Episode Description:
In this episode of What If? For Authors, Claire dives into a fear familiar to many writers and humans: the unsettling question, What if I'm shouting into the void?
Publishing, marketing, and building an audience can feel isolating, like waving at a motion-sensor sink that refuses to acknowledge you. Claire explores the deeper human fears behind this feeling—questions of meaning, agency, and connection—and provides practical insights to reframe your mindset and regain motivation.
Key Takeaways:
Recognize the existential unease that comes with publishing and marketing.
Shift your focus from unattainable goals to meaningful milestones.
Apply mindfulness to redirect unproductive thoughts and feelings.
Use the “Three Ps of Optimism” (personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence) to combat self-doubt.
Transform interactions, even with a small audience, into rewarding connections.
Why You Should Listen: Claire addresses the challenges of comparison, the dangers of fear-based motivation, and the importance of celebrating progress, no matter how small. Whether you’re shouting into the void or engaging with a handful of readers, this episode will guide you to shift your perspective, connect authentically, and move forward in your author journey.
Support the Show: If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and share the show with your fellow authors. Every review helps more writers discover this resource.
Join the Conversation: Have you ever felt like you were shouting into the void? What strategies have helped you? Share your thoughts with Claire by emailing contact@ffs.media or connect on social media.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm 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 for authors, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs.media/sustain.
How we doing today, y'all? We ready for a slow pitch here? I feel like we all deserve an episode every now and then that doesn't feel like a direct attack, which the Enneagram stuff sometimes does. So let's discuss something a little less scary, shall we? And I'll try and keep it as unscary as possible, but y'all know me.
I always find a way. Anyway, let's ask the question. I hear a lot from authors. What if I'm shouting into the void?
Publishing books by nature will trigger this fear. We may feel it looming as we're writing the book, wondering, what if I [00:01:00] publish this and no one reads it? And we may feel it when we post something on social media or send out an email to our list. I liken the feeling of shouting into the void to that moment where you're at a motion sensor sink and you're waving your hands more and more to get the damn thing to turn on and nothing's working and you're wondering, do I even exist?
Am I a ghost? There's an essential human concern that we contend with when we talk about shouting into the void and that's the fear that maybe we don't matter. That can be a terrifying feeling when you reach out and touch it. What if I don't matter? What if I could disappear and no one would notice?
Now I won't linger on this fear too long because every time I wonder about it, I don't like the thoughts that follow. But it's important to acknowledge just how deep and fundamental of a concept we're dealing with here when we feel like we're shouting, into the void.
As far as Enneagram types go, I think [00:02:00] all are susceptible to this uneasy feeling of wondering if we matter. I've been rereading Man's Search for Meaning this week, and it's reminded me of just how essential it is to human perseverance and well being that we feel like we have a unique contribution to the world.
In other words, that we matter. in some essential way. This may look a little different for each type, but I can't think of a type who wouldn't worry about this, at least subconsciously.
So if some of your marketing or publishing journey is making you feel like you're shouting into the void and you're confused why that gives you such existential heebie jeebies, it's probably because of the essential human need to believe that our lives matter and that we have agency and influence in the world.
I highly recommend you treat yourself to a little bit of that belief. It makes getting out of bed and doing stuff easier. Even if you don't really buy it right [00:03:00] now, what's the harm in entertaining it for a while? While no author is exempt from the occasional feeling of shouting into the void, it does tend to happen more frequently when we're new to building an audience.
So this could mean you're a new author, or it could mean you're starting over with a new pen name and don't expect your existing audience to carry over. Or maybe you're starting on a new sales platform, like moving your books to a new retailer, or starting on a new social media platform. Let's be real, sometimes you've spent a lot of time trying to build on a particular platform, and it still feels like you're shouting into the void. You're posting things or publishing books, and it feels like you're getting no response back.
This is often the case when you're first starting out because you don't necessarily have anyone viewing your content or reading your books. If you're trying to skip to mass appeal and target everyone to come read your book that nobody has heard about, you're probably going to find yourself rather [00:04:00] disappointed and disheartened.
This may even look like you have a lot of Facebook friends and you just published your first book, so you post on Facebook about that book and ask people to go and read and leave a review. New authors are often surprised by just how loud the crickets are when they do this. You may get a lot of people congratulating you on your first book, and then go and check the sales dashboard, and there are zero sales.
You may even have people say that they bought the book, and you go and see that there are zero sales, so you're like, oh, well, they're just lying. We can have a lot of feelings, but those feelings do tend to be essentially a chemical reaction between reality and the expectation. So when we adjust the level of our expectation, that can make a whole lot of those feelings fizzle out because there's nothing to react so caustically with reality at that point.
