Step #1
Develop an “Author Attitude” and Plan Your Success

You say you want to become an author. You can. You can upload a document right now to Amazon’s Kindle program and declare, “I’m an author.” You can produce a twenty-page, saddle-stitched (stapled) booklet at your local commercial print shop with your name on the cover and announce, “I’ve been published.” You can create a ten-page PDF and sell it as an e-book to your blog and e-mail subscribers, and this, too, changes your status from aspiring to published author.

If you have the ability to write and get a manuscript into print, you can become an author today. Right now. A multitude of ways exists to accomplish this goal, and some of them are not too difficult or expensive.

In general, you don’t even need great writing skill to become a published author, although writers of literary fiction are (usually) the exception to this rule. For this reason, I rarely mention the need for good writing when I discuss what it takes to become an author. Great editors take the work of mediocre or lousy writers who have great ideas and produce adequate, even phenomenal, manuscripts. They also turn poorly constructed manuscripts into highly comprehensible, polished books with the potential to become bestsellers.

Some best-selling and well-known authors have their books ghostwritten, like Ellery Queen’s The Player on the Other Side (ghosted by Theodore Sturgeon) and The Madman Theory (ghosted by Jack Vance) and Maurice McLoughlin’s Tennis as I Play It (ghosted by Sinclair Lewis fifteen years before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature). Some books sell millions of copies despite questionable writing skills or story lines criticized by reviewers and readers alike, such as Fifty Shades of Grey, Bared to You, Twilight, and The Da Vinci Code. However, successful writers tend to have a strong Author Attitude. They have willingness, optimism, objectivity, and tenacity. WOOT!

Ready for your first evaluation in the Author Training Process? Step #1 asks you to assess if you have an Author Attitude. This requires brutal honesty. You might believe you want to become a successful published author, but have your past decisions, actions, and results proven this to be true? Are you cut out for the job? Let’s find out.

Do You Really Want to Become a Successful Author?

This is the question you must ask before you even look at the Author Training steps that evaluate your idea. To conceive a successful book idea, you must know what you want and you must understand what it will take to get it. A clear lack of understanding about what achieving your goal entails—what actions you must take as well as how achieving your goal might positively or negatively change your life—can affect your ability to make progress toward your goal as well.

Look at this concept from the perspective of attitude. If you don’t know what you believe about publishing success—what it looks like, entails, or means to you—you won’t be able to:

• decide if it is something you really want to achieve, and then …
• take concrete actions so you can …
• achieve the results that move you closer to successful authorship.

At the very least, your lack of knowledge may breed fear, which may also make it harder to achieve what you want. Fear lies at the heart of writer’s block, but when we gain knowledge, we often eliminate our fear and move forward quickly—and eagerly. We also may find ourselves in a position to perceive situations more objectively and to act more tenaciously.

Defining your goal removes uncertainty and helps you develop an action plan and achieve results. It helps you know when you’ve reached your goal. That explains why every goal achievement expert advises, “Quantify your goal!” This basically means that if your goal is successful authorship, you must first define what success means to you. This way you can plan how to go from here to there (there being, “successful publication or authorship”). Consider these concepts as Goal Setting 101 for Authors.

If you recall, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice and the cat have the following conversation.

Like Alice, if you “don’t much care where” you and your book are going, “then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” and you will get somewhere—it just might take a long time, and you might not end up in the place you expected. You also may not realize you’ve arrived. If, however, you have a specific destination, or goal, you will set out down a specific path and arrive more quickly at your chosen destination. Right now, the path you believe you want to take leads you to successful authorship.

In his classic bestseller Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill offers six steps for setting and reaching goals. They are:

1. Have a specific goal.
2. Have a specific time to achieve your goal.
3. Write down your goal.
4. Develop a plan to achieve your goal.
5. Decide what price you are willing to pay.
6. Think about your goal every day.

Now, let’s go through these steps and see how they apply to your Author Training.

