What makes a writer successful? Is it the number of books he or she has in print? How many copies the individual has sold worldwide? How much money the person has made? The easiest and most incorrect answer would be that a successful writer has a string of bestsellers to attach to his or her name. This is wrong. When you are focusing on the impact your work will have, instead of how much money you’ve made, you will be a better writer. Here are some of the reasons why.
It allows you to set your own definition of success
In this day and age, having your book in print is not the key sign in anybody’s career that they’ve become successful. With the opportunities offered in self-publishing, writing e-books and selling them through Amazon, the tables have turned. Now, an aspiring author doesn’t have to knock on publishing houses’ doors and receive letter after letter of rejection.
Now, you are able to make up your own definition of success and modify it as you go along. You can set your own goals, which can be milestones that you have to reach. To start, set your own mini-goals. Every time you reach one of them, you will get closer to your ultimate goal.
Income (and lack of it) can and will control your writing
Writing is hard. It takes raw talent and a lot of hard work to become a master storyteller. If you are in it just for the income it will provide, then you need to get out before you start losing your mind. Making a living out of writing doesn’t happen overnight. May be it took months for some authors, but for others it took years.
For example, let’s say you want to write a novel. Before you start, you’ve researched the market and have realized that in the past year the market had been great for, let’s say, mystery novels, so you decide to write one. This is writing for income, but it will not help you make a living. First, because the market would be overcrowded with that genre already and second because you don’t write what you want to write. You begin to write what you think you should write. And that’s the moment when fairy tales go bad.
Impact will give you the freedom to not censor your writing
Once you start writing what you should write, instead of what you want to share with the world, you’ve begun to censor yourself. Take a risk instead. Share your thoughts with the world and see if anybody has the same worldview. If your first published piece doesn’t gather an audience, don’t worry and keep writing. The more you write, the better you get.
Focus on the impact you want to have on the reader, and decide how you want to make them feel. Before you know it, you have taken many readers on a whirl in the wildest of emotional storms and they have become your fan base. Once you have gathered your own fan base, you are free to improve your writing without having to condone to what you should be writing. The bigger the impact of your work, your fan base will increase, and therefore your income, and before you know it, through your hard work, free of outside influence, you have reached your goal to become successful.
Editor’s Note: This article was first published on e-Books India in December 2014.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/photo.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Georgina Roy wants to live in a world filled with magic.
As a 22-year-old art student, she’s moonlighting as a writer and is content to fill notebooks and sketchbooks with magical creatures and amazing new worlds. When she is not at school, or scribbling away in a notebook, you can usually find her curled up, reading a good urban fantasy novel, or writing on her laptop, trying to create her own.
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