My 10 biggest mistakes since becoming an author
I was asked in a recent interview what my biggest lessons as an author were. I gave the interviewer one line answers, but it did get me thinking – I made some pretty huge mistakes to learn those lessons. I thought that if I shared my mistakes in more depth, perhaps new authors could be spared making the same mistakes or other writers might find some comfort in discovering they weren’t alone in their trials and errors. Either way, I hope this article helps someone.
Big Mistake 1: I put my writing career before my health.
A few short years ago I was fit enough to operate my own bootcamp classes, I ran at least 24km along the coast every week, I had a well-balanced diet and used to write a regular newsletter for my Personal Training clients with nutritional advice. I made sure I got plenty of sleep every night and I had more energy than most people in their twenties. Then I had a serious inoperable knee injury which no amount of physio rehab managed to fix and which put a devastating end to my personal training career and my running.
Soon afterwards, my new career as a novelist put the nail in the coffin as far as my health went.
As the pressure increased with my writing career, instead of waking up and exercising, I woke up and turned on my Mac. Instead of eating balanced meals, I began to think that half a block of Dairy Milk and two cans of Coke Zero constituted a good day’s food and drink intake while I stayed glued to my screen writing.
And I stayed up past midnight every night, working.
It was fine for a short while but then my body fell to bits. I put on over ten kilos, I was diagnosed with sleep apnoea and I was just recently diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia (a stress related nerve disease). My lower back is always sore because of the amount of sitting I do and I have such little energy that a slow walk with my dog for half an hour leaves me completely depleted.
I’m forty-three-years-old but feel like I’m ninety-three-years-old.
Authors - whoever you are, wherever you are, don’t let this be you!
The indescribable pain of the Trigeminal Neuralgia and having a sleep clinician predict that because of my lifestyle and lack of sleep I was looking at heart failure and death before I hit sixty years of age at the latest, was just the wake-up call that I needed.
I decided that edit deadline or no edit deadline, my sleep is non-negotiable. I will get seven to eight hours every night. Eating proper well-balanced meals are non-negotiable. I will eat actual food not just TV snacks until dinner time. I will move more within the limits of my stuffed knee – every day I will do some form of exercise, be it cycling or walking (and a super slow walk around three blocks standing around checking my phone while my dog sniffs every lamp post does not count as daily exercise!)
Eat well, sleep well, move well – it has dawned on me (and it took me long enough but I finally got there) that no book is worth my life. The unhealthy, self-sabotaging way I was going was leading me to an early grave. And really, no career is worth that.
Big Mistake 2: I lost all sense of balance in my life.
This follows closely on from big mistake one. Being an author, or I should say being a highly driven, determined-to-succeed author, has to be one of the hardest ways to earn a living. It’s a job that’s very hard to switch off from.
The characters in our books are in our heads constantly urging us to write more words. Whenever we’re not writing, we feel guilty, kind of like we’re wagging school. We also have book research to do, social media to contend with, fan emails or emails from other writers to reply to. We have websites to maintain and update, blogs to write, interviews to do, talks to prepare and memorise for events and that’s just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head, there’s loads more than that involved.
When you throw in publisher deadlines, a demanding day job (my husband and I own and run two physiotherapy clinics and I also work part-time as a physiotherapist myself), a house to organise and two school children to take care of, it’s not hard to see why I lost any sense of balance.
I used to watch TV of an evening, I used to knit almost every day, I used to love looking up Pinterest recipes and playing around with them each week to create fabulous dishes. I used to actually see my friends!
These days, I wake up, work, then wake up the children, take them to school, work, pick up kids and help with homework and cook dinner, work and go to sleep.
I know lots of my author friends live like this too. Not a single one of my non-author friends live like this, no matter what career they have. This kind of self-flagellating lifestyle seems to belong exclusively to authors.
I made my children and myself a promise on New Years’ Eve that every single day of the year bar none, I would do at least one thing a day for pleasure. (It’s a worry when your children point out that you never rest or have fun.) And I’m pleased to report that even though it’s only been thirty days of the new year, I have indeed stuck with it. Whether it’s been heading down to the beach, watching a TV show, baking something yummy or grabbing those knitting needles, I’ve restored some work-life balance. Not anywhere near as much as I’d like but reality is that working two jobs and having children, there’s only so much free time in a day.
At least some balance does exist now.
Big Mistake 3: I expected too much from my family and friends.
I’m really close to my extended family. My cousins are more like siblings. One of my nieces especially is more like a daughter. I speak to loads of my cousins, even those that live on the other side of the world, weekly. You get the drift – we’re tight. Out of my entire extended family (I’m Egyptian – extended means EXTENDED) guess how many of them reviewed my book? One. One person in my whole super-close-knit massive family wrote a review of my book.