Define Your Success and Set Your Goals

Let’s identify a few things.

• How do you define successful authorship? What does it mean to be a successful
  author or to have written a successfully published book?
• How is successful authorship quantified? Is it a place, thing, feeling, experience, or number?
• Is this really what you want? Do you have what it takes to achieve this goal? What are you willing to sacrifice to achieve this goal?

You have to “locate” successful authorship on your particular road map. Do this physically by writing your ideas in a journal. Think short term, long term, whatever you wish as long as you are specific. Write it out, and don’t forget to answer the training exercise questions in the back of this book and perform the other activities found there. They will all help your goal to become more specific and quantifiable, which means more achievable.

Maybe you’ve always dreamed of having a best-selling book. Nothing less will do. You want to be the next Harold Robbins, Napoleon Hill, Stieg Larsson, C.S. Lewis, John Gray, or Lynne Truss. As part of your definition of success, you see yourself speaking before audiences, doing book tours, teaching workshops, writing more best-selling books, and having your book featured in book stores. Be as specific as you can, and write as much as you feel comfortable accomplishing.

Maybe success for you means writing and publishing a series of novels for Kindle. You don’t feel the need to become a best-selling novelist but simply want to find a small group of fans who enjoy your work—and create a small income. This positive feedback on your work would give you enormous pleasure and fulfillment.

Or perhaps your book represents the first step in your business plan for an empire of information products. Success for you looks like e-books, reports, services, videos, webinars, and membership sites, all traced back to the success of your initial book.

Maybe success for you is a specific number of books sold. As you try to define successful authorship in book sales, consider what agent Sheree Bykofsky, co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published (5th Edition), says about associating specific numbers with a book’s success: “I believe that the numbers will always be a function of the individual book’s expectations. Each book will have its own expectations as determined in advance of an offer when a publisher prepares a profit and loss statement. They will figure on doing a print run that will allow them to earn back their investment, including any advance to the author. Most books do not make it to a second printing, but if a book does, that book is a success—whether the print run was two thousand copies or a million.”

Once you have defined this in a quantifiable way, you can take the appropriate action to develop a route or get directions so you know how to arrive at your destination, thus achieving the end result you desired—successful authorship.

Create a Plan for Your Goals

So now you have an idea of what being a “successful author” means to you. It’s your goal, and it’s now quantifiable. Maybe it’s having a novel released by a major publisher in New York. Maybe it’s selling one hundred copies of your self-published family history. Maybe it’s building a publishing empire like Stephen King or James Patterson. Whatever it may be, you know that you can’t get there with an “Alice Attitude.” And as with most trips, it’s a good idea to know when you would like to arrive at your destination.

For example, your primary goal might be:

Put a time stamp on your goal. Perhaps:

You could break this goal down into “signposts” or “landmarks” along the way to your destination. For instance, you also might have these other goal time stamps.

Look at these goals often. When you wake up and just before you go to sleep are good times. Put them on 3 × 5 cards, and carry them around, or stick them on your computer or on the bathroom mirror.

These are concrete goals, quantifiable, and you have specific dates for each. They are real now.

But they won’t happen on their own. You must create a plan to help you reach your goal. To do this, break down each goal into actionable items. In other words, make decisions about how you will get to each destination. By identifying tasks and placing them on a to-do list, you create little signposts or landmarks to your final destination. For example:

Or, if you plan to self-publish:

This becomes your plan, or map, to follow to success. For each step of the Author Training Process, you can either add to your overall plan or create an individual plan for that step. Train yourself to follow the map each day, moving from signpost to signpost. Determine how far you want to travel daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. (You can create a general plan for developing your goals for successful authorship with the help of the training exercises.)

Create a Vision of Success

As you create these plans, also create a vision of your destination—your goal. Doing so will help you stay motivated and achieve it. Describe in detail what achieving success as an author will look like. Consider how this will affect all aspects of your life. You’ll find these questions in the exercises in the back. Feel free to answer them in a journal.

