It's been a while since I last posted so apologies for that. I've been hard at work on the last book in my Tube Riders series and I've not had much time for anything else (except work and feeding the cat).
This morning, over breakfast, I was reading a bit of The Angel's Game by Carlos Luiz Zafon (an excellent writer), and I came to an interesting passage which I think pretty much summed up value (or lack of it) of talent on its own.
In the book, you have the main character, a writer, David Martin, explaining a few things to Isabella, a teenager, whom supposedly has talent and wants to be his assistant in exchange for him mentoring her as a writer. Just after David has finished reading twenty pages of her manuscript, Isabella is keen to know if she has talent. This is what David says to her:
"I think you are talented and passionate, Isabella. More than you think and less than you expect. But there are a lot of people with talent and passion, and many of them never get anywhere. This is only the first step in achieving anything in life. Natural talent is like an athlete's strength. You can be born with more or less ability, but nobody can become an athlete because he or she was born tall, or strong, or fast. What makes the athlete, or the artist, is the work, the vocation and the technique. The intelligence you are born with is just ammunition. To achieve with it you need to need to transform your mind into a high-precision weapon."
What he is saying is that it doesn't matter how talented you are, if you don't put in the hard work you won't get anywhere with it. Just like every other writer, I often come into contact with people who tell me they can write, some who even look down their nose at me for writing my supposedly simple genre fiction (most of whom have never actually read any of it, I might add). The fact is, though, is that I'm writing, publishing and selling, and they're not. The world is ram-packed with so-called writers lauding their apparent talent, but talent is only a tiny part of being successful. The way to become a successful writer (or artist, or sportsman, or pretty much anything else) is simple:
Bust your balls.
That's it. Work your ass off and you'll get there. We all have different definitions of success. For some it might be finishing a single story. For others it might be selling a single story to some unknown ezine or small press. For others it'll be selling it to a professional magazine or to a major traditional publisher. Others consider success to be self-publishing a novel making hundreds of dollars on Amazon. For me, being a full time writer is my baseline for success. I have a decent enough job which pays my rent and allows me a couple of vacations a year, but to be a full time writer I would need to be earning a minimum of $2000 a month, a sum I've still not made in total in 18 months (although I'm close ;-) ). Earning that sum per month would allow me to survive full time and allow me to feel fully justified in telling all the doubters to shove their heads up their doubting asses. However, I know writers who make that sum PER DAY and don't feel like they've achieved any real level of success. It's all down to you.
What is certain though, is that you won't achieve anything with just talent. You can have all the talent in the world but if you don't get your ass on a seat and churn out some words day after day AFTER DAY, and then spend day after day after day trying to sell and promote those words, your chance of success is the same as finding a diamond in a garbage dump.
That is all. Work hard and don't give up.
Back to the WIP ...
Chris Ward
15th August 2013
Showing posts with label self-publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-publishing. Show all posts
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
Sunday, 21 April 2013
Don't be a Spammer
This morning I banned someone from my Facebook page. It's only the second time I've done that, and it was for the same reason - some random indie spammed me with his own Facebook page and book link without so much as the decency to even introduce himself.
Don't. Do. It.
I don't barge into a private party and start trying to sell cars to the first person I meet without so much as introducing myself first. The poor recipient would be quite within their rights to throw me straight back out the door, which is what I will do if anyone spams my Facebook page, one of my blogs, Goodreads, or anywhere else (you can do it on Twitter - I really don't care what you do there because Twitter is just one long spam feed anyway). There are no second chances.
In indie publishing, making contacts is vital. I've spent more than a year getting to know other indie writers and I've learned a lot from them. I hope some of them have learned from me. Approaching someone you don't know is just as difficult on the internet as it is in real life - if you do it correctly. It's a thousand times easier to be a dickhead and flood their inbox with your book links or post them on their Facebook wall.
If someone sends me a private message saying they've looked at my books and would I be kind enough to look at theirs in return, then there is a pretty decent chance I'll do it. I'm a nice guy. I'm far more tolerant than most people I know. And I've met some cool people this way. As a general rule I don't do the "I'll follow you if you follow me" thing. I get plenty of likes on Facebook without doing anything and in general I see no point in "liking" something I couldn't care less about. However, if you ask nicely, there's a good chance I will.
But if you post random links to my Facebook wall or write "that"s nice" (here's my link) on my posts, I'll ban you. I don't care if you're the next Charles Dickens, you're a dickhead and I'm not prepared to give you the time of day, let alone look at your book.
There are a lot of self-published writers out there of varying quality. I have a lot of time for the nice ones, regardless of how well they write, because they're following their dreams and they're not being a douche to everyone they meet on the way. I have time for those people. I'll talk to them, I'll help them out, I'll even read their books (eventually - I'm a very slow reader!).