If you're starting with an audience of zero somewhere, whether this is a new platform [00:05:00] or new social media, If you're trying to jump from zero to 1, 000 too quickly, you're going to activate that feeling of shouting into a void. If your attention is focused on that goal number of 1, 000 followers or 1, 000 sales, or it could be any other goal, right?
Just pick a number. We tend to look at 1, 000 though. That's what I hear a lot from people. What tends to happen is that we overlook numbers like 1 or 2. So those lower numbers start to feel meaningless when compared to the total goal we're shooting for, which tends to be much higher than what realistically happens in that first phase.
But one new follower, or two new subscribers, or five copies of your book sold are how you get to 1, 000. That's how it's done, and you're doing it. So if the feeling of shouting into the void is the predominant [00:06:00] experience you're having, the solution is to shift your attention away from what you have not yet achieved to what you have achieved.
And this may seem overly simplistic, but our ability to shift our attention from what we don't have to what we do have is is essential for feelings of well being, like gratitude and self worth. So, it's really no small thing, and to be quite honest, most people are absolute shit at doing it. Most people don't realize what they're doing in the first place, because they haven't been practicing mindfulness, which is the ability to observe.
Our interstate, and they haven't been observing their thoughts in this important way. And then they also don't believe that it's going to make a difference, there tends to be a belief that we will lose motivation completely if we allow ourselves to focus on the successes that we have already achieved, rather than looking at [00:07:00] all that have not yet achieved. There's certainly something powerful In the belief that there is yet more in this world for you to do and achieve.
So I'm not saying to give up on that. But if your fear is keeping you from allowing yourself to focus on the wins, You will flame out before you can hit whatever your goal is.
A lot of the times when authors will come to me and say that being on social media feels like shouting into a void, I will say, yeah, it's basically that. You can stop doing it if you want. I stand by that with social media because it does require so much internal regulation to keep redirecting our attention to the one or two people who like our content that we spend an hour on rather than wondering why. More people didn't like our content. And in the end, our author business would probably be better off for the time being.
Just not including that. Right? Not including that social media. But if you can really develop this disciplined approach of [00:08:00] redirecting your mind away from an expectation, Of more interaction on social media than you're getting and toward recognizing how amazing it is that you got some interaction. And really developing those people by replying in the comments and reaffirming that some people do like your stuff.
Then social media can continue to be a place where you get as much as you give. And of course, if you hate social media for some reason, You're always free to not use it. You can still have an author business, which I've talked about before in these episodes.
But there is one potential void that we really can't escape as authors, and that is the void that we shout into when we hit publish.
If you're publishing a book for the first time and you haven't been really working hard to build an audience who is waiting for that book, then if you sell a copy of it in your first month after publication, you are making progress. Before you [00:09:00] published, you had sold zero of that book, and now you have sold one.
And I'm not meaning to be patronizing here. It's very easy to lose that essential understanding the moment we jump into a Facebook group of authors and they're, you know, showing their dashboard of how many thousands of copies a month they sell of their books. It's really easy to lose sight of the fact that selling five books in the first month of, say, indie publishing is a pretty big deal.
Not everyone does that. More importantly, five people now have your book, which is pretty cool. Now, comparison, seeing those people selling all of that, all of those books that we wish we could sell, and then looking at our own sales numbers. Comparison is a trap that we fall into over and over again, which means that we have to practice getting ourselves out of that trap over and over again.
And we do that by returning our attention to what is, not [00:10:00] what isn't, the number of sales we have made. Not the number of sales we think we should have made and the difference between that and the reality.
And you may be saying, but Claire, I've seen so many people in my genre post how quickly their books take off as soon as they publish them. Mine should be doing the same.
Let's not forget that people who are not meeting their own expectations and feel like they're falling short. , are probably not posting their results on public forums. I mean, eventually you will see someone who's in a complete spiral post how few sales they're getting after writing like 40 books or whatever.
And you might even compare your situation to theirs and think favorably. of your situation by comparison, but this is still comparison, and we would have just fallen into the comparison trap again. So don't be fooled by thinking that comparison is fine as long as you come out on top. It is still a trap, and it [00:11:00] pulls you in and seduces you by making you feel momentarily superior, but you will eventually crash and burn and feel bad.
Inferior.
