Episode Description:
In this episode of "What If? For Authors," Claire Taylor addresses a common anxiety among authors: "What if my books never take off?" Drawing from her experience as an Enneagram Certified Coach and her own author journey, Claire explores the balance between preparation and luck in achieving success, the importance of feedback, and how to find deeper purpose and enjoyment in writing regardless of external success. This episode offers a compassionate and realistic approach to managing expectations and sustaining an author career over the long term.
Key Takeaways:
Preparation vs. Luck: Understanding the role of luck in author success and how to stay in the game long enough for luck to find you.
Feedback and Improvement: The importance of seeking and accepting feedback to improve your books without taking it as a personal indictment.
Dealing with Uncertainty: How to tolerate the uncertainty of whether your books will take off and finding ways to balance the pain of uncertainty with the joy of writing.
Purpose and Enjoyment: Connecting to a deeper reason for writing that provides immediate fulfillment and sustains you through the ups and downs of an author career.
Self-Compassion: Practicing kindness and compassion towards yourself and deconstructing the lies that link your self-worth to external success.
Why Listen? If you find yourself questioning whether your books will ever take off or struggling with the uncertainty and pressure of author life, this episode offers valuable insights and strategies to help you stay motivated and find deeper meaning in your writing journey. Claire's empathetic guidance will help you navigate the challenges and uncertainties of being an author with resilience and hope.
Join the Conversation: Have a question or fear you'd like me to explore? Reach out to me at contact@ffs.media.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor, and I'm an Enneagram Certified Coach for Authors, as well as a humor and mystery writer. You can check out my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs.media/sustain.
Just as a reminder for anyone who is interested but hasn't yet gotten around to signing up, registration for the last session of the Liberated Writer five week course available this year closes on August 19th. So if you've given up on searching for that silver bullet and are ready to do the deep work that actually sustains author careers for the long run, then this is your chance ahead of the, I don't know, chaos of the rest of the year to get started.
So the course runs for five weeks, but it's really kind of a launch period for the long term for you and your career. So just like success doesn't happen overnight, [00:01:00] neither do the underlying patterns of your author career change overnight. So if you're hoping for something better in 2025, which, who wouldn't, right?
Now's the time to start planting and watering those seeds. Now. Or August, I guess. Uh, so the course runs from August 26th through September 26th, and it includes an IEQ 9 Enneagram type assessment and three hours of group calls with me each week to really dig in and get to know other authors who can support you moving forward.
So if you are interested, go to LiberatedWriter. com to August 19th.
If you're listening to this on the Monday when it releases, I hope you had a solid weekend.
I hope you did some things that made you feel rested and sturdy coming into the work week. Whether that was sleeping a lot, knocking out your home to do list, spending time with friends, or whatever else. I had a [00:02:00] good weekend. I've been in a big fiction reading slump lately. And by lately, I mean the last year and a half or so.
I've only found a few fiction books that could hold my attention and not immediately irritate me. So that's what the slump feels like. And I, I think that that says more about me than the state of fiction, by the way. But it has been starting to feel pretty worrisome. Like, I'm a fiction writer, for fuck's sake.
I should be reading fiction, right?
I've kept myself from losing sleep over this concern by reminding myself that it's not like I never have read fiction before. Who knows how many thousands of fiction books I've read in my lifetime. But I also think it had something to do with the stakes. So, for me, like, fiction didn't feel real enough, essentially, for what I've been feeling the last year and a half or so.
I could read, watch, and listen to true crime just fine, for instance, but when I switched to crime [00:03:00] fiction, it just felt goofy and unimportant. Meanwhile, I was still writing crime fiction during this time. I don't know. Anyway, I talked to a couple of author friends about it, and while they tried to be conciliatory, it definitely came off as, yeah, that's weird and a problem.
At least that's how their reactions filtered through to me. But then I talked to John, and he was like, It's not like you don't know story, Claire. Right. That. I mentioned my fiction slump to a couple other non author friends, and they sort of gave me a, huh. And that was that. I think it goes to show how important it is to have friends who don't share some of the same shoulds as you.
My author friends have internalized a lot of the same shoulds around reading and writing as I have. So they pretty much reflected back to me my anxiety about it. Meanwhile, my non author friends tend to be like, I usually only read one fiction book a year, if that. Right? The perspective is so, so important.
