Loads of Books” blog, and my “Author
Myths” blogs. Combined with this list it’s as good a place to start as
any, and I won’t charge you $5 or $50 or $500 to hear it.
Just go buy one or two of my books if you found this valuable. If not, hey, you got your money’s worth, so don’t whine.
Easy eh! Douglas
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