I also have a huge network of good non-author friends – and I really do mean good friends, not Facebook only friends, but friends I lean on, friends who know my ins-and-outs, friends I genuinely love and would be lost without. Guess how many of my non-author friends wrote a review of my book? Two.
I had a huge book launch and invited all my close non-author friends. Nearly all of them didn’t buy the book (about ten out of eighty of them bought it.) I mostly signed books at my launch for my author friends (most of whom already had a copy but were buying another one anyway because, well launch and everything – you go, you buy the damn book!). It's a BOOK launch after all!
I put up a Facebook post announcing that my brand new debut book was released and I asked people to please, please share and spread the word that the book was in shops – out of all of my family and friends, that huge network of people I just told you about, only four of them shared the post – my husband and my mum were two of them. I compared this to how nearly every single one of my close author friends shared the same post.
I was gutted by the reaction of my family and non-author friends.
Weren’t they proud of me?
Didn’t they love me?
Didn’t they want to help me?
My family and friends knew how hard I had worked. They knew how important this was to me – so how could they be so inactive? How could they not care?
And I also thought a very toxic thought that made me resentful of most of them, ‘If I was them, I would have been so much more supportive than they’re being to me.’
Here’s the big lesson I learnt – they ARE proud, they DO love me, they DO want to help. But they aren’t authors and unless you’re an author, you don’t understand just how important things like writing reviews or sharing Facebook posts or even sales are. I know I certainly had no idea about those things beforehand.
What I did when my book was released and what I think a lot of others authors also do, is that I expected my family and friends to act like authors, to support me the way my author friends did (because author friends are incredibly pro-active). And this absolutely wasn't fair on my family and friends. Truth be told, if I wasn't an author, I probably wouldn't have done more for them than they did for me because I wouldn't have had that author insight that I do.
Once my book hot the shelves, my gorgeous family and loyal supportive friends took photos of themselves holding copies of it and the smiles on their faces were genuinely full of love and joy – it was as if it was their book in the shops not mine because they were just so, SO proud and excited. I cried several times at their love for me during that time.
As soon as I told them that I was nominated in 2015’s AusRom Today Readers’ Choice Awards , they voted like maniacs to help me win book of the year - no way would I have won it without their support.
And guess what? They ARE actually buying my book and they ARE telling their friends to buy it, they just aren’t as obnoxious about it as I am when I buy and read books.
I’m loud about it when I buy a book because I know authors need that loud support to spread the word about them. My family and friends, without that insight, are supporting me the way they always have, without having to shout it from the rooftops. I’ve found out in passing conversations sometimes months later that they read and loved my book or bought copies for friends. They don’t feel the need to give book feedback immediately, they wait and tell me when they see me.
My family and friends always have been and always will be solid for me. With the exception of a couple of them who are very vocal (God love them), most of them will never support me as loudly and publicly with Facebook posts and book reviews as my author friends will, because that just isn’t a natural thing for them to do. And that’s perfectly okay with me. Because now I’ve learnt to be thankful for all the love and support and help they give me in their own way, not in a way that was manipulated or directed by me. And that’s a lot nicer and healthier for all of us.
Big Mistake 4: I felt indebted to every author who supported me.
When I signed my contract with HarperCollins, I knew no authors except for my paid manuscript assessor. Not a one. I was blown away by the support shown to me as a newbie by the incredibly welcoming and generous author community. So blown away in fact that I felt a huge debt of gratitude to every one of them.
If someone read my book, I felt I had to read their book too. If someone followed my page on Facebook, I felt like I had to follow their page. If someone signed up to my newsletter, I signed up to their newsletter and so on.
You can see where this is heading right? Why couldn’t I see where this was heading??
Of course, the more success my book had, the more other authors read it, the more they followed my page and the more they signed up to my newsletter.
So I ended up completely freaked out because I was reading book after book that I had absolutely no interest in reading, I was being bombarded with author newsletters that I had no interest in receiving and my Facebook and Twitter feeds became so congested with posts from people I barely knew that it took forever to scroll through to find my actual friends’ posts.
I used to love reading but suddenly it was a job, rushing through book after book to make it up to everyone who read mine. And in the end, it became truly impossible. Two of my author friends with much more experience than I had, came over for dinner and read me the riot act, telling me that I had to end that cycle.
So these days if an author reads my book and they let me know that they have read it, I thank them. That’s it. Thank you is enough. It doesn’t need to be followed up with, ‘And do you have a book I can read?’ If authors ask me if they can gift me their books (after I have repeatedly stated on my website and on my Facebook page – please do not ask me to read your books!) I say ‘Yes sure,’ and then if I ever feel like reading their book I will, and if not I won’t and I have not a scrap of guilt about it.
If an author follows me on Facebook or signs up to my newsletter, I think, ‘how lovely.’ End of story! And if they’re offended that I don’t follow them back then they know where that unfollow button is and they can easily unfollow me.