The [00:04:00] world will not end if I don't read fiction. And what's the real problem? I was still able to write a bunch of fiction during my reading drought. I certainly wasn't out of ideas. I haven't heard anyone complaining about how my narrative structure, writing style is slipping. So maybe it just wasn't a problem after all.
Maybe it was all in my head, so to speak. I always figured I'd get back into reading fiction. And this week, Great news. It was the week that it happened. John and I went to a local bookstore that was offering 20 percent off for a bottle of wine when you bought a book. Yes. Incentive. It worked. It was his birthday.
So we went there before dinner. I had the hardest time picking out a book, but I ended up picking, , none of this is true by Lisa Jewel because it seemed just twisted enough to keep my attention. But then like we settled in to start reading and I was really struggling to focus and I started having this anxiety of like, oh no, this is happening again.
I'm still not through my reading slump. And [00:05:00] then John, who apparently listens to me a lot more than I thought he did, suggested that I set a 15 minute timer to read without stopping. Which is for sure advice I've given him before. Um, but I did it. And suddenly I was in. Oh, the relief. The book was so dark and creepy.
I loved every page of it. And I finished it yesterday, which made the weekend feel like a success for me. And now I'm, like, through that, you know, initial block and I'm into a stack of horror novels written by women for, uh, research on a novel I'll be working on in the fall. All this to say that sometimes we get anxiety as authors that we can know isn't useful or based on anything particularly sound, but it still comes in.
Not to sound overly confident, but I know how to write a fiction novel. And yet, even I get in my head about it sometimes. But so much of life works in cycles, and I'm taking my returned ability to focus on reading fiction as [00:06:00] a sign that some of the ongoing stress in my life that was making it hard for me to get into something fictional is sort of being integrated into my world.
So I don't need the, you know, raw realness to hold my attention like I did before. So that's really, really lovely. What a relief, right? I get to return to the peaceful life of reading horror. I'm quite excited. Anyway. In today's episode, we're going to ask the question that I hear from authors a lot, which is, What if my books never take off?
There is so much to deconstruct in this single question, so let's jump right into it. Part of author success requires preparation, and part of it requires luck. That's really important to remember for the sake of the discussion. Let's pretend that 50 percent of it is preparation and 50 percent of it is luck.
It may be more 80, 20, one way or the other. [00:07:00] Nobody really knows, right? But you, we do know that it's not all preparation and it's not all luck. So it's a mix of both. And I think that just for the sake of this discussion, let's just say it's 50 50. So that means that no matter how much and how well you prepare for success in writing your books, you can only get to, you know, roughly 50 percent of the way to your book taking off.
Then it's about sitting around and waiting until luck strikes, some of this is creating opportunities for luck, but still, you just have to wait. And sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes luck strikes, sometimes it doesn't. The longer you can stay in the game. The greater your odds of luck striking though, which is why I encourage sustainability practices.
Authors will sometimes forget that 50 percent of it is luck, and they'll burn themselves out by thinking the faster I write 20 books, the sooner I'll be rich and famous. Or any number of books we might pull. That one just popped into my [00:08:00] head for some reason. So we burn ourselves out in some race to a finish line that isn't actually a finish line.
And then, you know what? We're done. Nothing happens. There's no ribbon to run through, no friends and family draping medals around our neck. If you give up here, then the luck hasn't had a chance to find you. And now it won't. I want to point out that a bias belief that's perpetuated in this industry that can convince us that it's actually a hundred percent hard work and dedication, , that creates success and no luck is required. That belief is what is espoused by people who have hit it big.
It's really unflattering to the ego to admit that your success is. That's a result in part, sometimes in great part to luck, lucky timing, the right person happening to see your book, having a catalog already created in a genre that just suddenly takes off that sort of thing. The ego really wants to take credit for the success.
So that the person [00:09:00] can feel a little pop of being worthy, special, or just generally better than. It's not super socially acceptable to say those things aloud. Well, I'm famous, so I'm better than you. Or I'm selling all these books, so I'm clearly a worthier person than you. So instead, the successful folks will sometimes take on the role of Inspirational speaker.
This looks like, if I did it, so can you. This is a really sneaky way of denying that luck is involved. And it's a way of sort of reinforcing the ego. It was all hard work. So if they worked hard, so can you. Implied here is that if you don't have success, you're lazy, untalented, so forth. If you ever see me at an author event where someone says this on stage and my eye starts twitching noticeably, this is why.
