True authorly peace of mind comes when you can be happy for a fellow successful author without wanting to be them or to have what they have. I don't subscribe to the belief that to be successful you need to mirror successful people. That just leaves you never finding out how amazing you could be in your own right. Why not be the best you possible and smile at others being the best of themselves?
I've been on so many courses and seminars that say pick a successful person, do what they do and you'll achieve the same success. That's true to the extent that successful people on the whole tend to do key/universal things that help, but more often than not in following this advice we get caught up in the personality rather than those key things we all ought to be doing. We end up wanting to be that person rather than wanting to do what they do, and they're two very different things. Seems that jealousy is wanting wholesale what the other peson has, without doing the work or putting in the hours. We sit around whinging and saying, why can't that be me, why don't I have that? As if we expect it all to simply fall into our laps just because we think we deserve it. The sad fact is that you can copy all you like and still not gain the success the other person has. Short of working hard, writing lots of good, well produced books in popular genres and letting your audience know they're there, the other bits of the equation are so individual you'll never copy them.
I bought John Locke's book on how to reach an audience of a million but was left at the end with the over riding feeling that yes, it's a system that worked well for him, but even if I wrote similar books on a similar schedule, I'm missing one essential ingredient, which is, I'm not John locke. I don't have his background, his way of thinking. These copy me and you'll get what I got how to books might as well come with a mask of the author to wear, because that's essentially what you're doing. Putting on their mask and trying to be them. The moment I read that book, which implies twitter is the god of all social media, I read of another author who hit the top and hardly tweets or blogs. Goes to show there isn't a magic wand or forumla that will work for us all. Every story is different, every author has their own X factor which is their potential for greatness.
It's up to us to look at ourselves and decide what our personal X factor is and how we can use that to sell books. And I think, instead of casting jealous eyes on others, we need to look at our own books with enough pride to propel us out into the market place with a banner that says, I wrote a great book, too, take a look. What other authors do and achieve helps only in that it might set a trend for a genre or open up a new market place, but really it has very little bearing on our own personal stories. They'll always be ours, made by us. Struck me that another author's personal story could be down to something as individual as the way they look, how they smile or talk.
We've all got our own personal X factors. Find out what that is and you'll be on your way. There's room for us all, no matter how big or small.
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