• Will success allow you to build a business around your book or blog, travel more, become a speaker, or teach at a university? How so?
• How will successful authorship change your personal life and affect your relationships?
• Will success make it possible for you to spend more time with your spouse or children, pursue your hobbies, or write more books? How so?
• Will success make you feel as if you have fulfilled your purpose or potential? How so?
• How will success affect your income?
• How much money would you like to make from an advance and book sales?

You’ll find great value in actually crafting this vision of success. This exercise is quite similar to the Best Positive Self (BPS) process often used in Positive Psychology. A BPS is defined as an “ideographic representation of goals” (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Studies have shown that those who visualize themselves on a regular basis—daily or weekly—achieving their goal or potential have improved ability to self-regulate their behavior, gain awareness and clarity about priorities and values, achieve positive attitude, gain insight into motives and emotions, and reduce goal conflict.

Numerous studies show that writing about your life goals and imagining your most favorable future helps you learn about yourself. This makes it easier to restructure behavior, priorities, goals, motivations, values, beliefs, and attitudes. Basically, doing so helps you achieve better results.

You can write a vision of successful authorship by imagining your BPS in the present tense. Your vision might sound like the following.

A vision for self-publishing might sound quite similar but would begin:

Don’t just guess at the figures you use. See if you can find sales figures for books similar to the one you want to write. The financial aspect of authorship can prove a shocking detail if you have never thought about it before. Advances vary greatly depending on fiction or nonfiction and from publisher to publisher. A traditional publishing contract typically stipulates that the author gets paid 15 percent royalties on copies up to a certain number based on the net amount received by the publisher on sales to retailers. Ouch. That’s without the 15 to 20 percent you pay an agent on top of that.

If you have a self-published book, say on Amazon’s CreateSpace or Kindle, or Smashwords.com, or at Bookbaby.com, you can earn 70 percent for each book you sell at the midrange level. On the other hand, if you choose to use Amazon’s KDP Select program and offer free days or to discount your book in some way, you could earn much less.

It’s important to think about how many copies of your book you want to sell as you write your vision and set your goals—as well as how you will be involved in selling them. Will you:

• spend time on social networks?
• hire a publicist or PR representative?
• pursue media attention?
• speak at conferences?
• teach workshops and webinars?
• simply write more books?

And will any of this cost you money or eat into your writing time? This is where a profit and loss statement comes into play. You might want to spend some time considering how many books you will need before you recoup your investment.

So try to be realistic when you write your vision. The publishing industry has seen advances trending downward but royalties trending upward as publishers try to encourage authors to take ownership for their books’ success. That means you might only get an advance of $2,000 to $3,000 as a first-time author, should you be considering traditional publishing. Therefore, you might need that money for promotion and not get to use it for a vacation. Out of my two advances, I’ve used only a few hundred dollars for my own enjoyment. The rest has been reinvested in my book’s success. This was part of my business plan and part of my vision.

You might choose to write your vision in the past tense, as if you have already achieved your goal. This method effectively turns your statement into an affirmation that this goal will be realized. In the past tense, the vision above would be written as follows.

You can even try writing your vision for more than one year at a time. Have a long-term vision for five years at a time. This will help you think beyond this one book and beyond the first year of sales or the book’s release.

Read your vision as often as your goals—especially in the morning when you wake and at night prior to going to sleep.

With your goals and your vision written, you’ve created a good map to get you to your destination, and hopefully you’ve developed a greater understanding of where you are going and how to get there.

Are You Willing to Sacrifice to Become an Author?

It’s easy enough to spend time visualizing your goal and feeling good as you imagine achieving it. Determining what “price” you are willing to pay to achieve that goal, as Hill asks us to consider, personally represents quite a different matter entirely. You can count on having to sacrifice or give up something you enjoy. For instance, a few hours of television, a vacation, some sleep, or time spent reading. You might also have to give up old ways of doing things or beliefs—all so you can achieve the goal you desire.