That person is perpetuating a lie in a very sneaky way using false humility. But make no mistake, it is still an ego driven claim. But [00:10:00] it's, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. People who have success claiming they did it through hard work and know how, and that anyone who is as smart and dedicated as they are can make it happen.
So That's not true. All right. It's not. If it were true, there would be a hell of a lot more wildly successful authors because I see how savvy and hardworking most authors are. So if that were the formula, we would have a whole lot more people being bestsellers. It's counterproductive to see that your books haven't taken off yet and assume that it's because of some personal character defect of yours.
It's not. Frankly, I've seen people who make it big and sell a lot who have some of the Smallest amount of character I've ever encountered. So yeah, there's my type's judgment coming through, but I'm not taking it back. I mean it. I can't tell you the number of established men, for instance, in this industry who are where they are not because of their own hard work, but because of luck.
[00:11:00] Plus, the hard work of a bunch of underpaid and overworked women who have been raised to believe that their labor Isn't as valuable as every, you know, precious male geniuses. Barf. Okay, so if you let the fact that your books haven't taken off be a reflection of your character, which many of us do, then you're taking yourself out at the ankles.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't something you can do to make your books more desirable to the right readers, because there usually is, but the quality of your books isn't a reflection of your character in any way. That may sound obvious to some of you, but not to all of you. And it's important to ask yourself if you've subconsciously been functioning this way.
If you have, looking honestly and clearly at the quality of your books, your blurb, your cover, and so forth, might be too emotionally painful for you to do. If you've linked character to the quality of your books, you will not be able to [00:12:00] look at your books through clear eyes, and you will not be able to give them the best chance they have.
So then feedback of your covers look amateurish from someone about the cover you designed yourself may feel like someone saying you are sloppy or you are a failure when in fact you are none of those things, but the cover simply looks like an amateur made it, which is. True. It's just truth. If you're not a professional cover designer, then you are an amateur.
So, see how something as benign as over attribution of book sales to a person's character can quickly stifle your ability to give your books the best shot they have of taking off? If you're thinking that what I'm describing here is a stretch and that nobody does this, think again. I see it all the time.
I've even felt it at points?
So maybe your covers aren't the sore spot, right? What about your opening chapter? What about your skills [00:13:00] writing compelling dialogue? What about your book's ending? Would someone offering feedback on those hurt a little bit more than feedback on the cover? Would it strike more deeply at your idea of who you are as a writer?
So noticing these touchy spots allows us to untangle ourselves from them, decide that we want to give our books the best shot at success that we can, and listen to the advice from experienced and studied authors and editors, rather than getting defensive.
You certainly don't have to take all the advice you're given, but you lower your odds of your books taking off when you have areas of your books where you can't even hear the advice to begin with. So if your books haven't taken off yet, this is an area where you have some control. Go ask for feedback from people who already know and like your work, and who you feel don't actively hate you.
If you know someone who does covers, ask them if they have five minutes to offer feedback on yours, maybe. [00:14:00] If you know someone who's great at blurbs, ask if you can send them yours, already have something written, and maybe just get some notes. If these folks are close friends, they'll probably do it in a heartbeat and ask for nothing in return.
I do this for my close friends all the time. Personally, I like when my skills can support the people that I love. But if this person is not a close friend, And they maybe do this thing that you're asking them to do for a living, you'll want to pay them. And even if they're your close friend and offer to do it for free, there's no harm in sending them a gift card or even just a thank you note in the mail.
The point is though, start asking for feedback and start asking it. And I'm going to be talking about how to get feedback from specific people. What I see a lot is someone will drop a picture of their cover or their blurb into a, say, Facebook group of 20, 000 people, or even just a Facebook group of 500 people.
And they get so much feedback that they don't actually know where to begin. And some of the people giving feedback. Some of the [00:15:00] people giving feedback should not be giving feedback, and some of the people giving feedback are kind of assholes. And so this really will put your defenses up right away and make it hard for you to sort through the feedback and do so without your defenses getting in the way of you hearing the valid points.
So when I say ask for feedback, don't mean these big groups. That can be so counterproductive. Go ask an individual, or if you have a small group of maybe six people that you talk with regularly who are authors, maybe go ask for some feedback there.
Again, even if your books are incredible with nearly flawless packaging, that's not enough on its own for your books to take off. Luck is still in play.
Another point here is that books don't all take off at once generally. Some series just kind of never pick up steam. The series could be your favorite of yours. It could be your diehard fan's [00:16:00] favorites. And yet, it never really reaches that critical mass to make a chart on whatever chart you care about, right?
