The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (33 page)

W
hat is your goal for your writing?

It is very important that you answer this simple seeming, but perhaps not so simple, question.

Do you want fame? Fortune? The admiration of a select few?

To achieve certain aesthetic or creative goals?

Or simply to enjoy yourself and revel in self-expression?

Or some combination of all of the above?

Further, what does each of your goals mean to you? By “fame,” do you mean you want to get on a prestigious bestseller list? Or do you mean you want to be a recognizable name in your niche or genre—so that, although you’re not one of the superstars, you still have those gratifying experiences where strangers email you and tell you how much your work means to them? (Hint, hint...)

And what is a “fortune?” Would you be content with half an income a year? (Perhaps because someone else in the household is providing the other half.) Or a full income? And what constitutes a “full income”? $50,000? $100,000? $250,000? More?

And how soon do you want it?

Are you prepared to write a book every year or two, in a profitable genre, and market the heck out of all of them—investing a lot of time and money in the process—so that maybe in ten years you’re supporting yourself entirely through your writing? Do you have the time, energy, and focus to do that?

Or do you want or need to take things slower?

Remember that it’s fine to have ambitious goals: what makes a goal grandiose is not simply its scope but whether you are prepared to make the necessary investments and sacrifices to achieve it (Section 2.2).

After you’re done clarifying your goals, quantify them and give them deadlines. Then, create a plan for achieving them. Here are some tips for planning:

• Work from models.
Find writers whose success you wish to emulate and study how they got to where they are. Also, join a writer’s community and interact with local successful writers (Sections 3.9 and 3.10), even if their successes aren’t exactly of the type you’re after. You’ll still learn a lot.

• Plan backwards from your goals. Write down your goals for the next couple of years, and also five and ten years from now. Then write down the series of steps that will get you there, and what you want the result of each step to be. (Example: “Step 3. Attend XYZ Writer’s Conference. Desired Result: Meet Writers A and B; learn tricks for marketing historical novels.”)

• The steps in your plan should be
baby steps
—easily attainable—and your estimate of the yield from each step should be conservative. E.g., “My aim in meeting Writer A is not to get him to agree to include me in his anthology, but to get his permission to follow up after the meeting on that topic.”

• You should also write down the
resources
(e.g., money, time, assistance, mentorship) you’ll require to accomplish each step. Remember: The prolific resource themselves abundantly (Section 3.4).

• Don’t overplan.
A two- or three-page document that you consult and update regularly will help enormously in keeping you on track.

• Important!
Show your plan to your mentors
and ask the important questions, “Will this plan get me to where I want to go?” “Did I leave anything out?” “How can I strengthen it?” And, “Are there any people you know whom I should talk to, or resources you know of that could be useful to me?”

T
here are two key questions you’re going to need to answer:

(1) Do I want a publisher or an audience? And,

(2) Do I want to be in business?

Let’s take them one at a time.

Publisher vs. audience?
I hope that by now you’ve learned to separate your desire for a publisher from your desire for an audience. In the past, you often needed the former to get the latter—although not always, as there were self-publishing triumphs even in the bad, old pre-Internet days, including the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s
Our Bodies, Ourselves
and Julia Cameron’s
The Artist’s Way
. (Both dealing with empowerment, by the way.) These days, however, writers are fully empowered to build their own audiences via the Internet and allied technologies, independent of the help of a publisher.

If you’re one of those writers who feels you must “be published” to be legitimate, please revisit the section on that fatal fallacy in Section 6.7 and do your best to overcome it. It’s so much more productive, not to mention fun, to focus on your craft and audience-building than it is to knuckle under to a disempowering system.

Am I in business?
Most writers follow one of the three career paths summarized in the table below:

(I omit from this analysis the wonderful emotional and community benefits of a creativity-centered lifestyle, including joy, fulfillment, and the camaraderie of wonderful people, all of which can be derived from any of the paths.)

To be clear,
any
of the paths is a good choice if it syncs with your values and needs. The “Business/Hobby” path is a bit risky in that it can easily devolve into a “worst of both worlds” scenario where you wind up doing all the work of a business without getting the payoff. That and the “Hobby” path are fine, however,
unless
you’re choosing them because you’re afraid to try the “Business” path. (In that case, take a business class at a local community college or microenterprise organization, and also hang out with professional writers with a business orientation—business ain’t so bad.)

I’m partial to the Business and Business/Hobby paths not just because it’s good to get paid for our efforts, but because getting paid helps us “rationalize” (in the sense of making rational) our interactions. It also helps put the brakes on overgiving—and when you and those around you are all focused on exchanging fair value, the result can be a kind of miracle. “After all these years, everything is finally working like it should!” a musician friend of mine said, after she had left the chaotic and underpaid world of performing and become a well-paid voiceover artist. “I market, I use my referrals, I sell, and voila! I get work!”

The primary goal in business, after ethics, is
profit
, or a net gain of income over expenses. Profit is the hallmark of a healthy business, and it creates not just business sustainability, but health, wealth, and happiness in the entrepreneur. More on profit in Section 8.9.

Because of the financial implications of the choices, you should consult your accountant before deciding.