I read books that I want to read and I read nothing else. Reading is for pleasure, it isn’t meant to be a payback system. I sign up for newsletters that I actually want to receive and I only follow Facebook pages that I want to engage with.
Life is too short to read books you don’t like and Facebook posts from people you don't know.
Big Mistake 5: I felt indebted to everyone who reviewed my book.
I used to thank every single reviewer on my Goodreads page. I even wrote an article about the importance of thanking every reviewer! I thought that if someone went to the effort of leaving a thoughtful review, the least I could do was thank them. I thought that not thanking reviewers was rude and ungrateful.
But again, as with point 4, I started something I couldn’t maintain. Worrying myself silly that someone would review my book and go unthanked was ridiculous and I couldn’t keep checking for reviews every day when I had much more important priorities.
I still do go through my Goodreads account once every month and hit the like button on reviews without leaving a comment and guess what? Not one reviewer has sent me an angry email for being rude and ungrateful – fancy that!
Big Mistake 6: I let others sway me and wasn’t true to myself.
You have probably figured out from points 4 and 5 that I’m somewhat of a desperate people pleaser. The idea of upsetting anyone mortifies me. To make people feel that I value them, I sometimes take their advice when really I shouldn’t.
An author friend gave me advice after I opened up to her about the exhaustion of being a people pleaser and how I really wished that I had my shit together.
‘What am I doing wrong?’ I asked her.
'Do you really want honesty?' she said.
'Yes!' I replied.
So she suggested to me that something I was doing wrong was placing too much importance on coming across as lovelier than everyone else out there. And that because I was putting in so much effort to make sure everyone loved me the most, I was actually coming across as fake.
I was devastated to hear this. Sure, I didn’t want enemies and I wanted people to like me (who doesn’t?) but I thought I was a people pleaser because I genuinely wanted people to be happy, not for the reasons she suggested. But I kept listening.
The author friend said, ‘You end all your replies to comments on your page with honey, or darling or love. When I see you respond to me with ‘thanks honey’ I feel special because we’re friends, but then when I see that you’ve responded to everyone that way, well it just doesn’t seem as genuine anymore. If you make everyone feel special, then nobody ends up feeling special. You can be lovely and engaging but keep that boundary there instead of trying so hard to make everyone to think you are their bosom buddy, just so that they think you're lovely.
So being the people pleaser that I am, what did I do? I wanted to please that friend! I wanted to show her that I had taken on board her advice and was changing my fake, insincere replies to the comments on my page and that I was reeling in my desperate need to be loved more than anyone else. I became colder in my responses on my author page and you know what? I didn’t feel better.
I felt awful. And by being cool with people instead of my usual OTT gushy self, that's when I felt fake.
Because the thing is, I wasn’t being fake or insincere when I was being gushy, I was just being me. I have always used terms of affection for everyone! I call the lady at the grocery store checkout who I’ve never met before ‘darling’. And it’s not so that the checkout lady will love me over and above everyone else, it’s because that is what comes naturally to me. So now I think that if people think I’m fake because I use terms of endearment on my Facebook page, then that’s their issue not mine and I really don't care what they think.
I have happily gone back to being true to myself. If you comment on my page and I ‘honey’ you in my reply, it’s because it genuinely makes me happy to spread affection wherever I can.
I think this story can be used an example of what not to do in ALL aspects of your author life.
People mean well and when they give advice, they want to help you. But they don’t know what’s right for you, only you do.
By all means ask for advice but only take it on board if it feels right. If the advice feels wrong to you – listen to your gut and trust yourself. Whether it’s a suggested change to your manuscript, the way you handle your social media or the way you approach the submission process, listen to your inner voice and if your inner voice says no, then don’t take that advice. Even if it comes from the wisest person you know, or from your dearest friend or even if it comes from the most powerful publisher in the country - don’t take advice that feels wrong to you. I know I never will again.
Big Mistake 7: I didn’t set strict limits on myself when it came to social media.
Every idiot knows that social media is a time sucker, it’s so easy to find ten, fifteen minutes disappearing down the gurgler before you even know it. Those innocent lots of ten minute scrolls through the newsfeed in the course of a day, for a busy person, can turn into a couple of hours and suddenly there goes your quality of life, because you’ve got heaps of work that you still need to do and now you’ve got no time left for rest and relaxation.
I used to waste a lot of time going through my Facebook feed. I had notifications on my phone that beeped at me day and night and I would go on there to respond to a comment on one of my posts or to respond to a private message and then fifteen or even twenty minutes later, I would come up for air because I then started scrolling through the feed. I let social media take over and it made me feel stressed and anxious about all the time I lost.
As authors, we have such a big author community and, being writers they are so engaging and entertaining with their Facebook posts that it’s easy to get caught up and spend way too much time being entertained by all the fabulous witty writers instead of getting off Facebook and getting shit done!