So let me be clear. Nobody knows why this happens. Nobody knows why one series will take off and another series that seems bad. It's almost guaranteed to take off, just doesn't. Now people have theories, and I'm as happy as an ex gal to guess about what's going on. But it's all just a guessing game. No one will ever know with certainty.
This is why it's sometimes the best thing for your odds and for your mental and emotional to Move on to writing the next book. If you try to reach a conclusion on why a book or series isn't selling no matter what you do, you may keep searching so long that you eventually settle on the problem being, surprise, a character defect in yourself. They must not like me or whatever it is.
It's not that [00:17:00] it's not that the skill of shrugging, having a good chuckle at the mystery of the universe we all live in and moving on is an invaluable author skill.
So far, I've told you that sometimes what needs to happen is that you level up your books. And sometimes what needs to happen is nothing because it's a mystery that will never be solved or luck hasn't hit yet. So how do you know which one is at play? So you can either let it go. Or take a little more time updating your books.
How do you know if it's worth your time and energy to pay for a new cover? Or to update book one of your series to make the, you know, starting tighter and more appealing to readers? How do you know when you've done all you can on a book and it's time to let it go and just write the next? This is the uncertainty that all authors will sit in.
And there is no definite answer to it. The more you [00:18:00] practice sitting in this particular form of uncertainty, the more sustainable you become as an author. The authors who simply cannot tolerate that there is no definite answer to the question of is it the book or is it luck, are the ones that become obsessive, fixated, envious, and entitled.
This unanswerable question will drive some authors mad. And you can see it almost anywhere you look in the author community. People would rather draw a conclusion that makes them feel like shit about themselves, than sit in the uncertainty. So this often looks like someone posting somewhere, I'm just a terrible writer and no one wants my book so I'm gonna give up.
There is certainty in giving up. You know your books will never take off if you do that. Every day authors choose this certainty. over the uncomfortable and painful uncertainty [00:19:00] of whether or not the books will take off. That's what giving up is. It's choosing certainty because the uncertainty has become too painful.
So the real question we need to examine is how long can you tolerate the uncertainty? Can you tolerate it the rest of your life? If so, then you're in the best position for that luck to come along. Maybe not anytime soon, but maybe eventually. If you can stand the pain of hoping. How do we withstand the pain of hoping, the pain of waiting, the pain of uncertainty, the best way I've found.
is creating a counterbalance to the pain. You need to make the pain worth it. And you can't make that contingent on whether the book takes off or not. There has to be something more, something in your control. This is where purpose often comes in. Why do you write? What does it do for [00:20:00] you every time you sit down and sink into the story?
How does it help you? How is it a defiant act of self love and how does it help others? Who might be waiting for your book to come along without even realizing it? How might your story provide comfort, courage, compassion, or even hope for a reader? If you knew that each book would save a single person's life, would it be worth the effort to write?
I think so. That's just me. I mean, what nobler cause is there? But also, I think about the book I just finished reading. It didn't give me hope, it was dark, it was twisted, but it gave me something incredibly valuable nonetheless. It gave me relief from my anxiety about being in a fiction slump.
It gave me ideas for books I'd like to write someday. It gave me motivation to get through errands quicker yesterday so I could sit and read. Those are all [00:21:00] things that make life easier and more enjoyable for me. I'm so grateful. to Lisa Jewell for putting in the time and love and pain to write that book so that I could experience this fiction renaissance in my life.
The point is that if the only thing keeping you writing every day, or the only thing you're aware of as the thing keeping you writing every day, is the promise of your book taking off, then you're going to run out of steam. You will.
You want to find an immediate payoff, like purpose or enjoyment, then Or improved mental health for many of us, that will counteract the pain you're feeling of sitting in the uncertainty I've described, of not knowing when the book will take off, or if it's a matter of luck, or something about the book that you have control over.
All of that uncertainty needs to be counterbalanced. The pain of uncertainty can become insurmountable. extreme. So you need to find something outweighs it. And if you already know what that is, if that's a sense of purpose that you're [00:22:00] already aware of, strengthen your connection to that. Remind yourself daily of it and lean into the feelings of that sense of purpose.
Focus your attention on it and give it purposeful attention.
