How not to be discouraged when other people are better than you

Writing is hard work. Promoting that writing is harder work. Staying positive while other people fly by you in the rankings is damn near crazy making. And yet, still possible. You hear stories of authors selling 10,000, 20,000, or even 40,000 books in a week or a month and you sit there wondering why it never happens for you.

Stories are told about the outliers, the breakout authors. Success stories like Bella Andre, or Amanda Hocking are all over the place. You have to understand one thing. Online news is just like any other news media. What shocks the public is interesting. It’s entertaining. Hearing about someone slow building their sales over three or five years… that’s not an interesting story.

Ever heard of a moderate news station? Yeah, no. There’s Fox News… or there’s CNN. There’s no in-between. They don’t get ratings if they don’t report something wow-inducing.

But here’s the good news, folks.

You can still be successful without being an outlier. You can still make a livable wage without making publishing waves. You don’t have to shoot up the charts. In fact, you probably don’t want to shoot up the charts anyway. Why? Because what goes up, must come down. What you want to change is your baseline. If you’re a new author and your sales shoot up, it’s a pretty sure bet that it’s going to crash just as hard. It’s the nature of retail.

Remember Tamagotchis? They were all the rage. I had a couple. I spent hours feeding it and exercising it. I even named them. You couldn’t find them in a store most of the time, because they would sell out so fast. They were HUGE… for about six months. And then they vanished. Why? Because people move on. If everyone has it in your social circle, then you don’t get the word of mouth build. It becomes a fad, and we all know, fads die.

I’m being a little cynical, aren’t I? I did say there was good news.

It’s okay that people are better than you.

Seriously.

You can make a seriously nice living without putting a book out every month. You can still focus on the important things like kids or your scrapbooking projects while still making a decent living from writing.

The slow build is where it’s at.

Patience isn’t something I was born with. If you look at my history, you’ll see, it’s usually my lack of patience that gets me into trouble. So while I say that patience is the way to go, please keep in mind that I didn’t follow my own advice. I jumped head first into a new writing business with no plan and no long term goals other than I needed money.

So, think about this before you decide that self-publishing is easy money: There is no easy money.

Seriously. If you think you’re going to be like that outlier, consider this: You could potentially sell 10,000 copies in your first month and walk away with $20,000… but what happens when the retailers tweak their algorithms (I’m looking at you, Amazon!) and your book plummets from #200 in the store to the 20k rankings where you’re selling 10-20 a day instead of 100-200? I’m telling you guys. It can be devastating to your state of mind.

What goes up really fast must come down really fast too.

So here’s what you do. You release book ONE, with your mailing list info in an easily accessible place to your readers. You push that mailing list like nobody’s business. Then you release book TWO, and announce it to all those people you slaved away to get. THEN… you release book THREE and announce THAT to the people who signed up for your mailing list. And for the record, this happens over MONTHS of writing, editing, ect.

Is that a really slow way to go?

Yeah.

But the slow climb up changes your baseline. It’s not a synthetic spike, like when you get a BookBub ad or pay for Facebook advertising. It’s an organic build. So instead of your baseline being in the 100k’s on Amazon, it goes up to the 50k mark and hangs out there, even when you don’t have a new release. There’s your new baseline. So, instead of selling 1-2 a day, you’re selling 5-10 a day. With every new release, your baseline will shift up a little. Why? Because you’re releasing regularly, and you’re gaining new subscribers and readers with each book. It’s a natural progression of your business growing.

So, now instead of one book in the thousands, you’ve got three hanging out at 10k-20k all the time. 20k roughly translates to 10-15 a day. At a $3.99 price tag, you’re getting roughly $2.79 per unit sold. 10 a day means $27.90 every day. That’s approximately $840 a month… on one book. But you have three, because you did the slow build. For three books all in that 20k range, you’re making about $2520 a month. That’s $30k a year.

But that other author is selling MORE. How do I do that?

Um… keep writing. Chances are, that person is working hard and getting the books done and out there. You know those people who sit on a stool in the bar and talk to people all the time but never go home with anyone? Or maybe that writer who always is talking about that book they’re writing, yet you never actually see them writing? You’re never going to get to be that other author that people want to be when they grow up if you never close the deal.

And you do have to close the deal. Over and over again.

You want more?

Write more.

Otherwise… what are you really doing?