Now there are a few rare people who can use the success of someone else as intense fuel to motivate themselves to do what they were already planning on doing, right? And just do it better. And sometimes they even end up doing better than that person they're competing with in the end. And that's all fine and good for a while, but you can see how this could eventually end in a crash and burn scenario. And also, sometimes this competitive drive, while it may motivate us to work harder and more passionately, it may be impossible to win the battle that you have set up in your mind. You may not have the resources or the luck that you need.
And it doesn't matter how much motivation or drive you have, because that's not the only factor in the equation.
And what can happen when someone assumes that having motivation is enough to compete with anybody [00:12:00] is that they may push themselves way past their limit and not. In like a healthy growth kind of way, but in a burnout kind of way. And then things can get pretty ugly from there. We start to see people compromise their deepest values, burn bridges, and even put themselves into the hospital just to win.
So even if you are a competitive person, and this nature of yours has led you to push yourself to amazing places that boost your self worth and make you feel powerful and competent, it would still behoove you to keep a mindful eye on that impulse because It can go too far, like any impulse. And if you're adding a sense of impatience to that need for accomplishment, then you are really in a danger zone.
And there's nothing like staring into a void to cause that particular impulse to overdo itself. So, some situations are more void y than others, and some void y situations are avoidable, [00:13:00] while some aren't. We have options here then, that's good news. Let's backtrack for a second though, because the solution to the problem of feeling like you're shouting into one of the unavoidable voids is, as I've laid out, to shift your attention away from the distance between where you are and where you want to be, and focus instead on where you are in comparison to where you were, to acknowledge progress, in other words, and to summon up gratitude for what you have, not focusing on what you don't have.
It may seem like a simple shift, but if it were an easy one, more people would be doing it. So why don't people do it, and how do you do it if you want to practice? I alluded to this before, but more people don't do it. More people don't shift their attention away from the part they haven't accomplished yet to give themselves a little recognition, because they don't actually believe it will help.
They probably even believe it will hurt. Maybe you believe this too. [00:14:00] In that taking a pause to catch your breath, feel gratitude for the readers who have shown up, who responded to that holler in the void by buying the book, leaving reviews, emailing, and interacting on social media will somehow prevent you from ever possibly reaching that higher goal.
That's the fear. The degree to which we believe this, that feeling satisfied and accomplished. My sap us of the energy we need to continue onward toward our goals is the degree to which we rely on fear to motivate us. But remember, fear isn't the only motivator. We have desire, passion, purpose, and meaning to fall back on.
But we have to try tossing aside the crutch of fear motivation to prove to ourselves that there is something else that will hold us up. We may feel off balance for a while, but we'll get there if we can hold out on relapsing to fear based motivation.
So that's why [00:15:00] more people aren't practicing this simple shift of attention. And now here's how we start doing it. So the first step is to notice that our attention is going to that void. That gap between where we are and where we want to be with our audience building or sales. This is a skill we develop through repetition, and there is no shortcut around that.
We practice by being the observer of our thoughts, emotions, and actions through the process of it. You guessed it. Mindfulness. We do that by reflecting back on the patterns of our life, often with some sort of external help like a therapist, a teacher, a coach. But even like a solid book about this can go a long way too.
And then we start to see what we haven't been seeing. We start to notice that we frequently have the thought of say nobody will ever read these stupid books or I should be selling more or what am I doing wrong that nobody is responding to my posts. These are all thoughts that tend to appear when we're focusing on what we [00:16:00] don't yet have rather than practicing gratitude and appreciation for what we do have.
They're very common and they're also incredibly counterproductive to motivation because they don't imply agency in our situation.
In other words, they imply that we can't do anything to change this. So if you haven't heard of the three Ps of optimism created by psychology researcher Martin Seigelman, or if you've heard of them and you need a refresher, let's talk about those for a second because it's really a useful tool for evaluating your thoughts for validity.
These three Ps, when they show up, take away our feelings of agency, our ability to feel like we can influence the situation in a positive direction, and ultimately our motivation to try.
The first P is personalization. So notice when something isn't going the [00:17:00] way you wanted, and you immediately attribute it to some deep character flaw of yours, rather than considering the many, many other options. For instance, a friend agrees to read and review your book, and then that review doesn't show up when you expected it to.
If your self talk sounds like they must have hated the book and they just didn't want to tell me, then you're probably falling into the personalization trap. Just as likely, they were busy and forgot, or perfectionism trap trying to write the perfect review for you. It may not be about you, and it may not be about your book.
