What You REALLY Need To Know To Be a Successful Author

A Literal Literary Loser Leverages

TL;dr: In order to be a successful author you must become a totally different person from who you actually are.

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I understand your confusion: What’s a person who calls herself a Literal Literary Loser doing offering advice on how to succeed in writing?

Ah, but I haven’t always been a Literal Literary Loser. And now I am struggling not to be one again! So the advice I’m offering is from the middle of my career. The non-loser part, as it were.

My 18th book, “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region” is scheduled for publication this November.

Previously, I’ve been a New York Times best-selling author, I’ve been an Amazon best-selling author, and I’ve had books published by Avon, Dell, Simon & Schuster, Berkeley, and HarperCollins.

Aspiring authors often ask me, “Should I get a college degree in writing? Should I get an MFA?”

My answer is, “Get one if you want one, if you think it will enrich your life. But in my almost 30 years of writing professionally, no one has, ever, ever, EVER asked about my writing credentials. Everything came down to: Do they like the piece I sent them, or do they not like the piece I sent them? More importantly, do they think the piece I sent them will make them money. That’s it. Full stop. End of story.”

On the other hand, there are skills not taught in college - not taught anywhere - that I think are critical to being a successful writer. Which have very little to do with your actual writing skills.

You have to be fearless.

No, that’s not true. I’m afraid of everything. Walking into rooms full of strangers, making a phone call to someone I don’t know, saying the wrong thing, saying the right thing at the wrong time, saying the wrong thing at the right time; also, elevators (getting stuck in, getting caught in the doors), fire (burning alive), water (drowning), being underground, and looking stupid.

Did I say you had to be fearless? I meant you had to act like you were fearless.

Not in your everyday life. You can live your everyday life however you want.

But if you want to sell a book.

In order to sell a book, I had to get over my fear of making unsolicited phone calls, of saying the wrong thing and looking stupid, and, eventually, of walking into rooms of people I didn’t know. (Also, there are quite a few elevators involved in publishing.)

Because if you think selling a book is difficult, marketing it is a thousand times worse.

For marketing, you need to reach out to strangers for reviews, for guest blogs, for author appearances. And you will be rejected. Over and over again. And that rejection will make you feel stupid. Especially if you ever have to interact with those people again. But you have to keep doing it anyway. If you want the chance to sell another book.

Something else you need to do to be a successful author is have a high threshold for boredom.

I have a very low threshold for boredom. I watch 3 TV shows at a time, flipping between channels. I use a Kindle instead of carrying physical books because I’m usually reading up to 5 works at a time, and lugging them all around is prohibitive. I can’t listen to audio-books because I find narration too slow and would rather read so I can skim at my own pace. It’s amazing I’ve had the same husband for almost 24 years, but he is a pretty entertaining guy. In fact, that used to be criteria for dating: Entertain me!

Promoting your book is not entertaining. Promoting your books is beyond tedious.

Promoting your book is researching book groups that discuss your genre and reaching out to them, one by one by one, copying and pasting the same email, then, if you’re lucky, scheduling a book talk and giving the same presentation. (Don’t get me wrong, I love speaking to book groups and I get something new out of it every time. Speaking to book groups is great! But telling my story over and over again can get repetitive. Talking about me? Again?)

Promoting your book also means painstakingly compiling a mailing list of readers so you can let them know about upcoming events and releases. I have a Master’s Degree (not in writing, though), and I have spent the past few weeks copying and pasting emails, then hitting “I am not a robot” ad infinitum.

So what I am saying is, being able to write well is a nice bonus, but the real secret to being a successful author (anyone who has read a best-seller and been unable to understand how the book got an agent, much less a publisher, much less millions of readers, knows that the two are not always necessarily connected) is to ignore your basic temperament, personality, and instincts, and turn into someone you’re not.

At our house, when my husband or kids go out on a job interview, the parting shot is, “Don’t be yourself!”

Because yourself is not a successful author. Someone you’re not, just might be.