Episode Description:
In this episode of "What If? For Authors," Claire Taylor explores the often-overlooked question: "What if my books do take off?" While many authors dream of their books hitting the big time, the reality of success can be disorienting, triggering, and even stressful. Claire delves into the psychological and emotional challenges that can arise when your books suddenly gain widespread attention and offers practical advice for managing the experience. Whether your books have already taken off or you’re still waiting for that moment, this episode provides valuable insights on how to prepare for success and stay grounded amidst the whirlwind.
Key Takeaways:
The Double-Edged Sword of Success: Understanding that while having your books take off can be exciting, it can also bring unexpected challenges and stress.
Core Fears Triggered by Success: How different Enneagram types might react to sudden success, from the fear of being seen to feeling trapped or overwhelmed.
Maintaining Self-Worth Independently of Sales: The importance of not tying your self-worth to fluctuating book sales and strategies for staying grounded and self-assured.
Balancing Creative Desires and Financial Success: Tips for authors who may feel trapped in writing what sells rather than what they love, and how to navigate that tension.
Practical Preparation: Advice on setting the table for success before it happens and how to manage the realities if it’s already occurred.
Why Listen? If you’ve ever wondered what life would be like if your books became bestsellers, or if you’re already dealing with the pressures of a successful series, this episode will help you navigate the emotional and psychological terrain of author success. Claire provides actionable strategies to ensure that your well-being and creative fulfillment stay intact, even as your books soar.
Join the Conversation: Have a question or topic you’d like Claire to explore? Send an email to contact@ffs.media. Claire is always open to hearing from her listeners and offering support.
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 myself. You can check out my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs. media forward slash sustain.
Also, you have five days from the release date of this episode to sign up for the last session of the Liberated Writer five week course of 2024. TBD on when in 2025 I'll run another session, so if you want to start planting and watering the seeds of success, Now's the best time to start. This deep work is great for taking care of your career and taking it to the next level and really making each project that you work on feel more satisfying, but it's also going to make the rest of this year much more manageable.
If you're, you know, not as easily triggered by, say, world [00:01:00] events. So registration closes this Friday, August 19th. And there are payment options available if anyone's interested in that. And I know that makes it sound like it's some super expensive course, but it's really not. So, especially with all the face time you get with me during it.
I just want to do what I can to make sure that folks who need it can access it, hence the payment option. Anyway, go to LiberatedWriter. com to read more and register before that closes on the 19th.
Let's jump right into today's topic. It's going to be an unusual one because it's not actually a question I hear often.
But it's a question we could all benefit from asking ourselves.
In the last episode, we asked the question of, what if my books never take off? So I thought it only appropriate to, Then in this episode, we ask the opposite question. What if my books take off? Like I said, authors don't usually ask this question with anything [00:02:00] resembling anxiety. It's more like a whisper or even silent hope inside of us early on in our career.
Or, you know, later on in our career if our books haven't taken off yet.
But I've worked with enough authors at this point who had this dream come true, their books took off, to know that dream is the right word here because the experience can be disorienting, unsettling, and even nightmarish. I don't know about y'all, but my brain almost never sees fit to give me nice, unstressful dreams.
Or if it does, I'd never remember them. Last night, for instance, I was in a competitive scavenger hunt and only learned towards the end of the time that there was actually a set list of items we were supposed to be looking for. I had just been scavenging everywhere, looking for something that looked like it belonged to the scavenger hunt.
Like, is this anything? Is this anything? I'll write it down. And then I found out everyone was working from a list that I didn't have. And only a couple of the things that I'd found so [00:03:00] far appeared on the list. Uh, go ahead and analyze that anyway. So I'm going to give you this anxiety. If you haven't already experienced your books taking off, and if you have experienced it already, I'm about to give voice to the thing that you probably don't want to talk about because no one wants to hear us complain about things when our books are selling really well, right?
No one wants to hear that complaint. So I had a series takeoff back in 2018 and I was surprised by how fast that happened. I definitely was not prepared for the sales. One of the things that happens is you go from having only a few eyes on your books to having a lot of eyes on your books. This means you suddenly get an influx of reader emails, mostly positive, but some not so positive and others just plain weird.
Any sudden life change can be psychologically disruptive, but there's something about it being the thing you dreamed up that will take a special kind of adjustment.
Suddenly having a bunch more eyes on your [00:04:00] books can really trigger your core fear, especially if you're say a nine, the peacemaker or a five, the investigator. Nines aren't usually comfortable being seen, though they do tend to crave being seen. That goes back to their core fear of being separated or cut off.
They hide parts of themselves that feel divisive or controversial to protect against conflict. Fives don't necessarily want to be seen, but the experience of being seen is necessary to a five self fives are afraid of being incompetent or incapable. I hear them phrase it as I don't want to look stupid.
Essentially knowledge and intelligence are big for this type and they want to make sure they have enough resources for themselves. So the sudden attention can feel like a demand on the five's time and energy. Also known as resources. When this happens, fives may feel themselves tugged between their desire to withdraw into their castle and slam the gates and the very human compulsion for reciprocation [00:05:00] to the people who are giving them that attention so that they don't owe anyone anything.