And if you start to notice that you are having thoughts about giving up, Guess what those thoughts are a convenient clue that the uncertainty is getting to be too much for you. It's just the uncertainty is too much. That's why I think of giving up. So consider taking a break for a bit when that happens, and then reconnect to whatever is the counterbalance to that.
Whatever is the payoff day by day for the process of writing. Maybe imagine the people who will benefit from your book. Something like that. Also, remember you can still have a strong and fruitful author career over the long term without a single book ever making the New York Times [00:23:00] bestseller list or anything like that.
Which also brings me to this point. What does it even mean for a book to take off? Right? What do we even mean? Hit number one in the Amazon store, make a bestseller list, win a prestigious award. How many copies sold exactly constitutes taking off? So I ask these questions to direct our attention to the question of why we feel the need for a book to take off.
Is it recognition we're after? Money? A promise of relief from the grind? Generally, the answer is that we think we'll finally be allowed to feel about ourselves some way when that day comes. I'll finally feel like I'm a real writer, or I'll finally feel like I'm successful. Or I'll finally be allowed to take a vacation without feeling like a slacker. So again, we are attaching our character to this result.
Now I've seen people hit [00:24:00] this sort of nebulous level of success where the book hits the bestseller list. They're selling more copies out of, you know, just boom, it takes off. , and they don't suddenly feel different about themselves. They try, sure. They may get a pop of it and they're trying to hold onto that, but it doesn't last.
Yeah. And that's because our relationship to ourselves is one that is cultivated with kind and loving thoughts, feelings, and actions over time, day by day, watering those seeds day by day, and pulling the weeds so they don't overtake it. That is how we start to feel differently about ourselves. And those practices are things you can start practicing right now, regardless of how your books are doing.
And I recommend you do. So, if you practice those things, like speaking to yourself with kindness and compassion, and really coaxing parts of yourself that once felt like they had to hide, coaxing them to the forefront, you'll be [00:25:00] enjoying yourself so much that you'll lose track of time. The uncertainty of whether your books will hit, you'll If you're not, it won't feel so big and scary because it won't mean that much to you either way.
You'll stop attaching how you feel about yourself to your success in that way. So if a book takes off, fabulous. What a great week you'll have. And if it doesn't, well you can still wake up each day and ask, Do I want to work on a new project today or do I want to get some feedback on an old one and see if I could update it?
You can just do it. Ask that, depending on how you feel each day.
I should say that yes, having a book or series take off is often a nice little treat for our finances. Um, it may be like a, you know, drink of water after we've been wandering in the desert. So I'm not going to deny that it is financially beneficial, right? But it's also not a guarantee of future success in our industry.
So you hit it once with one book or one series. Great. You may never hit it again like that. [00:26:00] Do you really want your life and the way you feel about yourself to be contingent on something so fickle? It sounds like a great way to stay in a constant state of anxiety and low self esteem, frankly. So if you've never had a book or series take off, or you had it happen once and then you haven't had it happen again since, I hope you'll practice being okay if it never happens again.
This looks like connecting to a deeper reason to write that can be satisfied or nearly satisfied each time you sit down and write. And also bringing your awareness to the discomfort of uncertainty that we must necessarily sit in as authors. Be mindful of the pain associated with that and check in with yourself to see when it's getting to be too much or you need to take a break or add in something to counterbalance it.
And then you'll have a pretty good answer for, what if my books never take off? You can still love writing, change the lives of readers, and keep creating regardless. Just because your [00:27:00] book or books haven't taken off yet doesn't mean that they never will. So ask for feedback, accept the sound advice without getting defensive, and continue bravely for as long as you can, keeping an eye out for luck so you don't miss it if it comes your way.
That's all you can do. And, it can be enough, but it will also be painful at times. Lean into the pain and look at it. Deconstruct it. It won't kill you. But until you look at it directly, which many authors don't, ever do, and until you call bullshit on some of its lies, it'll haunt you. It may even overwhelm you.
The only thing that can stop you from writing is you. And if you stop writing and stop marketing, your books don't stand a chance of hitting it. That's the only certainty you can have here. So is it worth it? Is it worth just giving up so that you can have [00:28:00] some certainty there? Or would you like to keep building muscles that allow you to stay in that uncertainty?
Because uncertainty is the place where hope lives.
That's it for this episode. Thanks for joining me as we unpack this anxiety today. If something in this resonated for you, feel free to drop me a line at contact@ffs.media. I'm Claire Taylor, and I hope you'll join me for the next episode of What If for Authors.