AUTHOR ATTITUDE:
The Essential Characteristic Necessary for Publishing Success
Millions of aspiring authors around the world dream of self-publishing or traditionally publishing a successful book. If you’ve picked up this book, you likely share that dream.
Today, almost any writer can change his or her status from aspiring to published author. More ways exist to self-publish a book than ever before, which means you have many options should you choose to go that route. You’ll find it harder to change your status from aspiring to published author if you want to be traditionally published, but it’s not impossible. You just need to convince a publishing company to produce your book for you by following the steps presented in this book.
No matter which path to publication you choose, the most difficult task before you involves creating a book that sells. According to Publishers Weekly, the average book sells three thousand copies in its lifetime—not per year. The publishing industry deems a book “successful” when it sells large numbers of copies—usually many more than three thousand copies per year. Bestsellers, for example, outsell other books in their categories.
Since you are reading this book, I’m going to assume from this point forward that you want to produce a book that sells an above-average number of copies per year or reaches bestseller status. That means you want to be a successful author by publishing industry standards, so keep the average books sales noted earlier mind as you work through this process.
Many aspiring authors think all they need to produce a successful book is an outstanding idea, a sound story structure, and a well-crafted manuscript. Indeed, these elements sometimes suffice, but more often creating a bestseller or a book with above-average sales involves much more.
In particular, it takes a certain type of attitude. I call this an Author Attitude.
The Cold, Hard Facts of the Publishing Industry
To develop Author Attitude, you must make yourself aware of the cold, hard facts about the publishing industry. These facts are meant to help you understand the difference between simply becoming an author and succeeding as an author.
While the number of books published each year increases—Bowker projected a staggering four thousand books per day were published in 2011—the number of people and publishers who buy them decreases annually. That means the marketplace has become increasingly competitive, making it harder to find readers and publishers. Yet, out of a U.S. population of 317,132,631 people (as of November 2013), 81 percent still want to write a book, according to The New York Times.
Many writers produce manuscripts or books only to discover later that their creations aren’t viable. After spending months or years writing and honing their craft, these authors then suffer great heartbreak and disappointment when they discover traditional publishers don’t want to publish their manuscripts or readers don’t want to purchase their self-published books. Maybe the writing isn’t up to par, or the book isn’t unique or helpful to readers; the author might not have a “platform,” promotion plan, or expertise in the subject area, among many other things. Platform is visibility, authority, and engagement with your book’s target audience that gives you influences in that market.
Today, many readers simply cannot find most books. Bowker reported that in 2011, three million books were published in the United States. Marketing expert and best-selling author Seth Godin predicted that fifteen million ISBN numbers were purchased in 2012. If all of those ISBN numbers were used, it is possible that at least as many books were published that same year. That’s a lot of books for readers to sift through when deciding to make a purchase. It’s easy for yours to get lost among them all.
Not only that, if your book is traditionally published, it stands less than a one percent chance of being stocked in an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore, according to Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Self-published books almost never make it onto bookstore shelves. And if your book is not in brick-and-mortar bookstores, you miss another chance for readers to discover you or your book.
Even authors like Godin, with fourteen best-selling books, including Permission Marketing and Tribes, normally get only one or two copies of their books into each physical bookstore. In fact, Godin conducted a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign for his newest book, The Icarus Deception, primarily to prove to publishers that his books should be promoted inside bookstores. Even his publisher needed proof that booksellers should carry large quantities of his books and display them prominently. If a successful author like Godin has trouble getting books into a bookstore, you can imagine how hard this task proves for the average traditionally published author.
Once you get your book into either physical or online stores, you have to find ways to get it noticed. You have to ensure its cover makes readers feel they must not leave the store without it. The average nonfiction book sells 250 copies per year, reports Publishers Weekly—and nonfiction outsells fiction, so we can assume the average novel sells fewer copies per year. Taking into account the cost of editing and design, that’s hardly enough for any traditional publisher or self-publisher to earn back the cost of producing and promoting a printed book, let alone make much money. (Average yearly e-book sales are about the same as print book sales, possibly just a tad higher. According to novelist Mike Cooper, the average Amazon e-book author earns under $300 per year.)