However, there are a lot more that are pushy and spammy and nine times out of ten these people can't write for shit, almost as if the two go hand in hand. If you want to be an asshole in this business you'd better be the next Shakespeare because otherwise you'll get nowhere. Only one person out of a thousand that you spam will actually click on your book so unless its so good that they'll immediately go and tell all their friends about you rather than rolling their eyes at the spelling mistake in your first paragraph, then you have even less chance of getting noticed than if you'd just been a nice guy (or girl) in the first place.
There are ways to get noticed without spamming people. On Goodreads, for example, you can set up an event to notify the people on your friends list. They get a small, non-intrusive line on their news feed to say they've been invited and its quite easy to ignore if they're not interested. I get loads everyday, and while I ignore the vast majority I'll occasionally check one out. However, if you send people personal messages that's likely to irk them. I had some guy send me a personal message with a spammy link to his book EVERY DAY. After a week or so I told him to stop doing it. He actually refused - he said it was a social experiment and that he would be doing it for a month. Of course I blocked him, but by doing that what he achieved was negative publicity. I would rather shove chopsticks in my eyes than read his book. Just for sake of argument, I did click on it just to have a look at the Amazon Look Inside - and no surprise it was poorly written rubbish. It almost always is, because people who have not taken the time to learn correct etiquette tend not to take the time to learn correct writing either.
Building up contacts in this business is extremely important. You want people to help you and read your books. So be nice about it. Don't be a dick, or you might as well just shoot yourself in both feet and go back to bed.
Chris Ward
21th April 2013
Don't. Do. It.
I don't barge into a private party and start trying to sell cars to the first person I meet without so much as introducing myself first. The poor recipient would be quite within their rights to throw me straight back out the door, which is what I will do if anyone spams my Facebook page, one of my blogs, Goodreads, or anywhere else (you can do it on Twitter - I really don't care what you do there because Twitter is just one long spam feed anyway). There are no second chances.
In indie publishing, making contacts is vital. I've spent more than a year getting to know other indie writers and I've learned a lot from them. I hope some of them have learned from me. Approaching someone you don't know is just as difficult on the internet as it is in real life - if you do it correctly. It's a thousand times easier to be a dickhead and flood their inbox with your book links or post them on their Facebook wall.
If someone sends me a private message saying they've looked at my books and would I be kind enough to look at theirs in return, then there is a pretty decent chance I'll do it. I'm a nice guy. I'm far more tolerant than most people I know. And I've met some cool people this way. As a general rule I don't do the "I'll follow you if you follow me" thing. I get plenty of likes on Facebook without doing anything and in general I see no point in "liking" something I couldn't care less about. However, if you ask nicely, there's a good chance I will.
But if you post random links to my Facebook wall or write "that"s nice" (here's my link) on my posts, I'll ban you. I don't care if you're the next Charles Dickens, you're a dickhead and I'm not prepared to give you the time of day, let alone look at your book.
There are a lot of self-published writers out there of varying quality. I have a lot of time for the nice ones, regardless of how well they write, because they're following their dreams and they're not being a douche to everyone they meet on the way. I have time for those people. I'll talk to them, I'll help them out, I'll even read their books (eventually - I'm a very slow reader!).
However, there are a lot more that are pushy and spammy and nine times out of ten these people can't write for shit, almost as if the two go hand in hand. If you want to be an asshole in this business you'd better be the next Shakespeare because otherwise you'll get nowhere. Only one person out of a thousand that you spam will actually click on your book so unless its so good that they'll immediately go and tell all their friends about you rather than rolling their eyes at the spelling mistake in your first paragraph, then you have even less chance of getting noticed than if you'd just been a nice guy (or girl) in the first place.
There are ways to get noticed without spamming people. On Goodreads, for example, you can set up an event to notify the people on your friends list. They get a small, non-intrusive line on their news feed to say they've been invited and its quite easy to ignore if they're not interested. I get loads everyday, and while I ignore the vast majority I'll occasionally check one out. However, if you send people personal messages that's likely to irk them. I had some guy send me a personal message with a spammy link to his book EVERY DAY. After a week or so I told him to stop doing it. He actually refused - he said it was a social experiment and that he would be doing it for a month. Of course I blocked him, but by doing that what he achieved was negative publicity. I would rather shove chopsticks in my eyes than read his book. Just for sake of argument, I did click on it just to have a look at the Amazon Look Inside - and no surprise it was poorly written rubbish. It almost always is, because people who have not taken the time to learn correct etiquette tend not to take the time to learn correct writing either.
Building up contacts in this business is extremely important. You want people to help you and read your books. So be nice about it. Don't be a dick, or you might as well just shoot yourself in both feet and go back to bed.
Chris Ward
21th April 2013
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