Rhonda told me that after writing her goals and vision, she realized she would have to make some changes if she wanted to succeed as an author. “I gave up reading three-and-a-half books a week, playing the piano every Saturday, and [spending] time in the morning to relax before work. I don’t watch TV and seldom watch a movie with my husband unless I’m working on the laptop,” she reported. “My lifestyle has completely changed to make room in my thinking as well as in my schedule to write.”

Are you feeling a bit squeamish? Starting to squirm in your chair? Or are you feeling eager, willing, and excited to examine your habits and ideas with change in the forefront of your mind?

The writers who truly want to become successful published authors simply do whatever it takes to reach their goals, and sometimes this doesn’t involve writing at all. It can involve a total lifestyle change. As you continue through the training, you will see that you need to take on many tasks in addition to writing to achieve your goal and realize your vision. You may not like or want to do all of them. Evaluate yourself again: Are you willing to take on these tasks if it means the difference between success and failure or a book with below-average, average, or above-average sales?

Dr. Wayne Dyer created a bestseller out of his first book, The Erroneous Zone, by purchasing copies himself and driving all over the United States to promote it. He would stop at every radio station and ask if they wanted to interview him. After the appearance and every chance he found, he would sell copies out of the trunk of his car. This certainly ate into his writing and personal life, but it helped him achieve his publishing goals. It was a major sacrifice, but it was worth it at the end.

Many writers I know balk at anything that takes them away from writing their books. I call them “purists.” A few feel that anything related to marketing, promoting, and selling books somehow “dirties” them as creatives. Others think they should focus only on their craft. Still others just don’t like anything to do with business-related publishing activities and therefore want nothing to do with them. Some maintain the outdated belief that publishers should handle all of the business-related stuff.

If you write to be read and to have your books purchased, the only way to let people know about your writing is to promote it and yourself as a writer. That means you have to start selling your book in one way or another, even before it’s written. It also means you need to wear a lot of hats in addition to your writer’s hat.

Learning this represented a turning point for Rhonda. She wasn’t writing her memoir as just a healing journey for herself; she wanted to share the lessons she had learned and help and encourage others with similar experiences. “I realized that if I had no audience, then there was no reason to share my message. Also, if I’m not willing to reach out to my readers and sell books, then there is no reason to work and sacrifice this much to write my stories,” she says.

So I ask again: Are you committed to writing your book? Are you committed to making your book and yourself as the author of that book successful? What does that commitment look like? If you do want to commit, can you commit? That is, do you have other obligations, such as children, a job, elderly parents whom you care for, or financial restraints that make it difficult for you to commit at the level you would like? Can you work around those obligations in some way, getting a college student to work with you for experience rather than pay, asking a retired parent to help you with some child-care tasks, or cutting back on hours at work while your spouse takes on more financial responsibility for the family? Take some time to think about this and to create another visualization, this time of an ideal yet typical day in your life as an author. For how many hours will you write, and for how many will you wear other hats?

Review the exercises in the back of this manual and write your answers in your journal.

Be realistic and honest with yourself because becoming a successful author is hard work. Publishers want projects from writers who will work hard to help sell books, which is why they look for those who have built author platform. Author platform is built with prepublication promotion specific to your book’s target market. This creates an audience for you and your book. Having a platform shows your commitment to helping your book succeed and your desire to become a successful author. If you don’t want to do what’s necessary to build a platform, you can still go from aspiring author to published author. If you want to be a successful author by industry standards, however, this attitude won’t cut it.

Every time I teach a workshop about how to become an author, a few hours into it someone typically sitting at the back of the room raises his or her hand. This frustrated writer always asks the same question: “Why can’t I just write my book? I don’t want to do any of that other stuff like promotion and platform building. I just want to write my book.”

I always respond the same way—with the truth. “You can just write your book, but it may not sell a lot of copies and you won’t attract a publisher—especially if you are writing nonfiction.”