With these facts in mind, it’s no wonder that along the way some writers discover they aren’t cut out to produce successful books—ones that do sell to lots of readers and to publishers. They might discover this after they’ve self-published or traditionally published their books or maybe while they are trying to publish them (or even while exploring their options). Maybe they are unwilling to learn the necessary tasks, they can’t or don’t want to hire someone to help them do those tasks, or they simply don’t want to compete in the industry or the marketplace. Maybe they have other commitments, like family or a “real” job. So these writers may decide they feel comfortable writing books that sell a below-average number of copies.
Others decide the path to publication is just too long and arduous. They leave their dreams of becoming authors behind and choose different paths. They give up.
Then there are the aspiring writers left wondering how—despite the above facts, their situations, and the often harsh and competitive publishing industry environment—they can change their status from aspiring to successful published author. They are not put off by the obstacles in the facts presented or by what life has thrown their way. Full of optimism, they cling to something else they have heard: “Now is the best time in history to become an author.” They are willing to do whatever it takes to produce a salable book and to publish and promote it until it sells well. They are determined, persistent, and perseverant. In fact, they have the essential characteristic of successful authors: an Author Attitude.
I hope you have it, too.
If you aren’t sure whether you have this attitude, no worries. This manual, and the training process it includes, will teach you how to develop an Author Attitude.
Of course, some writers have this attitude naturally; most, I believe, have worked at developing it. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen come to mind. They received over 140 rejections prior to getting Chicken Soup for the Soul accepted by Health Communications. The book has sold over 200 million copies due to the authors’ commitment to promoting the book in every way possible—including sending free copies to the sequestered jurors serving on the nationally broadcast first O.J. Simpson murder trial. The jurors were then pictured on national television carrying the books! The authors promoted the book in five ways every single day after its release. Now that is Author Attitude.
Change Your Status From Aspiring to Successful Published Author
Let’s take a closer look at the word attitude. As defined by Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, attitude is a position assumed for a specific purpose. It can be a mental position with regard to a fact or state of being. It also can be a state of readiness to respond in a characteristic way to a stimulus, such as to a concept or a situation. If you want to become a successful published author, you want to take a mental position—which means you adopt or choose that attitude—that helps you achieve a particular state of being, in this case successful authorship. You want to be ready to respond to your book idea and to all situations related to it with a successful author’s mindset, or an Author Attitude.
Your attitude makes a huge difference in the results you achieve. Possession of this state of mental readiness will get you the specific result you desire: successful authorship.
Author Attitude consists of four primary characteristics: Willingness, Optimism, Objectivity, and Tenacity.
You may possess one or more of these characteristics, or you may not possess any of them at all. You may feel you display one characteristic more strongly than another or need to strengthen one even though you possess it.
I have created an acronym to help you remember the four characteristics of Author Attitude. The acronym spells a word that recently has come into common culture: WOOT!
“Woot” originated as a hacker term for root (or administrative) access to a computer. However, the term coincided with the gamer term, “w00t.” According to the Urban Dictionary, “w00t” originally was a truncated expression for “Wow, loot!” common among players of Dungeons & Dragons. The term passed into Internet culture and then into common culture as a term of excitement. It works well for our purposes. As you will see, if you can access your own computer, your mind, you possess the key to successful authorship, which could result in loot—or at least a sense of abundance. That might cause you to exclaim, “WOOT!”
Let’s look at each characteristic of WOOT. Know that—like attitude—each one reflects a choice you can make and you can learn each characteristic if you feel you don’t possess it yet. Indeed, you can make the choice to learn it or adopt it into your way of being as you train to become an author. That’s what the “Author Training Process” is meant to accomplish.
Willingness
To become a successful author you need a general willingness to change and grow. Your old attitudes, actions, behaviors, thoughts, decisions, beliefs, and habits have only gotten you this far. They helped you achieve your current results. If you want a new level of success as a writer, something has to change. For that to happen, first and foremost, you need to be willing to change. Every one of the following characteristics and each step in the Author Training Process requires that you have some degree of willingness to explore, do, learn, evaluate, try something that may be new or different, or do something you know how to do already but in a different way.