The big change I made was to take off alerts. So now if anyone comments on my post or private messages me, I don’t know about it, there is no annoying beep. Four to five times a day I will check Facebook with a super strict time limit of ten minutes. Sometimes that ten minutes allows me to go through my newsfeed and sometimes it doesn’t because the whole time is spent replying to messages or comments. Every time I go to check my Facebook, I’ll set a timer before opening the app and it goes off after ten minutes because I know I have no self-control otherwise. Sad but true.
And when I really need to, like when I’m writing drafts and I know that I’ll use any excuse to get out of writing, I take social media completely off my phone and that takes away any temptation to newsfeed scroll whatsoever.
Now I can sleep at night knowing that on any given day, less than an hour was all I devoted to social media.
Big Mistake 8: I let nasty reviewers hurt me with their words.
Nobody likes bad reviews but they are part and parcel of the business. Unfavourable reviews didn’t bother me if they were based on real criticisms – didn’t like the characters, wasn’t invested in the plot etc. etc. – those kind of reviews were fine. What I really struggled with were nasty reviews, that had no thought put into them and were just a way of trolling.
I would read things like ‘she can’t even write’ and ‘worst book literally ever’ and ‘pile of crap’ and I would cry and cry.
But you know what? That’s what trolls want! They want to make you cry, it makes them feel better about themselves, because let’s face it, which happy, well-adjusted people spend time throwing shade at authors? None, that’s who!
When I came to this realisation, after listening to more experienced authors talk about how they handled trolls, I’ve now gone from being hurt by bad reviews to feeling sorry for the people who wrote them.
And I love this saying that I want to share with you (although I can’t remember where I heard it, so it may not be word perfect but you’ll get the message anyway) – ‘Even if you are the juiciest ripest most delicious peach in the world, not everyone likes peaches.’
There will always be people who don’t like our books, and not all of those people are nice so some of them will tell us that they hate our books in nasty awful ways. Rise above, authors! Rise above!
Big Mistake 9: I was too available to readers and writers who wanted a piece of me.
Revisiting that people pleaser theme here (again!) The more my blog took off with writing tips and the more successful my book became, the more that readers and writers reached out to me.
I love hearing from my readers, it’s one of the biggest thrills of them all!
And I post writing tips every month, I’m running a writing retreat – clearly I’m someone who wants to help other writers. So I really do love sharing ideas with writers who contact me.
But what happened was that every time I received an email, I felt pressure to respond immediately. And many of those emails required quite time consuming responses. Every time I got a private message, I felt the same way, like I had to respond (often in great depth) straight away. This added to my lack of balance and stress and anxiety in a big way.
I’m now in the habit of acknowledging receipt of emails and replying properly when I’m good and ready. So I’ll often respond with ‘Hello! I got your email, thank you. I will write back properly to you as soon as I have more time.’ Every single time I send an email like that, without fail I get a response saying something along the lines of, ‘Thanks so much, no rush, I know you’re busy.’
If everyone else knows I’m busy, why did it take me so damn long to know I was busy?
I always do end up writing back properly later and people are always grateful and gracious when I do respond, whenever that is – a week, two weeks later sometimes. People are actually very reasonable and nice. I don’t know why I’ve spent so much time thinking everyone will be upset or hurt if I don’t give them long replies within a few minutes of getting their emails!
So now I have learnt how to maintain relationships with readers and also help out other authors but I limit my availability to when it works for me. Nobody minds and I get to stay relatively sane. Note I said relatively! I’m still a writer – show me a perfectly sane writer! Which leads me onto the next point:
Big Mistake 10: I allowed internet crazies into my life big time!
Social media is a minefield. All I can say is thank goodness it wasn’t around in my formative years, because boy oh boy, I just hate to think what ‘people pleaser’ me would have done as an impressionable teen!
It’s very hard to decipher people based on how they come across on social media. People I thought were stand-offish or even prickly on Facebook, I met in real life and discovered warm wonderful friends who were just wise enough to play it cool online. People I thought were just gorgeous on Facebook, I met in real life and they were nothing like their Facebook alter-egos. (Side note – don’t have a profile photo of you from thirty years ago or it will be very hard for me not to stare when you introduce yourself in person and you’re actually fifty not twenty!)
There was even one lunatic author who I found out had created fake profiles and I accepted friend requests from those fake people and had long and on-going conversations with these people who did not exist. Ugh, I feel so stupid. Then I found the reason she created the fake profiles was to troll another gorgeous lovely much more successful author with bad reviews from lots of different profiles – crazy people I’m telling you folks, they are indeed out there!
So I am much, much, MUCH more cautious these days. I don’t jump into instant friendships, I try and suss out people more by making sure we have lots of mutual friends (especially friends in common whose judgement I trust) and I reserve all judgement until I meet people in real life. Less lunatics, and more lasting friendships that way.