That push and pull alone can feel incredibly draining to a five.
Ones, the reformers, may also feel uncomfortable if their books take off. Those little mistakes that they didn't think much about seem much, much larger when it's getting that much new attention. And suddenly their books are facing a degree of criticism that they didn't before. The one's core fear is being bad, wrong, or corrupt. And so they're incredibly sensitive to criticism as a result.
When the one starts to take criticism of their books as a criticism of their goodness or integrity, then they're all exposed nerves all the time. A once book taking off is essentially predictive of an increase in their patterns around perfectionism over revising and so on as a result of that core fear being triggered.
The one may start working extra hard to make sure all of their books [00:06:00] are above reproach in the hopes that they can avoid criticism, but we can't, none of us can avoid criticism. Some people just like to criticize.
Now, Sixes, the Loyalists, may also feel unsettled and even unsafe if their books take off. It can feel to the Six, and they may not be entirely wrong, that they've just put a target on their back. The Six wants the security that an influx of cash can bring, but they might not have considered the cost to their sense of safety.
This can trigger the core fear of being unsupported that they have, which looks a lot like I'm all on my own and I don't know that anyone will come to defend me when I need it. That's a scary thought to a six and it can lead to a lot of behavioral patterns around testing relationships to see which ones are safe and which ones may harbor potential betrayal.
The other types may also have their core fear poked at when their books take off, but I would say that those types I just talked about are probably the ones most affected by the [00:07:00] sudden change. Actually, it can be a pretty freaky thing for Sevens, too. They're the enthusiasts. If a series takes off, it can make them feel trapped in that series.
Which is a surefire way for them to want to write any series but that one. They may start really struggling to focus on the next book in a highly successful series as a result. No one feels the golden handcuffs of success quite so acutely as a seven. People may call them ungrateful or more likely the seven will call themselves ungrateful, but this is a core fear territory, so it really has nothing to do with being grateful if you're feeling restless.
Feeling trapped in deprivation, in this case the deprivation of writing whatever they feel like writing in that moment. is going to trigger the seven's core fear. So yeah, this success can also terrify a seven.
Anyway, having your books take off isn't happily ever after by any means. It can also make a two let off on their [00:08:00] boundaries because they feel like they owe it to the readers to give more of themselves. It can accelerate the workaholism of a three who thinks if they work twice as hard, they'll make twice as much money.
It can put a four into a funk if they equate the success with being inauthentic enough for, you know, the masses to take their work and understand it. And it can make an eight feel like their readers are trying to control what they write next, which can activate some defiant patterns. It's not all sunshines and rainbows, this dream coming true of your books taking off.
So let's talk about a few things you can do before your books take off to help you set the table for success, and then what you can do if your books have already taken off and you're in a spot you didn't foresee and want to get out of. If your books haven't taken off yet, it's important to remember that you will not suddenly feel the way you expect yourself to feel when your dream comes true.
You may get like a pop from it and the sales, you know, as they increase day by day, they'll [00:09:00] definitely be some excitement there for sure. But when we see a sales chart trending upward, some unflattering patterns can emerge inside of us. We can start to feel greedy. We want the trend to continue indefinitely.
And when it flattens or starts to dip, we can panic. But think about that. Do you expect that curve to go up forever? That's kind of unrealistic. So we can get addicted to success and positive external feedback very easily because we think what's the harm in feeling good about ourselves and our business.
The harm is that you don't only get to become dependent on the positives. You also become tethered to the negatives. What lifted you up will someday drag you down. So be careful about giving control of your mood and self image to anything external. Even if it currently means that external thing is making you feel like hot shit.
That's a trap. And when sales start trending [00:10:00] down, you'll feel not great. And then you might come see me, which is fine. And what I'm here for, but I'm just going to tell you the same thing. You have to reconnect with your innate and infinite worth internally, instead of hinging it on something external.
Otherwise you'll be on this self worth rollercoaster your whole life. Even when you want to get off,
here's a practice you can take with you. If you find yourself checking your sales stats more than three times a day, Something curious is going on and you might want to get curious about it. Looking at the stats doesn't actually do anything. It doesn't make you more money. It doesn't make you less money.
It doesn't do anything. So if you're going back again and again, it's giving you a hit of something fleeting. And it's a sure sign that you're attaching your mood and sense of self to numbers. Numbers that fluctuate. Don't do that. It doesn't improve your wellbeing. So consider [00:11:00] making it off limits to yourself or use the impulse to check your sales dashboard or your rank multiple times a day as an indicator that it's time for you to close your eyes.
And remember that sales are no reflection of who you are. And if you feel bad about yourself, deep down, no amount of sales will change that. And if you feel good about yourself, deep down, no amount of sales or lack of sales needs to influence that. Use the impulse to check those stats as your cue to do that connection work with yourself.
And then you'll be on your way to feeling grounded in a sense of genuine wellbeing, no matter what happens. So, doesn't that sound like a much better option?
