How To Succeed as an Author: Love the Stuff You Hate
I teach aspiring authors how to succeed. Yet, there’s no proven formula for success authorship. I can only tell these eager, wanna-be authors what I know to be true about producing marketable books and promoting them. I can tell them what it takes to be a successful author. But they don’t often like what they hear.
Being an Author Isn’t Just About Writing
You see, these writers just want to write. And becoming a successful author tends to be less about writing and more about doing a lot of other things most writers hate—things like platform building, promotion, market analysis, competitive analysis, speaking, and project management. It involves a lot of business-related tasks.
A few writers manage to just write. These tend to be novelists. The majority of aspiring and published authors, however, must become good business people and do all that yucky stuff I just mentioned. Mostly, they have to pre-promote their books, which is called platform building. And they have to promote their books upon released, or else they won’t sell well.
The majority of writers don’t want to become salespeople or marketing experts. They want to become authors and have careers as writers.
Wrap Your Arms Around It
Know all of this, how do you succeed as an author? During a keynote speech I recently told a room full of writers that at a certain point in my efforts to become a published author, and a successful one at that, I told myself, “I refuse to fail.” At that moment, everything shifted for me. I accomplished more in the next four years than I had in the previous eight.
Someone in the audience asked me, “What did you do that was different?” I blundered through the answer saying, “I blogged more. I spent more time on social networks…” The truth was that I wrapped my arms around all the tasks I had previously disliked, and I learned to love them. I decided to stop resenting them and complaining about them and to just do them eagerly and willingly because they would help me reach my goal.
What I should have told that man in the audience was this: “I changed my attitude.” I learned to love the tasks I had to do to succeed—the ones I had previously hated.
Therein really lies the key to successful authorship. You must learn to love every aspect of achieving your goal. Every time you balk at doing something that gets you closer to becoming a successful author—or complain, resist, procrastinate, or simply don’t do it—you stop yourself from becoming a successful author.
My thoughts on The Author Training Manual
When I read about this book, I immediately thought to myself, "I really need to read that." I have been struggling to write and finish my own first novel for years now...with a ton of starts and stops...and self doubt. Amir states in the book that you have to have the right attitude/mindset if you're planning on pursuing a career as an author and one major component of that mindset is optimism. I feel I do have that. So, one step ahead. However, Amir outlines in this terrific book that we must be open to every aspect of the process of becoming a successful author. Not just the writing of the book itself, but the business side of the book. The book proposal for agents/publishers (yes, you even need one for fiction authorship), as well as finding out if what you are writing about is going to sell. Will people want to read what you are writing? Now this all may sound too structured or business-like for the more creative brains out there, but the concept she outlines in the book is solid.
After the introductory section of the book which introduces the concepts, you then move on to chapters that are 'steps' in the manual. After that, there are exercises to help you complete each step and a section of samples (book proposals, etc.). I haven't had a chance to work through the entire book yet, but you can bet that I will be starting now. That's is a major concept in the book..."define your success and set your goals" and "create a plan for your goals" and break those goals down into "signposts" or "landmarks" by adding a timestamp. For example: "Publish my first novel with a traditional imprint by May 31, 2016."
In my opinion, The Author Training Manual is an essential tool for any writer's toolbox. I can't wait to get to work on what Amir has outlined in this inspiring book!
About the book
Anyone can publish a book and become an “author,” but if you want to become a successful author with a profitable publishing career, you need a clear, step-by-step guide to help you develop book ideas that sell. In The Author Training Manual, expert editor and book coach Nina Amir reveals the exact process successful authors have used to create business plans and proposals for their books and teaches you how to view your ideas through the eyes of acquisition editors and literary agents.
Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, plan to traditionally publish or self-publish, The Author Training Manual provides you with the tools you need to achieve your goals and become the author publishers and readers want. Inside you’ll find concrete steps, evaluations, sample business plans, in-depth training activities, editor and agent commentaries, and much more – all designed to help you stand out, from the slush pile to the shelf.
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About the author
Nina Amir, the Inspiration to Creation Coach and author of How to Blog a Book and The Author Training Manual, transforms writers into authors. She inspires people from all walks of life to create books that positively impact readers and to develop careers as authors, achieve their goals, and fulfill their potential. Nina is a sought-after nonfiction developmental editor, proposal consultant, and author, book, blog-to-book, blog, and results coach. Some of her clients have gone on to sell 300,000+ copies of their books and to land deals with major publishing houses. She writes four blogs, has self-published 12 books and is the founder of National Nonfiction Writing Month, aka the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge.
You can find all of Nina’s blogs by visiting her main website, www.ninaamir.com.
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A copy of this book was sent to me in exchange for an honest review. I was not monetarily compensated for providing it.
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