I hope you found this article helpful and that you go forth with more nous than I did!
Take care,
T x
Big Mistake 1: I put my writing career before my health.
A few short years ago I was fit enough to operate my own bootcamp classes, I ran at least 24km along the coast every week, I had a well-balanced diet and used to write a regular newsletter for my Personal Training clients with nutritional advice. I made sure I got plenty of sleep every night and I had more energy than most people in their twenties. Then I had a serious inoperable knee injury which no amount of physio rehab managed to fix and which put a devastating end to my personal training career and my running.
Soon afterwards, my new career as a novelist put the nail in the coffin as far as my health went.
As the pressure increased with my writing career, instead of waking up and exercising, I woke up and turned on my Mac. Instead of eating balanced meals, I began to think that half a block of Dairy Milk and two cans of Coke Zero constituted a good day’s food and drink intake while I stayed glued to my screen writing.
And I stayed up past midnight every night, working.
It was fine for a short while but then my body fell to bits. I put on over ten kilos, I was diagnosed with sleep apnoea and I was just recently diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia (a stress related nerve disease). My lower back is always sore because of the amount of sitting I do and I have such little energy that a slow walk with my dog for half an hour leaves me completely depleted.
I’m forty-three-years-old but feel like I’m ninety-three-years-old.
Authors - whoever you are, wherever you are, don’t let this be you!
The indescribable pain of the Trigeminal Neuralgia and having a sleep clinician predict that because of my lifestyle and lack of sleep I was looking at heart failure and death before I hit sixty years of age at the latest, was just the wake-up call that I needed.
I decided that edit deadline or no edit deadline, my sleep is non-negotiable. I will get seven to eight hours every night. Eating proper well-balanced meals are non-negotiable. I will eat actual food not just TV snacks until dinner time. I will move more within the limits of my stuffed knee – every day I will do some form of exercise, be it cycling or walking (and a super slow walk around three blocks standing around checking my phone while my dog sniffs every lamp post does not count as daily exercise!)
Eat well, sleep well, move well – it has dawned on me (and it took me long enough but I finally got there) that no book is worth my life. The unhealthy, self-sabotaging way I was going was leading me to an early grave. And really, no career is worth that.
Big Mistake 2: I lost all sense of balance in my life.
This follows closely on from big mistake one. Being an author, or I should say being a highly driven, determined-to-succeed author, has to be one of the hardest ways to earn a living. It’s a job that’s very hard to switch off from.
The characters in our books are in our heads constantly urging us to write more words. Whenever we’re not writing, we feel guilty, kind of like we’re wagging school. We also have book research to do, social media to contend with, fan emails or emails from other writers to reply to. We have websites to maintain and update, blogs to write, interviews to do, talks to prepare and memorise for events and that’s just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head, there’s loads more than that involved.
When you throw in publisher deadlines, a demanding day job (my husband and I own and run two physiotherapy clinics and I also work part-time as a physiotherapist myself), a house to organise and two school children to take care of, it’s not hard to see why I lost any sense of balance.
I used to watch TV of an evening, I used to knit almost every day, I used to love looking up Pinterest recipes and playing around with them each week to create fabulous dishes. I used to actually see my friends!
These days, I wake up, work, then wake up the children, take them to school, work, pick up kids and help with homework and cook dinner, work and go to sleep.
I know lots of my author friends live like this too. Not a single one of my non-author friends live like this, no matter what career they have. This kind of self-flagellating lifestyle seems to belong exclusively to authors.
I made my children and myself a promise on New Years’ Eve that every single day of the year bar none, I would do at least one thing a day for pleasure. (It’s a worry when your children point out that you never rest or have fun.) And I’m pleased to report that even though it’s only been thirty days of the new year, I have indeed stuck with it. Whether it’s been heading down to the beach, watching a TV show, baking something yummy or grabbing those knitting needles, I’ve restored some work-life balance. Not anywhere near as much as I’d like but reality is that working two jobs and having children, there’s only so much free time in a day.
At least some balance does exist now.
Big Mistake 3: I expected too much from my family and friends.
I’m really close to my extended family. My cousins are more like siblings. One of my nieces especially is more like a daughter. I speak to loads of my cousins, even those that live on the other side of the world, weekly. You get the drift – we’re tight. Out of my entire extended family (I’m Egyptian – extended means EXTENDED) guess how many of them reviewed my book? One. One person in my whole super-close-knit massive family wrote a review of my book.
I also have a huge network of good non-author friends – and I really do mean good friends, not Facebook only friends, but friends I lean on, friends who know my ins-and-outs, friends I genuinely love and would be lost without. Guess how many of my non-author friends wrote a review of my book? Two.
