How to guarantee failure as an Author
How to guarantee failure as an Author
(Part 1)
1. Constantly doubt your own worth.
Doubt, that incessant, persistent beast which follows you around, hovering over your head like a dark cloud, threatening to burst hail down on you at any moment. Don’t look up, because you might catch a glimpse of the faces of the people around you and they will read like judgment, confirming your every fear and insecurity about who you are, what you are doing. Doubt is the brain child of fear and the servant of hesitation. It comes to you first like a tiny bacteria and burrows under your skin. Before you know it you are infected with its virulent drilling. You start to sweat. You break out in hives. Your eyes begin to blur. You itch. Your hands start shaking, so that you can no longer type, much less hold a pen in your hand. Then it has you. Doubt, it creeps in unseen, sows the first seeds, takes root in your brain, before sending its menacing, thorny branches deep into your very soul. Once it has you, you cannot shake it off. The only medicine is to stop writing. You can’t anyway. And don’t even look at the words on your page, for this hideous disease makes you imagine things, things you once dared not. “It’s no good,” it convinces you. “Why bother,” it tells you. And then, the crunch. “You may as well give up.” So you stop writing and the virus has you exactly where it wants you.
2. Constantly question the value of your work.
It’s not that you don’t trust your own judgment, it’s just that you don’t trust your own imagination. Writing is as different to reading as running is to swimming. Oh, sure, you might be heading in the same direction, but unlike running, if you stop swimming, you may well drown. If you stop when you’re swimming to consider the flaws in your own efforts, you will lose concentration and sink before you know what’s happened. If you stop too often, the exercise of treading water while you wait for inspiration makes you tired and you can easily lose strength and guess what? You sink to the bottom and drown. It’s like swimming half way across a raging river, realizing it is impossible and swimming back again. You started this journey. You had the idea. No one forced you to swim across. You may as well keep going, come hell or high water. But you stop anyway, decide it’s not worth the risk, the energy, the investment and you drown.
3. Write, publish, fail, delete, reboot.
We’ve all been on this merry-go-round. You write with a burst of passion, publish the results, only to fail (in your eyes) miserably, then (sadly in my case) delete everything; your sites, your accounts, even your work (thank the heavens for online cloud storage). Then, after a moment of regret (some times weeks or even months) you reboot and start all over again. Do you know how many times I have done this? To my shame, more than a few. I’ve lost friends over it. I’ve lost hope over it. I have even lost my way over it.
4. Sabotage your own work.
Self sabotage is the worst kind of betrayal. I don’t know why we do this. It seems to be something which is relatively unique to artists (and I include authors as artists). It’s almost as if by punishing ourselves, we are also punishing others. “I’ll teach the public to not like my books. Well, if that’s the way it is, they can’t have them, no one can.” Weird, but there it is. In the end, predictably, the only one we are actually hurting is ourselves.
5. Loathe yourself for being a self saboteur.
Just as strange is the self loathing that follows the self destruction. We hate ourselves for being weak, for letting it get to us, for blinding us to our own ridiculous, nonsensical, irrational behavior. This self hate is really quite bizarre. My friends, I have been there more often than I care to admit. Though, admitting it is getting easier, because I tend to try and laugh at myself more often these days.
6. Place too mush emphasis on the value (or lack of it) of feedback.
Feedback, reviews, comments, ratings. What a load of tripe. I am here to tell you reviews mean diddly squat now days. They used to, way back a few years ago, when self publishing was in its infancy. But these days they are missing one important ingredient: INTEGRITY. They have none. I have read reviews for books that praised it and gave it five stars when the book is absolute trash. I have read reviews that were clearly written by the author. I have seen many reviews for one book and none for any of the others and all of them have a pattern so distinguishable that a three year old would be able to tell you what it is. And where does most of the actual feedback come from? Friends, family, other authors who then want you to return the favor and as much as you tell yourself you will be objective, nobody in their right mind is going to give another author friend anything less than four stars, no matter how bad the book is. No my friends, if you want genuine, quality feedback there are only two ways you’re going to get it: From professional articles or from people you have never met who VOLUNTARILY chose to respond to your work. The rest is all BS.
