These are the basic principles I’ve been teaching authors for the past six years, and almost always, the initial reaction is that I’m “a hack.” That I’m selling out, writing for the “lowest common denominator” – that I can’t have any love of literature or art that I can’t actually enjoy writing books if I do it for money that my books can’t actually be any good (even if readers love them and I get hundreds of reviews!) because I didn’t start from a place of pure joy and passion. It’s still difficult, but it doesn’t have to be terrifying. There’s still a lot to learn, but if you put your readers first and strive to entertain, educate or fascinate them – if you focus on the reading experience instead of the writing experience – you can create books readers love with passion and enthusiasm. SECOND, you can deliberately avoid most of the fear and uncertainty by treating your writing as a business. FIRST, it creates a cult of failure, which leads failed authors to take their poor sales or negative reviews and – instead of getting better – makes them tone-deaf to the market so they just keep on creating more books that don’t sell, sinking thousands of hours (and dollars) into an expensive and frustrating writing hobby. Something I learned from the business world and apply to my writing, is to produce quickly so you can fail more: because only by trying and failing a lot can you figure out what actually works.īut the conclusion that anxiety and fear is a normative and unavoidable experience, and the advice to just push through it anyway, is dangerous for two reasons.

These are not isolated concerns: If you’re determined to write and publish a book, you’re going to be doing lots of new things for the first time. What if my book gets bombarded with bad reviews? What if I never make my money back? What if I’m doing everything wrong? What if I embarrass myself? What if I’m just not good enough? For example, here’s a comment I saw recently on Facebook:

They have all these ideas, but are also filled with fear and doubt. And I get it: most writers never finish their book.

Hack version of good novel