Learn to be Successful

Yay!  It’s Release Day at Loose Id – check out the new selections:  Visit Loose Id

Wow new blog, new project, new readers… New beginnings are great, don’t you think? They are a second chance to make something happen, fix an error, take advantage of a missed opportunity.

So many times when opportunities come along, we let them pass us by. Sometimes we think they aren’t meant for us, or we feel unprepared or undeserving. And sometimes we make a deliberate choice to ignore them. Why is that? Why is it authors feel so undeserving of any success they attain?

When we think of successful authors, we may look at how we feel about the authors we love, and they seem so much bigger and better than we could ever be. We are so enamored of what they do for us that we can’t fathom having those same abilities ourselves. That hero worship may skew our ability to see our own efforts clearly.

We should not be holding ourselves up against our favorite authors, our author friends, or against the measuring stick of anyone else’s ruler. Your measuring stick as an author should first be your own sense of accomplishment – how do you feel when you finish that story? Do you see progress and improvement in your writing with each story? And second of all your readers – what is it that you offer them? If you are happy with what you write, and if your readers are getting from your books what they need and what you want to give, then you are a success already.

Georgia’s Rules for Success:

Develop a can do attitude. Success means perseverance and determination. And it also means you must decide ahead of time that you can rise to meet the challenges – you can do it.  You may get rejected by ten or more publishers before you find the one that loves your story. Don’t allow anyone to sway you from your goal, even yourself. Lack of confidence and fear of failure, or even fear of success, can cripple your career before it even gets off the ground.

Being rejected is part of the game. It isn’t personal, it’s about your book, which is a product. Like it or not, you have to learn how to see your book as a product and find ways to improve that product until publishing companies want to acquire it. Look at it this way – a publisher is basically a storefront – they choose the books they want to publish by what looks good in the window and draws sales – what will attract more shoppers to their store, sell the most copies, and make the customer so happy they return next week for another purchase. It’s a lot like a restaurant – once you find a recipe that all the customers like, you want to keep satisfying them, so you look for other recipes that have the same ingredients or are complimentary. It’s all about money, like it or not.

You as a writer have to learn to see your book not as being part of you, but being something you created. Just like if you made curtains for your friend – if they are too short, you raise the hem, if they are too plain, add a bit of lace, change colors, whatever it is you need to do to make them work. It’s the same with a book. Sometimes you just need to find another store that will be interested in your product, and sometimes your product needs fixing – it’s up to you to decide when and where and how to make those decisions.

From the very beginning, have a plan. Know where you want to go with your career, and know yourself. Know what will work for you and what won’t, what you are willing to give up and what you aren’t, where you are willing to bend and where you aren’t. Your plan is your road map – how are you going to get to your goal otherwise? Take the time to sit down and plan it out – it takes twice as long to get anywhere if you don’t know the route.

Make yourself a schedule and stick to it. Write something every day – imagination is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it will get, and your writing skills are the same. If you write only when “the muse” feels like it, you’ll always be at the whim of that muse. Teach the muse you want it working all the time, and it will.

Understand that every piece of feedback is a gift. All critique, whether a rejection letter with revision suggestions, the letter of praise from a reader, or a nasty review is a gift. It is valuable feedback which you will use to evaluate your product. It is also an opportunity to learn, to improve, to hone those skills that build your product. Look at it as research and development, earn to accept it well, and see it for the opportunity to improve that it is.

Keep in mind you are now a public person, whether you like it or not. What you do will be scrutinized and evaluated, and the higher you climb, the more intense it will get. If you don’t want your words splashed across the Internet in the most embarrassing way possible, don’t say them, don’t write them. The Internet is not secure – your emails will be seen by the person you are gossiping about, that snarky piece of commentary you just posted on someone’s blog, that ugly letter you just wrote to an editor or publisher you feel didn’t treat you fairly could and probably will be read by someone who could have been important to you, a prospective agent, editor, or publisher. What you might lose will never be worth the satisfaction you got of telling someone off – don’t burn your bridges before you even get to them.

Take advantage of any opportunity that comes your way. There’s a saying about a wise person being ready and waiting for opportunity, and that is totally correct. Prepare yourself for opportunity – learn your craft, work at it hard, build a network of friends and acquaintances in the industry you can call on, then when the door opens in front of you, walk through it.

Don’t quit – every writer has had rejections, and how you treat those rejections will mean failure or success to you. If you allow your feelings of failure to stop you, then your career dreams will never happen. But if you keep trying, you will improve, you will grow, you will learn, and you will succeed.

The wise writer knows their audience and learns to give them what they want. They also learn what not to give them, and they don’t let others sway them into writing a book that is not true to them as an author and what their audience expects. Once you lose a fan, it is very difficult to get them back. Burn them more than once, and it may be impossible. This is why many authors, even big names, have multiple pen names – they have readers who expect a certain type of story and they don’t like change. It’s just the facts of the market.

Surround yourself with support, supporting people, post encouraging sayings and comments on your desk and monitor, set realistic goals and then celebrate them. Celebrate even small successes like reaching your page goal every day for a whole week. And get rid of the negatives in your life, those who say your dreams are too big, those thoughts that cause you to second guess yourself or make self-defeating decisions. Life is too short to waste it catering to those who do not have your best interests in mind, and if they don’t want your dreams to come true, they aren’t on your side.

Take time for you. Take care of yourself – your health is important. And take vacations, take time to get away and just be with family and friends and relax. Then come back to your desk refreshed, full of new ideas, and ready to work.

Meanwhile, take a moment to sit down and think about why you don’t take advantage of opportunities. Write down all the reasons. Then think about each one. Are they justified? Do you fear things that haven’t even happened yet and may not come to pass? Figuring out why you avoid and thus miss out on opportunities may help you to stop this self-defeating practice. And if there’s anything we all need, it’s to learn to be winners.

Go get ‘em!

Georgia

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