I had a huge book launch and invited all my close non-author friends. Nearly all of them didn’t buy the book (about ten out of eighty of them bought it.) I mostly signed books at my launch for my author friends (most of whom already had a copy but were buying another one anyway because, well launch and everything – you go, you buy the damn book!). It's a BOOK launch after all!
I put up a Facebook post announcing that my brand new debut book was released and I asked people to please, please share and spread the word that the book was in shops – out of all of my family and friends, that huge network of people I just told you about, only four of them shared the post – my husband and my mum were two of them. I compared this to how nearly every single one of my close author friends shared the same post.
I was gutted by the reaction of my family and non-author friends.
Weren’t they proud of me?
Didn’t they love me?
Didn’t they want to help me?
My family and friends knew how hard I had worked. They knew how important this was to me – so how could they be so inactive? How could they not care?
And I also thought a very toxic thought that made me resentful of most of them, ‘If I was them, I would have been so much more supportive than they’re being to me.’
Here’s the big lesson I learnt – they ARE proud, they DO love me, they DO want to help. But they aren’t authors and unless you’re an author, you don’t understand just how important things like writing reviews or sharing Facebook posts or even sales are. I know I certainly had no idea about those things beforehand.
What I did when my book was released and what I think a lot of others authors also do, is that I expected my family and friends to act like authors, to support me the way my author friends did (because author friends are incredibly pro-active). And this absolutely wasn't fair on my family and friends. Truth be told, if I wasn't an author, I probably wouldn't have done more for them than they did for me because I wouldn't have had that author insight that I do.
Once my book hot the shelves, my gorgeous family and loyal supportive friends took photos of themselves holding copies of it and the smiles on their faces were genuinely full of love and joy – it was as if it was their book in the shops not mine because they were just so, SO proud and excited. I cried several times at their love for me during that time.
As soon as I told them that I was nominated in 2015’s AusRom Today Readers’ Choice Awards , they voted like maniacs to help me win book of the year - no way would I have won it without their support.
And guess what? They ARE actually buying my book and they ARE telling their friends to buy it, they just aren’t as obnoxious about it as I am when I buy and read books.
I’m loud about it when I buy a book because I know authors need that loud support to spread the word about them. My family and friends, without that insight, are supporting me the way they always have, without having to shout it from the rooftops. I’ve found out in passing conversations sometimes months later that they read and loved my book or bought copies for friends. They don’t feel the need to give book feedback immediately, they wait and tell me when they see me.
My family and friends always have been and always will be solid for me. With the exception of a couple of them who are very vocal (God love them), most of them will never support me as loudly and publicly with Facebook posts and book reviews as my author friends will, because that just isn’t a natural thing for them to do. And that’s perfectly okay with me. Because now I’ve learnt to be thankful for all the love and support and help they give me in their own way, not in a way that was manipulated or directed by me. And that’s a lot nicer and healthier for all of us.
Big Mistake 4: I felt indebted to every author who supported me.
When I signed my contract with HarperCollins, I knew no authors except for my paid manuscript assessor. Not a one. I was blown away by the support shown to me as a newbie by the incredibly welcoming and generous author community. So blown away in fact that I felt a huge debt of gratitude to every one of them.
If someone read my book, I felt I had to read their book too. If someone followed my page on Facebook, I felt like I had to follow their page. If someone signed up to my newsletter, I signed up to their newsletter and so on.
You can see where this is heading right? Why couldn’t I see where this was heading??
Of course, the more success my book had, the more other authors read it, the more they followed my page and the more they signed up to my newsletter.
So I ended up completely freaked out because I was reading book after book that I had absolutely no interest in reading, I was being bombarded with author newsletters that I had no interest in receiving and my Facebook and Twitter feeds became so congested with posts from people I barely knew that it took forever to scroll through to find my actual friends’ posts.
I used to love reading but suddenly it was a job, rushing through book after book to make it up to everyone who read mine. And in the end, it became truly impossible. Two of my author friends with much more experience than I had, came over for dinner and read me the riot act, telling me that I had to end that cycle.
So these days if an author reads my book and they let me know that they have read it, I thank them. That’s it. Thank you is enough. It doesn’t need to be followed up with, ‘And do you have a book I can read?’ If authors ask me if they can gift me their books (after I have repeatedly stated on my website and on my Facebook page – please do not ask me to read your books!) I say ‘Yes sure,’ and then if I ever feel like reading their book I will, and if not I won’t and I have not a scrap of guilt about it.
If an author follows me on Facebook or signs up to my newsletter, I think, ‘how lovely.’ End of story! And if they’re offended that I don’t follow them back then they know where that unfollow button is and they can easily unfollow me.
I read books that I want to read and I read nothing else. Reading is for pleasure, it isn’t meant to be a payback system. I sign up for newsletters that I actually want to receive and I only follow Facebook pages that I want to engage with.
