I am a very grateful woman. With my third book coming out in 2023, completing my first YA book series, having received multiple awards recognizing RISING STAR and readers who seem to be as invested in my characters as I am, I have many things for which to be thankful. Four years ago, I set out to see if I could become a traditionally published writer and sell my books.
And I did.
This is no small accomplishment for a random mom from San Clemente. But all it takes is a few minutes scrolling through Instagram or Amazon to make me feel like an unaccomplished loser.
All thanks to comparison. Seeing how many awards or reviews another author has received or how large their readership is all it takes to make me feel like I haven’t achieved anything. Which I know for a fact is not true. But it’s always a struggle to shake that doubt.
I know other writers deal with this as does anyone who spends more than three minutes on social media. It’s an insidious, time-sucking creation that steals one’s confidence and replaces it with doubt or envy while being cloaked in the guise of creating community and building friendships. But today it is a necessary evil if you want to promote yourself, your product and reach potential customers (in my case, readers).
In a rare moment of confidence I say to you that I know my books are good. I am grateful for every reader who has read and reviewed by books. But it’s hard not to feel bad about yourself when you see books on Amazon or GoodReads with hundreds of reviews. Reviews aren’t just about those five golden stars; if a five hundred other readers take the time to post a review, it might convince a new reader that your book might be worth their time.
It’s a challenge not to feel completely hopeless sometimes.
But, before I fling myself into the void, abandoning my laptop forever and crying my eyes out in utter failure I force myself to remember one thing:
Why I write.
Do I write to make money? To get reviews? To have people pat me on the back when I walk into my favorite restaurant and cry out my name?
No.
I write because I love to tell stories. I love to build a world, believable or fantastic, where characters live. I love creating scenarios and figuring out plausible, incredible or ridiculous solutions for my characters. I love to make people laugh, or cry or feel uncomfortable. Because if I can make that connection with my readers, it means that I am not alone in what I experience in life. And that I was somehow able to communicate that feeling or experience to my reader through my storytelling. A connection is pretty amazing.
Don’t get me wrong – no one writes a book for the purpose of shoving it in a drawer. Of course I want my books to be read by millions of people if I had the choice. And I want people to like them, too. But first and foremost I love writing books. It’s living a hundred different lives or traveling unknown roads every time I sit down at my keyboard to write.
I might never be a household name or be at the top of the NYT best-selling list, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to give up. At the end of the day I am not writing for anyone else but me. I just need to stay focused on the work and not get distracted by other people’s success. Other people’s achievements do not minimize my own. But paying too much attention to what other people have accomplished robs me of my appreciation for the many blessings I have, as an author and a human, and it serves no one.
All of us have many things to be grateful for if we would stop comparing ourselves to others. Our journey is unique and should be celebrated as such.
Happy Tuesday📚