Whenever you look at your sales you often wonder what you’re going to get. It’s a mixed bag of squee and WTF? Will you have oodles of sales and page reads or will there be no change or something worse. This comic illustrates what goes through our minds when that something worse appears…
Author Jim Johnson has decided to set himself a challenge. He’s going to write three novels in three months. For some that is a very bold challenge. In order to achieve this Jim has decided on a plan. One part of that plan is to carefully outline his three books and to do that he is enlisting Scrivener’s help.
I feel so far behind. My brain says why bother? I open the computer and stare. I tell myself a million times a day, “you should be writing.” I pace around my dining room table with my Mac mocking me. I lie awake at night thinking about story ideas. Yet, I don’t write.
There are huge numbers of indie writers out there that have multiple books under their belt. Some are making great money, some are not, but all of them have written more than me. And I feel inferior. The angrier I get about this fact, the less I feel like writing. My gut tells me there isn’t enough time to get anything completed. I end up feeling frustrated about my lack of progress. I don’t write. It is a vicious circle.
This is advice that all authors receive at one point or another and that is: to never read the reviews.
Sometimes we do. We can’t help it. We authors are a curious lot. I’m sure we’ve all sneaked a peak and found something that irked our authorly minds. So I’m sure you can totally relate to the below stick figure comic about being an author…
We recently interviewed Mina Carter on the SPRT podcast (episode #119) and I asked her about about mindset and amongst the great answers, she said she writes even when she doesn’t want to, when she thinks she is out of ideas. She ended her sentence saying that she just shook her head whenever she heard people say that they could only write when they are “inspired” (she used the verbal version of the quotes I just used there).
I shuddered and may or may not have gone on a mini diatribe (ok, I totally did). I hear this very specific type of fallacy often from writers that are better than me but are not doing the work. It usually sounds like this:
I really do want to write, but I sit down and I can’t get inspired to write . I can even write a few things, but then I can’t get into it or I read what I have written and start over.
or…
Writing a novel is an immense undertaking, and before you finish it you think it’s the most daunting thing you’ll ever do. Then you DO finish it, and suddenly you need to figure out how to get people to read it.
Before long you realize you need to learn this strange sorcery called marketing, so you start asking around, reading blog posts, and digesting anything else you think will help. Then you start posting ‘look I wrote a book’ to Facebook, Twitter, and anywhere else you think people might see it.
People throw rotten tomatoes, and you quickly retreat back into your introvert shell. You realize that all the Facebook groups you joined are full of other people like you who are also yelling BUY MY BOOK as loudly as possible.
The method described above is the hunting approach. Your prey are readers, and you are stalking them through the internet wilds. The sad reality is that isn’t very effective. Readers are canny prey. You must get them to come to you. How? You’ll have to