Life is too short to read books you don’t like and Facebook posts from people you don't know.
Big Mistake 5: I felt indebted to everyone who reviewed my book.
I used to thank every single reviewer on my Goodreads page. I even wrote an article about the importance of thanking every reviewer! I thought that if someone went to the effort of leaving a thoughtful review, the least I could do was thank them. I thought that not thanking reviewers was rude and ungrateful.
But again, as with point 4, I started something I couldn’t maintain. Worrying myself silly that someone would review my book and go unthanked was ridiculous and I couldn’t keep checking for reviews every day when I had much more important priorities.
I still do go through my Goodreads account once every month and hit the like button on reviews without leaving a comment and guess what? Not one reviewer has sent me an angry email for being rude and ungrateful – fancy that!
Big Mistake 6: I let others sway me and wasn’t true to myself.
You have probably figured out from points 4 and 5 that I’m somewhat of a desperate people pleaser. The idea of upsetting anyone mortifies me. To make people feel that I value them, I sometimes take their advice when really I shouldn’t.
An author friend gave me advice after I opened up to her about the exhaustion of being a people pleaser and how I really wished that I had my shit together.
‘What am I doing wrong?’ I asked her.
'Do you really want honesty?' she said.
'Yes!' I replied.
So she suggested to me that something I was doing wrong was placing too much importance on coming across as lovelier than everyone else out there. And that because I was putting in so much effort to make sure everyone loved me the most, I was actually coming across as fake.
I was devastated to hear this. Sure, I didn’t want enemies and I wanted people to like me (who doesn’t?) but I thought I was a people pleaser because I genuinely wanted people to be happy, not for the reasons she suggested. But I kept listening.
The author friend said, ‘You end all your replies to comments on your page with honey, or darling or love. When I see you respond to me with ‘thanks honey’ I feel special because we’re friends, but then when I see that you’ve responded to everyone that way, well it just doesn’t seem as genuine anymore. If you make everyone feel special, then nobody ends up feeling special. You can be lovely and engaging but keep that boundary there instead of trying so hard to make everyone to think you are their bosom buddy, just so that they think you're lovely.
So being the people pleaser that I am, what did I do? I wanted to please that friend! I wanted to show her that I had taken on board her advice and was changing my fake, insincere replies to the comments on my page and that I was reeling in my desperate need to be loved more than anyone else. I became colder in my responses on my author page and you know what? I didn’t feel better.
I felt awful. And by being cool with people instead of my usual OTT gushy self, that's when I felt fake.
Because the thing is, I wasn’t being fake or insincere when I was being gushy, I was just being me. I have always used terms of affection for everyone! I call the lady at the grocery store checkout who I’ve never met before ‘darling’. And it’s not so that the checkout lady will love me over and above everyone else, it’s because that is what comes naturally to me. So now I think that if people think I’m fake because I use terms of endearment on my Facebook page, then that’s their issue not mine and I really don't care what they think.
I have happily gone back to being true to myself. If you comment on my page and I ‘honey’ you in my reply, it’s because it genuinely makes me happy to spread affection wherever I can.
I think this story can be used an example of what not to do in ALL aspects of your author life.
People mean well and when they give advice, they want to help you. But they don’t know what’s right for you, only you do.
By all means ask for advice but only take it on board if it feels right. If the advice feels wrong to you – listen to your gut and trust yourself. Whether it’s a suggested change to your manuscript, the way you handle your social media or the way you approach the submission process, listen to your inner voice and if your inner voice says no, then don’t take that advice. Even if it comes from the wisest person you know, or from your dearest friend or even if it comes from the most powerful publisher in the country - don’t take advice that feels wrong to you. I know I never will again.
Big Mistake 7: I didn’t set strict limits on myself when it came to social media.
Every idiot knows that social media is a time sucker, it’s so easy to find ten, fifteen minutes disappearing down the gurgler before you even know it. Those innocent lots of ten minute scrolls through the newsfeed in the course of a day, for a busy person, can turn into a couple of hours and suddenly there goes your quality of life, because you’ve got heaps of work that you still need to do and now you’ve got no time left for rest and relaxation.
I used to waste a lot of time going through my Facebook feed. I had notifications on my phone that beeped at me day and night and I would go on there to respond to a comment on one of my posts or to respond to a private message and then fifteen or even twenty minutes later, I would come up for air because I then started scrolling through the feed. I let social media take over and it made me feel stressed and anxious about all the time I lost.
As authors, we have such a big author community and, being writers they are so engaging and entertaining with their Facebook posts that it’s easy to get caught up and spend way too much time being entertained by all the fabulous witty writers instead of getting off Facebook and getting shit done!
