Secret Countdown: Five Truths To Keep You Sane

Three Days To Go

In three days, on January 12th, 2016, SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB will be published. Publishing your first book can be a pretty stressful experience. Trust me on this. You’ve worked for ages — not just the years you’ve spent on writing, rewriting, and revising this particular book, but all the writing you did before this book that wasn’t quite good enough. And now your book is finally, finally coming out. It’s going out into the world. Maybe it’ll be ignored. Maybe it’ll be hated. Maybe no one will even know it ever existed.

Yeah, boy, this is stressful.

So, if you’ve got a book being published and it’s stressing you out, here are some thoughts of comfort.

1. Someone is always doing better than you

It’s very easy to look at everyone else with a book out and to see how much better their book is doing than yours. They’re getting starred reviews from Kirkus. They have a front table display at Barnes and Noble. They are on every blogger’s list of books to be excited about. Their debut is on the bestseller lists. They have adverts in the national press. They have a thousand five star reviews on Goodreads. Their advance is twenty times what yours is.

What a failure you are. What a loser. Maybe your book wasn’t that good after all.

Yeah, but no.

Someone will always be doing better than you. Even if you’re outselling JK Rowling, someone else might be getting all the award nominations. Even if you’re getting all the award nominations, someone else is on the top of the New York Times bestseller list and you’re not.

You can’t win.

The truth is it is basic human nature to compare ourselves to those doing better than we are and not with those who are doing less well. The ones we see are the ones with the great success. But they are the exceptions. There are far more people whose success is on a par with yours and plenty who are not doing as well. Except you’re not noticing them. You’re comparing yourself with those very few who, by luck or timing or national mood, just happen to be hitting a freakish level of success.

Don’t compare yourself to them. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. There is no win in comparing. It’s a lose every time.

2. There’s nothing you can do, so don’t stress it

It’s a horrible truth, but nothing you can do will really make much difference. Yes, a signing or a school visit might sell some extra copies. Yes, a blog tour might get a few people interested. Yes, putting vast amounts of effort into social media might shift a hundred more books. Attending conferences and conventions and producing lots of swag and doing dozens of giveaways, all these can add some sales.

But they are insignificant. Compared to the number of sales that will be generated just by sitting on bookstore shelves or being ordered by libraries, what you can achieve through your own efforts is statistically small and isn’t going to make much difference to your success.

How is that comforting?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I get a certain amount zen-like calm from the idea that I have no real power over whether my book sells or not. You can fall quite easily into thinking that you’re not doing enough, that if you could just do a bit more, that would make all the difference.

It wouldn’t.

If you enjoy blogging or giveaways or social media or school visits or conventions, do them by all means! But don’t do them because you think you have to. You’re not losing out by not doing them.

Actually, I’m lying. There is one thing you can do that will make a difference. You can write the absolute best book you can. And you’ve already done that.

3. This is not the end

If the worst happens and your book isn’t a success it’s not the end.

Every writer who has a career lasting more than a few years will hit that point where a book flops and they are dropped by their publisher. I know a lot of writers who have gone out of contract. Sometimes it was their first book or first series. And every one of them has come back again after a few years and sold again. Some of them have gone on to enormous success after that commercial failure earlier in their career. Hell, even George R.R. Martin was dropped by his publisher because his book didn’t perform as expected, and he’s doing all right now.

4. Someone, somewhere bought and loved your book

Maybe none of these things help. Maybe you’re still feeling down. Maybe you didn’t get any reviews and only sold 500 copies and no one seemed to notice your book came out at all, except your family, and even they didn’t seem terribly excited.

Well, it’s not true.

Someone bought your book or checked it out from a library. Someone loved it. It spoke to someone. It mattered to someone. That is true for every book ever published. We all hope that thousands of readers will adore our books, but it’s not a failure if only one person loved it, because by giving them something they loved, you’ve changed their life for the better. If you can do that for one person, there’s no way your book failed.

5. You did it!

Yep, you did. You wrote a book and you got it published. Have you any idea how rare that is, how unlikely? Millions upon millions of people want to write a book. Millions actually do. The vast majority will never get those books published. Writing a book good enough to be published is an incredible achievement all by itself.

In all the pressure of the process of publication, we forget all too often what an amazing thing we have done.

Take time to be immensely proud. What you’ve done is special. You did it!