defeatism and writing advice
Someone recently asked me for writing advice, and one of the questions was a fear that the self-publishing market had become too saturated for anything to sell.
That’s a fear you see a lot on various writing forums and blogs, especially from younger and newer writers.
You don’t need to worry about it. Why? Well, everything is saturated, and everything has always been saturated! Go to the library and you’ll have more free books than you can read in a lifetime. If you’d prefer ebooks, go to Project Gutenberg and you can spend the next twenty years reading through the classics. Go on YouTube and you’ll have more free videos than you can watch in a lifetime. Get a TV antenna and you’ll have free entertainment for 24 hours a day. If you pay $12 a month for Netflix, you will have more TV shows and movies than you can watch.
So there’s all this free entertainment out here, and people still pay for HBO and buy books. To flip it on its head, there’s all this free entertainment out there, but people keep making more.
Or to use a more practical example, there are thousands of restaurants in the United States. The market is saturated, but people keep opening new ones.
Of course, those restaurants might fail, which I think is the root of “the self-publishing market is saturated” fear. I’m sure there is a fancy psychological term for this, but I think it’s sort of a pre-rationalization of failure before it even occurs. It’s a form of self-defeatism, and it’s best to avoid it.
Granted, there’s a difference between self-defeatism and taking foolish risks. Ruthless self-honest is necessary. If you write a book, self-publish it, and on one reads it…well, so what? No one died. No one was even hurt. A restaurant fails and the owners and the backers can be out hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s hard to to do that with a self-published ebook.
And failure can be valuable too. The things you learn from it can be more important than what you learn from success.
Concrete example: a couple of years ago I had the chance to write a tie-in novel for a game. It seemed like a big opportunity at the time, but I didn’t want to abandon my other self-publishing projects. So I forced myself to squeeze in the game novel, to write it on the side while I finished up other things.
Unfortunately, the game deal was canceled and the project fell apart. The tie-in novel will never see the light of day.
But! I had never before worked on two novels at the same time. With that new skill, I started working on two of my own novels at once, which is why the CLOAK GAMES series exists, and why I’ll be releasing a science fiction series later this year. Both series got their start as things I wrote on the side while my main focus was elsewhere.
In fact, the CLOAK GAMES books at present are some of my more popular books in the US according to Amazon:
And the CLOAK GAMES series would not exist if not for that failed game tie-in.
If you want to be a writer but are talking yourself out of it, I think THE SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR MINDSET by Joanna Penn is a good book to read. It’s the sort of book I would have found really useful twenty years ago, and addresses a lot of the self-defeating mindsets that plague newer writers.
-JM