Additionally, you must be willing to change your book idea. The actual story, characters, subject, angle, theme, purpose, audience, or any number of other aspects of your project might need to be altered to make it viable in the marketplace. This may be difficult to swallow at first, but successful authorship relies on your ability to evaluate the marketability of your idea from every angle possible and make the tough calls. Only when you have discovered that you have created a salable idea can you turn to writing the book. When you have completed the manuscript, you must be willing to receive feedback on how your writing and manuscript can be improved to make it successful and to make those changes.
Additionally, you need the willingness to cycle through the Author Training Process more than once. The training asks you to return to several steps until you find the angle or focus that offers your book project the highest likelihood of success.
Optimism
Whether you call it faith, positive thinking, reverse pessimism, Positive Psychology, or learned optimism, to become a successful author you must be willing to see everything that happens to you as pushing you closer to your goal of successful authorship. This means a rejection from an agent presents an opportunity to improve your query letter or your book proposal. A negative review of your manuscript by a book doctor at a conference presents a chance to rethink your plot or your content—or even to hone your craft. A session with a proposal consultant who tells you your platform section needs strengthening offers the opportunity to rethink your pre-promotion activity level.
In case you think I am suggesting you become a Pollyanna, let me share some scientific data with you. In a report published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael F. Scheier, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wrote that optimists tend to respond to disappointments, such as being rejected by a literary agent, by formulating a plan of action and asking other people for help and advice. On the other hand, pessimists more often react to the same event by trying to ignore it or assuming they can do nothing to change their results.
In a similar study, Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, found that pessimists tend to construe bad events, such as low book sales or being told a manuscript doesn’t fit a publisher’s needs, as the result of personal deficits that will plague them forever in every aspect of their personal and professional lives. Optimists see the same events as caused by mistakes they can remedy by making changes, once they discover what changes are necessary.
You will have many reasons for optimism as you move through the Author Training Process and in your career as an author, and this optimistic attitude will help you achieve more positive results.
Objectivity
To become a successful author, you need to see yourself and your work objectively, from a different perspective than your own. Specifically, you need to see through the lens used by publishing professionals, such as literary agents and acquisitions editors. Both view your book idea not only as a creative project but also as a business proposition. They view you as a potential business partner. Even if you don’t plan on seeking a traditional publisher for your book, you must learn to stand back and evaluate yourself and your work objectively from a publishing business perspective. Doing so becomes even more important if you plan to independently publish since you become the publisher of your own work.
The publishing industry is the book production and selling business; if you want to become an author, you must be willing to make this your business as well. You have to be willing to craft your work with an eye to the industry’s needs and standards, which are, more often than not, focused primarily on marketability and sales.
You also must distance yourself from your idea. You must detach from it so you are willing to receive, hear, and act upon criticism—and so you can learn to evaluate your idea and offer constructive criticism of your own. And you must make the necessary changes without cringing as if you are cutting off fingers and toes. You must do this with excitement because you know you are making the end product more salable. In other words, you must act in your book’s best interest—even when it feels hard.
Ultimately, you must see your project from the perspective of consumers as well. Only when you do this can you pinpoint why they might pick up your book, carry it to the register and purchase it, and then tell their friends they must read it, too. That’s when you and your book become successful.
Tenacity
To become an author, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes for however long it takes to reach your goal. Determination, persistence, and perseverance carry you through to successful authorship, whether you are rewriting your manuscript, building author platform, submitting to the one hundredth agent, contacting the one thousandth reviewer, or writing the fiftieth blog post or press release about your book. You must have passion for your project and feel a sense of purpose. Every day you must show up eager to move forward, even if it is only by one small step or in spite of the challenges that have presented themselves.
You must love what you do. You must be in love with writing, being an author (or the prospect of becoming one), and your book. For you, authorship must not be about making money or selling books; writing books or this particular book must feel like a passion, a calling, a vocation, or a “soul” purpose. This will keep you doing what must be done to succeed every day.
As I mentioned, you choose your attitude. According to Dr. Alan Zimmerman, author of Pivot, only a small percentage of the U.S. population chooses to have a positive attitude—but it can make the difference between success and failure. A study done by Harvard University proved that 85 percent of your success depends on your attitude and only 15 percent on your technical aptitude.
To a huge degree, your attitude is based upon your beliefs. Beliefs affect your decisions. Decisions then affect your actions, which affect your results.