In part 2 of this article, I will cover the following topics…
7. Believe the lie that Amazon are “for authors”.
8. Believe the lie that anyone is “for authors”.
9. Adhere to the popular belief that to be successful you need to be there for other authors.
10. Maintain a healthy presence on all kinds of social media.
11. Never question the perfection of your work.
12. Interpret failure (or a perception of failure) as a judgment of self.
(Part 1)
1. Constantly doubt your own worth.
Doubt, that incessant, persistent beast which follows you around, hovering over your head like a dark cloud, threatening to burst hail down on you at any moment. Don’t look up, because you might catch a glimpse of the faces of the people around you and they will read like judgment, confirming your every fear and insecurity about who you are, what you are doing. Doubt is the brain child of fear and the servant of hesitation. It comes to you first like a tiny bacteria and burrows under your skin. Before you know it you are infected with its virulent drilling. You start to sweat. You break out in hives. Your eyes begin to blur. You itch. Your hands start shaking, so that you can no longer type, much less hold a pen in your hand. Then it has you. Doubt, it creeps in unseen, sows the first seeds, takes root in your brain, before sending its menacing, thorny branches deep into your very soul. Once it has you, you cannot shake it off. The only medicine is to stop writing. You can’t anyway. And don’t even look at the words on your page, for this hideous disease makes you imagine things, things you once dared not. “It’s no good,” it convinces you. “Why bother,” it tells you. And then, the crunch. “You may as well give up.” So you stop writing and the virus has you exactly where it wants you.
2. Constantly question the value of your work.
It’s not that you don’t trust your own judgment, it’s just that you don’t trust your own imagination. Writing is as different to reading as running is to swimming. Oh, sure, you might be heading in the same direction, but unlike running, if you stop swimming, you may well drown. If you stop when you’re swimming to consider the flaws in your own efforts, you will lose concentration and sink before you know what’s happened. If you stop too often, the exercise of treading water while you wait for inspiration makes you tired and you can easily lose strength and guess what? You sink to the bottom and drown. It’s like swimming half way across a raging river, realizing it is impossible and swimming back again. You started this journey. You had the idea. No one forced you to swim across. You may as well keep going, come hell or high water. But you stop anyway, decide it’s not worth the risk, the energy, the investment and you drown.
3. Write, publish, fail, delete, reboot.
We’ve all been on this merry-go-round. You write with a burst of passion, publish the results, only to fail (in your eyes) miserably, then (sadly in my case) delete everything; your sites, your accounts, even your work (thank the heavens for online cloud storage). Then, after a moment of regret (some times weeks or even months) you reboot and start all over again. Do you know how many times I have done this? To my shame, more than a few. I’ve lost friends over it. I’ve lost hope over it. I have even lost my way over it.
4. Sabotage your own work.
Self sabotage is the worst kind of betrayal. I don’t know why we do this. It seems to be something which is relatively unique to artists (and I include authors as artists). It’s almost as if by punishing ourselves, we are also punishing others. “I’ll teach the public to not like my books. Well, if that’s the way it is, they can’t have them, no one can.” Weird, but there it is. In the end, predictably, the only one we are actually hurting is ourselves.
5. Loathe yourself for being a self saboteur.
Just as strange is the self loathing that follows the self destruction. We hate ourselves for being weak, for letting it get to us, for blinding us to our own ridiculous, nonsensical, irrational behavior. This self hate is really quite bizarre. My friends, I have been there more often than I care to admit. Though, admitting it is getting easier, because I tend to try and laugh at myself more often these days.
6. Place too mush emphasis on the value (or lack of it) of feedback.
Feedback, reviews, comments, ratings. What a load of tripe. I am here to tell you reviews mean diddly squat now days. They used to, way back a few years ago, when self publishing was in its infancy. But these days they are missing one important ingredient: INTEGRITY. They have none. I have read reviews for books that praised it and gave it five stars when the book is absolute trash. I have read reviews that were clearly written by the author. I have seen many reviews for one book and none for any of the others and all of them have a pattern so distinguishable that a three year old would be able to tell you what it is. And where does most of the actual feedback come from? Friends, family, other authors who then want you to return the favor and as much as you tell yourself you will be objective, nobody in their right mind is going to give another author friend anything less than four stars, no matter how bad the book is. No my friends, if you want genuine, quality feedback there are only two ways you’re going to get it: From professional articles or from people you have never met who VOLUNTARILY chose to respond to your work. The rest is all BS.
In part 2 of this article, I will cover the following topics…
7. Believe the lie that Amazon are “for authors”.
8. Believe the lie that anyone is “for authors”.
9. Adhere to the popular belief that to be successful you need to be there for other authors.
10. Maintain a healthy presence on all kinds of social media.
11. Never question the perfection of your work.
12. Interpret failure (or a perception of failure) as a judgment of self.
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