How to Develop Willingness

So you have now created a vision; you have seen the benefits clearly. You’ve examined how your life might change and the things you may need to sacrifice. But maybe you’re still feeling uneasy about the changes and sacrifices you will have to make. Now is the time to ask yourself, “Why?” and to discover the reason for your resistance. There’s a reason why you are unwilling to do what it takes to become an author or, more specifically, a successful author, and maybe that reason is as simple as fear.

Explore your resistance … your attitude. For a long time—three or four years—I didn’t want to put in the effort to build platform. I piddled at it because I knew I “should,” but I didn’t put my heart into it. I had a fear of success and how it might change my life, and in particular my relationships. I believed that I wasn’t a good salesperson—at least not of my own work—and that I wouldn’t be able to sell books. And I wanted to just be a writer. I didn’t even really want to write business plans or proposals. But when I decided I wanted to be an author more than I didn’t want to do those business-related tasks, my attitude changed. I realized that I had to wear “many hats” in addition to my writer hat or I might never sell my books.

I put on a business hat. I put on a promotion hat. I put on a speaker hat. I wore a social-media hat. I wore these every day or as often as possible. I wore them more than my writing hat on most days. And I even grew to like wearing them. I got good at those tasks. And wearing those hats helped me become an author—a best-selling one.

Maybe you don’t want to wear a business hat and do the tasks that go with it because you are shy and don’t like to be out in front of people; possibly promotion makes you nervous. If you can develop a willingness to wear a business hat, you might discover you can promote yourself and build an author platform from the comfort of your home without anyone ever seeing you. If you have a fear of standing in front of your readers in public, utilize the power of social networking, podcasting, blogging, or radio appearances.

Or maybe if you plan to self-publish, you are afraid of having your new publishing company fail; fear of failure is a common reason people don’t start projects. If you don’t try, you won’t ever know if you can succeed. The power of driving your book success lies primarily in you, the author, so the only way to assure your book has a shot is to overcome that fear and try.

Ask yourself: What’s your “reward,” or how might you “profit” if you choose to remain an aspiring compared to a successful published author? What do you gain by keeping your current habits? Consider the following questions, and respond to them in your journal. I will give you an example answer, but carefully consider each of these and add as many reasons for each as you can.

• What will I gain if I ignore the task of building a big enough platform to land a publisher and/or sell a lot of books? What will I lose? (Example: I gain more time to write, and people won’t judge my blogging skills! But I lose a built-in audience once I’m done).
• How do I profit if I choose to ignore Twitter and Facebook? What do I lose? (Example: I don’t have to worry about not becoming popular enough online! But I lose the chance to see how connected I can become in the writing community.)
• How do I improve my chances of successfully selling my book by not showing up in front of audiences? What do I lose? (Example: I don’t have to deal with stage fright or a red face, or suffer from my fear of public speaking! I don’t have to risk taking a hit to my self-image. I lose one of the most effective methods of connecting with my reader and selling my books and must rely on luck for the reader to find me.)
• What do I gain by leaving my business hat hanging on the wall? What do I lose? (Example: I can avoid the fact that I really don’t believe I have a good business mind and will likely fail if I try my hand at becoming an authorpreneur. I lose the ability to achieve my dreams.)

Think about it: Do you have a payoff for remaining an unpublished or unsuccessful author? Or is the risk worth it?

Remember, your old thoughts and beliefs have only helped you achieve your current level of success. Henry Ford said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” If you want to achieve a higher degree of success, rid yourself of the negative thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that hold you back or keep you stuck where you are right now and create new ones. Then make new decisions and take new actions, even if these are baby steps, so you achieve different results. All of this goes back to attitude.