As proven by Scheier’s report, a pessimist rejected by a publisher might subsequently believe she is somehow personally deficient. Therefore, she may believe she doesn’t have the ability to write and publish a book. Based on this belief, she then might make decisions that affect her actions and results. She might decide not to seek help so she can discover how to improve her current project, and she might never submit another proposal to an agent or publisher.
An optimist, on the other hand, might make a totally different decision and take totally different actions based on his beliefs. The same type of rejection might cause him to believe his book idea just needs tweaking—or that he, as a writer and aspiring author, needs tweaking. So he might reevaluate the angle of his book, the benefits it offers, and numerous other aspects of his project and then rewrite his proposal. He also might spend another six months building author platform, during which time he also might add several more items to the proposal’s promotion plan. He then might begin submitting the book project to agents and publishers once again.
These examples demonstrate the importance of getting clear about your beliefs so you can achieve the results you desire.
Train Yourself to Have an Author Attitude
Despite this focus on Author Attitude, the need for a great idea and outstanding writing remains a factor in any book’s success. These will take you far, especially if you write fiction. However, in all cases, to go the distance and become a successful author, you need the elements included in an Author Attitude—WOOT!
So how do you get this Author Attitude if you don’t already have it?
If you’ve ever learned how to do something technical, you probably used a manual for assistance and you might even have entered a training program. There are manuals to teach you to use computers, televisions, clock radios, or video cameras. A manual is nothing more than a step-by-step guide on how to do or learn something—anything—from putting together a piece of furniture to producing an e-book to exercising with a Pilates ball.
Athletes train to build muscle, endurance, and facility in their chosen sport. Musicians and dancers train to achieve skill and artistry. Whether they use a personal trainer, coach, teacher, or manual to help them learn or refine their abilities, in the end, the result is the same: The time and hard work typically pay off for individuals who invest in training. They become accomplished at their chosen endeavor.
In the same way, you can train to become a successful published author. This book serves as your Author Training manual. It provides a time-tested Author Training Process—an evaluation tool. The nine unique steps outlined in the table of contents will help you move closer to your goal of successful authorship by teaching you to see yourself and your work from a publishing professional’s perspective—both a creative and a business perspective. If you use them, you will develop muscle, skill, and proficiency. The process will give you successful author muscle in the form of Author Attitude.
Each step in this book requires that you evaluate a specific part of yourself and/or your book idea. In the process, you discover the necessary information, skills, activities, mind-sets, and behaviors that help you and your book become more salable and publishable. Remember, evaluating yourself in this manner requires WOOT!—willingness, optimism, objectivity, and tenacity. By the time you have finished all nine steps, you will acquire the mind-set and professional training needed to move from aspiring to successful published author.
You complete the Author Training Process by reading the chapters in this manual and completing the suggested exercises, which are included in the training exercises provided at the back of the manual. Later you will put all of these pieces together to create a complete business plan for your book. (These business plans often translate directly into book proposals.) This constant evaluation, along with the real examples of book proposals and business plans in the Samples section, which have been evaluated by agents and editors, will develop your ability to “see” your book project from an agent’s or acquisitions editor’s perspective.
One of my students-her name is Dindy-says the Author Training Process taught her how to determine if the book she planned to write, which profiled a group of artists, was worth pursuing. “That’s wonderful to know before you spend years writing,” she says. “Helping me view my germ of an idea through the eyes of an agent or publisher turned me 180 degrees in the right direction. It also gave me some new tools for looking at what makes certain books successful and others not so much.”
Rhonda, another student working on a series of memoirs about adoption, says that seeing herself and her work objectively from a publishing business perspective provided “the turning point in my thinking about my ideas. Until I saw myself through this lens, I struggled with the message of my book. I struggled with the purpose of my writing and with finding my overall direction with this book and subsequent books. By learning how to have an Author Attitude, I have become a more focused writer,” she says. “I am driven by a passion to share my story in such a way that my readers must buy a copy of my book.”
Step by step, you, too, will discover what you need to do to produce a viable book project—one that sells to publishers and to many readers. You will train yourself to have an Author Attitude and become a successful author—one who produces salable books. WOOT!