F
irst, three success stories:

When her publisher did little to market her first novel,
Mama,
Terry McMillan (later famous for
Waiting to Exhale
) sent, at her own expense, thousands of letters to bookstores, libraries, colleges, and other organizations in African-American communities asking them to buy and support it. Thanks to her efforts, it sold out its first edition and went through two more reprintings in just six weeks.

When Anita Diamant’s publisher was ready to pulp
1
unsold copies of her first novel,
The Red Tent
, which told the story of Dinah, the sister of Joseph (of “coat of many colors” fame), she convinced them instead to send free copies to rabbis. The rabbis promoted it within their congregations and communities, and it eventually became a bestseller.

Spencer Johnson spent years sending copies of his business-advice book
Who Moved My Cheese?
to CEOs of major corporations, some of whom bought thousands of copies for their staffs. It, too, became a bestseller.

The first two lessons you should draw from these stories are that
marketing is powerful
—which makes sense; corporations wouldn’t spend billions on it each year if weren’t—and that
writers can be great marketers
. The latter should come as no surprise, given that marketing is all about communication, observation, and analysis, three skills many writers have in abundance.

The implied third lesson is that
you should market
. Marketing is your vehicle to whatever success you are after, whether it’s fame, fortune, or the respect of your peers (and the job opportunities that flow therefrom). Besides, marketing goes with writing like PB goes with J: once you’ve written something you’re proud of, don’t you want as many people as possible to see it? Marketing is just the thing for that.

People make a big fuss about sales—no one’s written a play called
Death of a Marketer
, after all—but it’s marketing that creates the customers. If you market effectively, customers will visit your website, come to your reading, or stop by your conference table primed to buy. Then, all you have to do is finalize the transaction (more on this, below).

The goal of marketing is to create a clear image in the
right
customer’s mind of who you are and what you are selling. Marketing is what impels the reader with a yen for an action-packed romance novel with a fun, quirky heroine to Jennifer Crusie, or the one who wants a suspenseful thriller served up with a goofy side of humor to J.A. Konrath, or the one who craves acutely observed comic essays about life and love to David Sedaris.

Marketing is therefore about creating a perception—but the first person you have to do that for is yourself. If you’re on a Business path (see last section), you’ve committed to doing a lot of marketing, and so you need to see yourself as a marketer as well as a writer. (Ditto for Business/Hobby, albeit to a lesser extent.) If a part of you is thinking marketing is weird, pushy, or a distraction from your “real” work, please do some journaling around those ambivalences, because they will hold you back.

Twentieth-century marketing was all about broadcasting—meaning, I send out my message to many passive recipients, who are not empowered to respond. Twenty-first-century marketing, however, is all about interactivity, reciprocity, and community-building. It’s about asking for people’s opinions—even about things like what your heroine’s name should be, and whether her dog should be a basset or a corgi. (Or—heaven forfend!—a cat.) It’s also about telling them the story behind the story; letting them enter your world and life and work process to whatever extent you’re comfortable.

And it’s about showing up—because although the Web is a great billboard, it’s still weak for sales. Many people want to see your face and hear your voice before they’ll buy (see below).

If all this sounds like a lot of work, you’re right: it is. Marketing does take time, so be a good writer and do your time management as discussed in Chapter 4. If you’ve got twenty hours a week to “write,” it may be that you apportion eight or ten of those to your marketing, sales, and management. Maybe you’d rather not do that—and, if so, I sympathize. But that’s the path you signed up for. If you really object to time spent marketing, then settle on your writing as a Hobby and be done with it.

Be aware that the minute you start marketing, you basically become a public figure. In fact, that’s the point! And if that squicks you out, I wouldn’t blame you one bit, because once you become a public figure, you are not only psychologically exposed but vulnerable to others’ misbehavior. People can—and will—say mean things about you or your writing. They’ll visit your website and start trolling around or otherwise behaving badly (Section 7.6). They’ll mock you for your mistakes, and also for your accomplishments and virtues.

In person, you’ll meet some tedious people, obnoxious people, importuning people—maybe, if you’re unlucky, a harassing person or two. (The techniques in Section 4.9 will help with the first three types, at least.)

I won’t deny it—that’s all a drag. And I’m guessing that some successful writers would gladly give up the “public figure” part of the job description if they could. But they can’t, and so eventually they learn to cope with it the way one copes with bad weather or dental work or the bad part of any job—meaning, they mostly ignore it. It also goes without saying that, along with the bad’uns, you’ll meet many, many terrific and supportive people, and that the life of a successful writer is, generally speaking, fantastic.

There are lots of different ways to market, so you can play to your strengths. If you like to give readings or workshops, you can do that. If you like to write blog posts and articles, you can do that. If you like schmoozing at professional meetings or other venues, you can do
that
. (The best approach is a combination of all three, but you can emphasize the one(s) you’re most comfortable with.) But all these tactics involve public exposure, and so you’ll have to come to terms with that. I suggest getting out there a little at a time, and taking the time to adjust between steps; gradually, you’ll get more used to it. (This all also amounts to a coming-out process, so also refer to Section 6.6.)