So notice when your thoughts jump right to personalization and don't consider all the other options. The second P is pervasiveness. This looks like a single unfortunate turn of events growing really large in your mind and overshadowing everything else. So this happens when we turn all our attention to the negative thing.
We water [00:18:00] that seed with our attention, and it grows until it's all we can see if we're not careful. By noticing when we feel like, ugh, everything is doomed, from a single decision or disappointment that we suffer in our career, we can pause and remember to intentionally look for everything that is going right and well, and water those seeds.
With our attention instead.
The third P is permanence. This looks like assuming that what's happening right now, what you're thinking, feeling, and experiencing will last forever. This is super unhelpful because if you don't think things can change, what are the odds that you're even going to try? Very demotivational. If you hear yourself use language like always or never in relation to your career, you can be pretty sure that you're falling into a permanence trap.
Just because your first book launch was a dud by your standards doesn't mean you'll, quote, never make money doing this. Notice where one event is being duplicated and [00:19:00] then projected into the future.
So, noticing the three Ps in our thoughts is a great place to start with this mindfulness stuff. The second step is to shift our attention towards something else that is working better. A little self talk goes a long way here. Now, with self talk, you can do this in your head, you can do it aloud or in a journal.
Instead of personalization, talk through as many reasons as you can think of why the results you're getting might be attributable to something other than you're a shit author and even more a shit human being, right? Instead of letting that one disappointment overshadow everything else, Talk yourself through all of the victories you've had recently.
So, look at those reviews you, you did get, right? Even if it's only a few. Those are steps forward. Uh, think about the email you got from a fan, even the enjoyment you gave yourself writing the book, bring your attention to that, [00:20:00] let those grow large in your awareness. And you might find that your list of victories can actually go on for quite a bit.
And finally, instead of permanence, try to imagine yourself in the future looking back on this time when you were just getting started and how insubstantial of a moment this current moment was in comparison to all of the wonderful things you had coming your way.
As your future self, imagine if you'd given up and then assumed that there was nothing better. Now, if you're having trouble imagining this future self, great news, you can simply be you in the present, right? And look back on some negative experience that you thought would last forever, middle school, say.
And notice how many interesting and unexpectedly great things have happened since then. Maybe you got your first book deal. Maybe you got a dog, maybe you got married, maybe you've had kids.
The ability to observe our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and question [00:21:00] whether they are capital T truth, is the best tool we have for steering our attention away from the demotivational options, and toward the truly motivational ones. Knowing that circumstances can improve if we keep trying to improve them, is the best tool we have for steering our attention away from the demotivational options, is hugely motivational, and it's also true, but sometimes we lose sight of it, don't we?
I know that I do. Uh, it helps to have friends around to remind us of these things. So the more we practice this skill of observing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, questioning if they're getting us the results we want or not, just objectively speaking, and steering our attention toward beliefs and practices that will motivate us with something other than fear.
And, you know, remind us of our agency. The easier the skill of mindfulness will become. And the quicker we'll remember to do it. And that's important. Because that means spending less time feeling like we're shouting into the void, and more time connecting with the progress that we've made. [00:22:00] Remembering that we've made progress Is hugely empowering because it reminds us that we can continue to make progress, that we have agency and influence in this world, and that Ultimately, we do matter.
Of course you matter, whether you believe that or not. But that's beside the point. So if you're asking the question, what if I'm screaming into the void? You have a few options. You can walk away from the void, if that's something like social media, or a particular publishing platform that you just, you know, You can stop all that screaming into the void and instead have a civilized conversation with the people who are responding to your books and content, regardless of if that's only 10 different people, the choice is yours.
And so is how you feel about the situation. Notice what thoughts you're having around those triggering places. Notice P's are [00:23:00] showing up for you. And remember that you can redirect your thoughts by saying. That thought isn't doing what I'd hoped it'd do. I'm going to experiment with this other thought for a while instead.
And then repeat that thought to yourself and notice how it makes you feel. Now, fair warning, it might make you feel a little jittery simply because it's unfamiliar or it goes against a rule that you internalized when you were young and in a system of control. So, if you feel a little jittery, it might just be because it's unfamiliar, not because it's not unfamiliar.
A better or more useful thought for you. So you may wonder, am I allowed to think that? Yes. You're allowed to think whatever the hell you want. No one has to know. Go wild. So that's it for this episode of What If for Authors. Thanks for joining me. And if you feel so compelled to leave a rating and review for this podcast, I greatly appreciate each [00:24:00] and every person who takes the time out of their busy day to do so.
I'm Claire Taylor, and I hope you'll join me again next time. Happy writing!