A Key Question to Ask About Your Author Career
A bit of tough love for you today about author marketing.
One of the most important things that you can do to sell more books is to always be working on your mindset. You’ve got to tackle those limiting beliefs and stories that you're telling yourself so you can empower and fuel yourself to take more action.
Often, we tell ourselves that we are working really hard on something when we’re actually half-assing it.
There’s a question I want you to ask yourself today: “Am I really trying?”
There’s a great podcast episode from Rachel Rogers who's an entrepreneur focused on helping women become successful business owners. She tells a story she read in Leslie Odom Jr.'s memoir.
Leslie got famous when he starred in the original Broadway production of Hamilton as Aaron Burr. Before that, he was a struggling actor for years and years in New York. He was going to auditions, but he just wasn't breaking through. He called up his mentor one day and said, basically, “I think I'm just gonna go get a real job. I'm done with this.” And his mentor told him, “Well, Leslie, that's certainly a choice that you have available to you, and I will support that choice, but first I wanna see you actually try.”
Ouch.
And Leslie was like “What?! I've been trying for seven years.” And he rattled off all of the things he’d done. But what his mentor coached him to see was that he was trying to a certain extent, but he had a cap on it.
If his agent told him to go to an audition, he would go to the audition. But he wasn't getting out and trying everything he could think of. He was waiting for people to come to him and only taking action based on that. So, after that conversation, Leslie started actually trying, and very soon thereafter he landed a role in Hamilton.
I see this all the time with many of the authors that I talk to. Many of us are only doing the safe things and calling it trying.
James Clear gives us a helpful way to evaluate ourselves in this regard. In his book, Atomic Habits, he talks about motion versus action. Sometimes we're moving a hamster on a wheel, our legs are going like crazy. We call it action. But it's not. It’s not getting us anywhere.
If I want to get to downtown Portland, I can’t hop on the bike trainer in my basement and start pedaling. I’ve got to put my bike on the road and my butt in the saddle.
Motion versus action.
Action will actually take me somewhere other than my own basement.
Let’s take a look at the list of things authors call trying, but likely won’t cut it if you’re looking for that “big break.”
Endless fiddling with your website. Yes, you need a website up and running. But the number one job of your website is to get subscribers. You don't need to spend 40 hours working on it, and you don't need to spend thousands and thousands of dollars having someone else work on it. You need a minimum viable website that you can tweak over time. If all you've been doing is working with your website, it's time to move on to the next step.
Extensive research on influencers without actually pitching. That's another motion versus action that feels like trying, but it really isn't. Don’t do all your research up front. Make sure you’re pitching nearly constantly. Research, pitch, repeat.
Only focusing on Oprah-level influencers. Many authors are just looking for that golden egg that's going to solve all their sales problems. If that's the only thing you're willing to do, that can be a clue you’re not really in it to win it. On some level, you know what a long shot it is and that you probably won't get it. But you can fool yourself you're playing big, but you're not doing any of the other things that could actually help you work your way up to the Oprah-level.
Focusing on only the smallest of the small fry influencers. This is the opposite of the previous issue. Playing small feels safe, so it’s where many writers stay. But I want to see my clients pitching a blend of big, medium and small influencers.
Learning to the exclusion of doing. If you’re in “research mode” for marketing and you’ve been there as long as you can remember, it’s time to apply some of what you’ve learned in the real world. Yes, keep learning, don’t tell yourself you need to know more before you can actually do something. Experiential learning is far more powerful and can actually get you somewhere.
Creating a massive amount of content for your very small audience. I've talked to writers who are writing two newsletters a week for a list of 38 people. You're gonna burn yourself out on producing content and not see any real results because you're staying in your safe content space.
Waiting for people to stumble into your digital spider web. You'll respond when someone happens to find you, but you're not getting out there and taking the kind of action that can have a wider impact.
You can see how sneaky this is. On some level, these are all potentially helpful motions, but you need to be honest with yourself when you're in the rut and focusing on safe, yet relatively ineffective things.
So let's talk about what actually trying looks like. Actually trying equals taking action out in the world.
Setting targets. Decide on how many subscribers you want and the number of books you want to sell. Then brainstorm a wide range of actions that may get you there. Don’t stop taking action until you get there.
You’re always pitching influencers. Pitches don’t have to be perfect. Research a little bit, pitch a lot, research a bit more, pitch even more.
Talking about your book. Use any opportunity you get, even if you’re not speaking to your ideal reader to talk about your book. And then use the reactions and the feedback that you get to get even better at talking about your book.
Experimenting with things that seem likely to fail. I want you to try things that you're pretty sure won't work. You will learn so much when you do something experimental and you'll break down some of that fear that happens when you do a risky thing and don't die immediately.
Actually trying takes lots of action, which takes commitment. It requires you to tell yourself a positive story about what's possible, a story about selling the number of books you want to sell and the number of subscribers you want in 2023.
Keep telling yourself that story, and keep taking action until you get there.
I'm rooting for you.