The big change I made was to take off alerts. So now if anyone comments on my post or private messages me, I don’t know about it, there is no annoying beep. Four to five times a day I will check Facebook with a super strict time limit of ten minutes. Sometimes that ten minutes allows me to go through my newsfeed and sometimes it doesn’t because the whole time is spent replying to messages or comments. Every time I go to check my Facebook, I’ll set a timer before opening the app and it goes off after ten minutes because I know I have no self-control otherwise. Sad but true.
And when I really need to, like when I’m writing drafts and I know that I’ll use any excuse to get out of writing, I take social media completely off my phone and that takes away any temptation to newsfeed scroll whatsoever.
Now I can sleep at night knowing that on any given day, less than an hour was all I devoted to social media.
Big Mistake 8: I let nasty reviewers hurt me with their words.
Nobody likes bad reviews but they are part and parcel of the business. Unfavourable reviews didn’t bother me if they were based on real criticisms – didn’t like the characters, wasn’t invested in the plot etc. etc. – those kind of reviews were fine. What I really struggled with were nasty reviews, that had no thought put into them and were just a way of trolling.
I would read things like ‘she can’t even write’ and ‘worst book literally ever’ and ‘pile of crap’ and I would cry and cry.
But you know what? That’s what trolls want! They want to make you cry, it makes them feel better about themselves, because let’s face it, which happy, well-adjusted people spend time throwing shade at authors? None, that’s who!
When I came to this realisation, after listening to more experienced authors talk about how they handled trolls, I’ve now gone from being hurt by bad reviews to feeling sorry for the people who wrote them.
And I love this saying that I want to share with you (although I can’t remember where I heard it, so it may not be word perfect but you’ll get the message anyway) – ‘Even if you are the juiciest ripest most delicious peach in the world, not everyone likes peaches.’
There will always be people who don’t like our books, and not all of those people are nice so some of them will tell us that they hate our books in nasty awful ways. Rise above, authors! Rise above!
Big Mistake 9: I was too available to readers and writers who wanted a piece of me.
Revisiting that people pleaser theme here (again!) The more my blog took off with writing tips and the more successful my book became, the more that readers and writers reached out to me.
I love hearing from my readers, it’s one of the biggest thrills of them all!
And I post writing tips every month, I’m running a writing retreat – clearly I’m someone who wants to help other writers. So I really do love sharing ideas with writers who contact me.
But what happened was that every time I received an email, I felt pressure to respond immediately. And many of those emails required quite time consuming responses. Every time I got a private message, I felt the same way, like I had to respond (often in great depth) straight away. This added to my lack of balance and stress and anxiety in a big way.
I’m now in the habit of acknowledging receipt of emails and replying properly when I’m good and ready. So I’ll often respond with ‘Hello! I got your email, thank you. I will write back properly to you as soon as I have more time.’ Every single time I send an email like that, without fail I get a response saying something along the lines of, ‘Thanks so much, no rush, I know you’re busy.’
If everyone else knows I’m busy, why did it take me so damn long to know I was busy?
I always do end up writing back properly later and people are always grateful and gracious when I do respond, whenever that is – a week, two weeks later sometimes. People are actually very reasonable and nice. I don’t know why I’ve spent so much time thinking everyone will be upset or hurt if I don’t give them long replies within a few minutes of getting their emails!
So now I have learnt how to maintain relationships with readers and also help out other authors but I limit my availability to when it works for me. Nobody minds and I get to stay relatively sane. Note I said relatively! I’m still a writer – show me a perfectly sane writer! Which leads me onto the next point:
Big Mistake 10: I allowed internet crazies into my life big time!
Social media is a minefield. All I can say is thank goodness it wasn’t around in my formative years, because boy oh boy, I just hate to think what ‘people pleaser’ me would have done as an impressionable teen!
It’s very hard to decipher people based on how they come across on social media. People I thought were stand-offish or even prickly on Facebook, I met in real life and discovered warm wonderful friends who were just wise enough to play it cool online. People I thought were just gorgeous on Facebook, I met in real life and they were nothing like their Facebook alter-egos. (Side note – don’t have a profile photo of you from thirty years ago or it will be very hard for me not to stare when you introduce yourself in person and you’re actually fifty not twenty!)
There was even one lunatic author who I found out had created fake profiles and I accepted friend requests from those fake people and had long and on-going conversations with these people who did not exist. Ugh, I feel so stupid. Then I found the reason she created the fake profiles was to troll another gorgeous lovely much more successful author with bad reviews from lots of different profiles – crazy people I’m telling you folks, they are indeed out there!
So I am much, much, MUCH more cautious these days. I don’t jump into instant friendships, I try and suss out people more by making sure we have lots of mutual friends (especially friends in common whose judgement I trust) and I reserve all judgement until I meet people in real life. Less lunatics, and more lasting friendships that way.
I hope you found this article helpful and that you go forth with more nous than I did!
Take care,
T x