The Fastest Way to Become a Better Author consists of 3 Steps
- Accurately Seeing Where You Are
- Accurately Assessing How Strong You are in the 3 Core Skills
- Setting SMART Goals and Immediate Commitments and hitting them
A Quick Note before we go into these
It is Almost Always Better To Choose ‘Improve Your Product and Skills’ over ‘Find a Shortcut or Trick’
A lot of the focus in the eBooks and Publishing ecosystem, unfortunately, is around
- How to find shortcuts using some new fangled advertising method
- How to leverage shortcuts and tricks
- Tapping into some ‘Flavor of the Month’ new marketing secret
The eternal quest for ‘The Easy Button’ of Publishing Success
It is so compelling – the thought that you can skip on becoming a very good writer, you can skip on market research to find the right market, you can skip on learning marketing
However, those 3 Core Skills cannot be ignored or evaded. You must learn them
Stuff that actually works is
- Creating a Better Product
- Becoming a Better Writer
- Understanding Your Market Better
- Finding a Better Market
- Becoming a Better Marketer
- Improving your Return on Investment for Your Marketing Budget
- Finding Marketing Channels that will still work even after other authors find out about them
- Writing More Books
This post and our entire blog and website focus on – things that are eternal and Will Always Work
Most ‘short cuts and tricks’ either do not ever work, or work only for a short duration
Accurately Seeing Where You Are
The first step if you want to be truly successful is to See Reality As It Is (courtesy Jack Welch)
See Reality As It Is, not as it was, or as you want it to be
- How good is your writing?
- How many books did you sell last month?
- How many books did you sell last year?
- What was your net take home income from books last month?
- What was your net take home income from books last year?
- What percentage of the readers you send to your book pages actually buy the book?
- What percentage of the readers that buy your book actually add a review?
- What percentage of the readers that buy your book actually buy 1 or more of your other books?
- What things do you measure? How accurately do you measure them?
The first step if you want to improve, is to See Reality As It Is and Accurately Assess Where You Are
And to see where you are – you must measure everything you can
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
Accurately Assessing How Strong You are in the 3 Core Skills
After you have accurately assessed where you are, you need to determine how strong you are in the 3 Core Skills
- Knowing What to Write
- Writing Very Well
- Marketing Very Well
What The 3 Core Skills are (a very basic post)
Levels of Mastery of the 3 Core Skills (absolutely vital to understanding The 3 Core Skills)
Please read that 2nd post on Levels of Mastery of the 3 Core Skills and accurately assess what skill level you are at, for each of the 3 Core Skills
You absolutely must make sure you assess your skill levels accurately. Be honest with yourself
It is better to be a bit conservative and underestimate your skill level, than to be over optimistic and think you’re already Stephen King
Setting SMART Goals and Immediate Commitments and Hitting Them
Deciding Where You Want to Go
After
- Figuring out where you currently stand
- Assessing your Skill Levels on the 3 Core Skills
You have to decide
- Where do you want to go
- What skill level you need to reach to get there
- How much time do you need/have to get there
After you do this, you will need to set Smart Goals and Immediate Commitments
SMART Goals
What are SMART Goals? They are goals that are
- S – Specific. Your goals must be very specific with precise details. If you have a goal of buying a house with your author earnings, you must be specific about what the house costs, where it will be located, what the monthly mortgage would be, how soon you want to buy it outright, what it will look like, what refurbishments you would do, etc
- M – Measurable. Your goals must be measurable. They must be something where on any given day you should be able to say – I have reached X% of my goals. Based on it taking me 212 days to get to X%, I am reaching 100% within the next 345 days
- What Gets Measured Gets Managed
- A – Attainable. A goal must be attainable. Your Dream house should not be Buckingham Palace. It should be something which you can ATTAIN from your Author Earnings and Author Career
- R – Realistic. A goal must be realistic and relevant. So setting a goal that you want to own every penthouse in Manhattan is not really realistic (or sensible). Nor is it to want to own something that the owner is not willing to sell. Set a goal that is realistic and relevant so that it has a stronger pull than something which you consciously or subconsciously know is impossible and therefore will not motivate you
- T – Time Bound. There must be a time limit i.e. by when do you want to achieve your goal
- This might be the most important criteria
- Setting a Goal of – I would like to be earning enough to buy a new house – makes no sense until and unless there is a timeline attached. Do you want to earn enough to buy a new house in 10 years? in 100 years?
- Make each SMART goal very Time Bound with a deadline
Every goal you set for your Author Career must be S M A R T
Immediate Commitments
In addition to your Smart Goals, which usually would have deadlines of 1 year to 10 years, you need to set some Immediate Commitments
- A Commitment is something you control 100%
- A Commitment is a COMMITMENT. You absolutely commit and you get it done, no matter what
- Commitments are immediate and should have deadlines of 1 month to 3 years
If your long term goal is to earn enough from your writing to buy a new house (or pay off your home mortgage) your commitments might look like
- Within 3 Months cut expenses down enough to start saving $300 more per month
- Within 6 Months write another book and set up the processes to write one very good book every 6 months
- Within 4 months learn a new skill that makes my writing better and translates into higher book sales and more reviews
- Within 1 year, save up enough to pay off all credit cards and have no debt except for my home mortgage and car loan
- Within 2 years, save up enough so that I can pay off 10% of my current mortgage and lower my monthly mortgage payments
- If you don’t own a home yet, this might be – Within 2 years, save up $50,000 towards the cost of a new home
Each commitment must be something that you control 100% and which you absolutely 100% Commit to achieving
Hitting Your Goals & Commitments
You have to make sure you measure and track the progress of your Goals and Commitments
- A Review every 3 months is critical
- An Annual Review is also critical
- Works even better if you can add a monthly review
If you really want to go all out, then add a weekly 15 minute review