The second half of this what if is for those folks who have had a book or series take off and now feel like they're being forced down a path that they don't enjoy. I see this happen when the, say, 3's desire to hit as much success as possible supersedes all other values, including valuing their creative desires.[00:12:00]
It's not only threes, the achievers that find themselves in this position, but I do see it a lot with threes. So the desire to have worth and value and the fear of lacking it is this jet fuel for threes to home in on an opportunity and go full force into it.
They aren't always successful in this, by the way, there's an idea that threes always end up making a lot of money and being very successful. And that idea exists because it's the only one that threes allow themselves to perpetuate. Okay. Okay. Threes feel most comfortable showing their successes, and they either hide away their perceived failures, or if that's not an option, if failures are out there for everyone to see, they'll spin the failure into something motivational, as like a step along the way to their success.
So being a three or not being a three isn't actually a sign of potential success in this industry, but it does mean that someone is likely to be perceived as a success in this industry. And I'm not saying that to diminish the hard [00:13:00] work of the threes, but I'm saying that for everyone who's not a three, who says, man, I wish I was just a three so that I could make money.
You can make money, some money, decent money, right? Whatever type you are. Um, and just being a three alone isn't enough to guarantee, you know, six, seven figure, uh, income. So I just wanted to dispel that a little bit and kind of show why. That perception is there anyway, threes are the most likely type to prioritize earning potential above other considerations, and therefore they do up the odds of a book taking off.
And you might be thinking, I wish I was a three, but hold on because I've worked with my fair share of threes who have a six or seven figure yearly revenue rank high on the chart. So that root release and. Don't make much profit. Revenue and profit are not the same thing. But to be quite honest, some of these threes do make a lot of profit, but they're [00:14:00] writing in a genre they hate because their desires didn't get to make much of an appearance in the strategy process.
Now the type three author has a situation where they want to keep making good money, but they also hate what they write. Whoops. Right? I think we can all empathize with the situation. The books that took off were ones that maybe the three didn't care about, in other words. Maybe they think the books are fine, right?
That's fine. I don't dislike these books. Uh, but it's hard to stay interested in a series that you just think is fine when you're ten books in or whatever. Fine can stop being enough. And now what? Now their living expenses might have grown to fit the income.
And so they won't be able to afford their current lifestyle, or so the fear goes, if they start choosing to write books they care more about. Of course, this doesn't only happen to threes. I've seen it happen to eights, fives, twos, sixes. It can happen to anyone who gets too laser focused on making decisions around [00:15:00] what will sell at the cost of their own personal creative preferences.
The problem is that you might be right about what sells. And then suddenly it's selling. And if you didn't incorporate what you want to write into that, that's just going to be a tough situation. As much as we may want to be able to just say, fuck it, let's go for broke from time to time and write whatever fits this so called formula for success at the time, maybe a hot sub genre with the hot tropes and so forth, we must remember that the outcome of pushing our personal creative desires aside is that we either put a lot of time into books that don't ever take off, because remember that luck is a necessary component here, Or we put a lot of effort into building a catalog that makes us enough money that it may not feel responsible or even feasible to start writing what we would rather be writing.
I can speak from experience here that it feels much more fulfilling when we write books we care about [00:16:00] that sell solidly over time than when we write books we only kind of care about and those sell solidly over time. And it can happen. I've seen it. You can write what you want to write and have it sell.
You can also steer an existing series towards more of what you like to write a few books in, and most readers will follow along for the writing. It's a risk that you'll lose a few readers, sure, but it might be worth the risk if the other option is that you start to really hate what your career has become, or you start to feel contempt for your readers for liking something you hate writing.
So if you're asking the question, what if my books take off, which again, you probably aren't worrying about too frequently. My answer is that books taking off will not solve all of your problems. It might not even solve your financial problems. And in fact, it could stir up some anxieties that have been lying dormant near your core fear for a long time.
What you can do, [00:17:00] however, to avoid this becoming a problem is to be mindful of where you're giving yourself a pass to attach how you feel about yourself. To your book sales when those sales are good. I'm not saying you shouldn't celebrate successes. And in fact, feeling gratitude for the money coming in is fantastic.
What I'm saying is be careful of what other hidden meanings you're letting increased book sales carry with that, that comment specifically on your character. Remember that a superiority complex is just an inferiority complex with slightly better situational factors. If the way you feel about yourself is fluctuating with your sales, that is a warning sign.
You don't get to feel good from those external factors without eventually feeling bad from those external factors. And if your books have already taken off but you want to write something else, yeah, that's, that's going to be a moment for courage.
Might have to consider cutting back [00:18:00] on your living and business expenses to give yourself the financial wiggle room to value what you want to write in this one life you have, you might need to make a slight pivot, but you don't actually know that it won't work out for you financially as well.
Maybe the quoi of your creative impulses is exactly what readers have been waiting for to go absolutely bonkers over your books. You don't know. You may think you know, but you'll never know until you try. Until you run the experiment. And maybe, just maybe, there's something more important than making the most possible money anyway.
Are you brave enough to bring that part of yourself to your readers? That's the question.
That's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you feel compelled to reach out, you can send me an email at contact at FFS. media or scope out me and my services at FFS. [00:19:00] media. I'm Claire Taylor, and this has been another episode of the What If for Authors podcast.