As I mentioned, one of the reasons I didn’t succeed for so long was because I was afraid of success—yes, afraid of success. I thought success would draw me away from my husband and family; I thought it might harm my marriage. So I would procrastinate every day. I did a lot of talking about what I was going to do, but I didn’t do it. The payoff: I didn’t have to worry about the effect success would have on my family or my relationship with my husband. One day, I decided I wanted to become successful for myself as well as for my husband and family. The payoff: I could contribute financially to the family. I would be able to support myself. I would feel happier and more fulfilled. My family relationships—and my marriage—would benefit. I decided to work toward success as if my life, or my financial well-being, depended upon it.

Just as I did, you need to uncover your positive payoffs. If you become a successful author, how will you benefit? What reward will you receive? How will you profit? If you have difficulty with this exercise, go back to your vision and look for the positive payoffs you wrote about in different areas of your life.

Really, this comes down to making decisions that affect your attitude. In 2001, I decided I wanted to become an author. In 2009, I decided I would become published. Period. In 2011, I landed my first traditional publishing deal. I accomplished more in two years than I did in eight. How? I changed my attitude.

One day, when I thought I might have to go back to work full-time rather than pursue my writing career, I thought about what I might lose if I didn’t ever become an author—my dream, my chance to fulfill my purpose, my opportunity to realize my potential and inspire and help others. I examined my vision and thought about a life in which I failed to obtain my dream. This adjusted my attitude. Seeing my possible future from the flip side—how failure would detract from my life—motivated me more than seeing success. I began working harder and got moving faster. I knew I had to accomplish my goal, no matter what. I refused to fail.

I began taking the steps—whatever steps I could find or learn. I spent time on social media, I spoke every chance I got, I wrote for magazines, and I blogged five days a week or more. Even if I didn’t like what I was required to do, I did it knowing it was getting me where I wanted to go. I could make (and still do) any task bearable—even pleasant—by believing it was necessary to my success, deciding to do it because it would help me succeed, and then actually doing it.

Michelle, one of my students, considered what she might lose if her novel—which she planned to self-publish—failed. She listed the following items.

• Credibility (with a small but growing audience of blog readers and fellow writers, several published)
• Patience from my family, given the time waste of having me spend months not earning an income
• The ability to go on (?)

But Michelle already was developing (or had) an Author Attitude. Her last response got her thinking more positively. She related, “If my first book fails to sell, or sells an average amount, this means I lose:

• Nothing, other than the time and resources spent on the indie production.
• Nothing, provided I learn from the process and change my promotional work or other things and produce a new book or change the current one.

In other words, it could be a gain, provided I learn from it and go on.

I later learned that this approach to changing behavior is the same one used by Third Wave Psychologists. They employ approaches consistent with much of the training given to life coaches and Neuro-Linguistic Programmers (NLP), which focuses on acceptance and awareness of negative emotions and thoughts and commitment to alignment of values, beliefs and goals. When you commit to something, you adopt an emotional state—an attitude—of obligation. You feel emotionally compelled to move forward to achieve what you value for yourself. Basically, if you know your negative beliefs, thoughts, and feelings and how these affect your actions and results, you can adopt an attitude that helps you choose (decide upon) new behaviors (actions) that align with your new values, beliefs, and goals.

If you haven’t felt willing to do what it takes, this type of activity and focus can help you develop the necessary will. Every day, look at your vision, see what you stand to lose if you don’t make the right choices, and choose to make decisions and take actions that align with your goal. Be willing to go over these things every day. That’s having an Author Attitude.

I think Jonathan Winters had an Author Attitude. He said, “I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.” That’s chutzpah.

Use what you have learned in this chapter, and success might have to catch up with you, too. You still need to evaluate your book idea, though (and you’ll evaluate yourself again later). In the process, your “personal training” and Author Training continues as well. WOOT!

Reading Suggestions:

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
The Success Principles™: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E.P. Seligman
How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life by John C. Maxwell
Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want—Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible by Brian Tracy
Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy
Write That Book Already! The Tough Love You Need to Get Published Now by Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark
Write It Down, Make It Happen: Knowing What You Want and Getting It by Henriette Anne Klauser
The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling