by Nina Amir
Many aspiring authors think all they need to produce a successful book is an outstanding idea, a sound story structure and a well-crafted manuscript. Indeed, these elements sometimes suffice, but more often creating a bestseller or a book with above-average sales involves much more.
It can involve promotion, social networking, speaking, technology, and business savvy. Many writers don’t want to wear all these hats, while some are willing to wear one or two. Even those who are willing to wear quite a number of them can find themselves struggling…just not getting the results they desire.
Attitude Affects Success
The most successful people in the world will tell you that their attitude helped them achieve their goals. If you want to succeed as an author, in addition to a good idea and writing skill you need what I call an Author Attitude.
Author Attitude consists of four primary characteristics:
- Willingness
- Optimism
- Objectivity
- Tenacity.
I have arranged the four characteristics of Author Attitude to create an acronym to help you remember them. It spells a word that recently has come into common culture: WOOT!
You may possess one or more of these characteristics, or you may not possess any of them at all. You may feel you display one characteristic more strongly than another or need to strengthen one even though you possess it.
W O O T
Let’s look at why WOOT applies so well to achieving success as an author.
“Woot” originated as a hacker term for root (or administrative) access to a computer. However, the term coincided with the gamer term, “w00t.” According to the Urban Dictionary, “w00t” originally was a truncated expression for “Wow, loot!” common among players of Dungeons & Dragons. The term passed into Internet culture and then into common culture as a term of excitement.
It works well for our purposes. Let’s look at the reasons why.
Hack Into Your Mind
First, your computer is your mind. You are the administrator of your own computer. Yet, if you are like most people, you probably don’t take advantage of that fact often enough. You leave your mind unlocked, able to be filled with spam and viruses—limiting beliefs and negative thoughts. These make it hard to focus on anything that serves you and moves you toward your goal. In fact, they lower your self-confidence, bring up fears and generally cause you to falter along the path to authorship. They affect your attitude in negative ways as well.
Second, your attitude is based upon your beliefs and thoughts, or ideas about a thing, experience or situation, such as writing or publishing your book. If your thoughts and beliefs tend to focus on the negative, your attitude will be negative. Since attitude affects behavior, or how you choose to act, you will have trouble performing actions that support you becoming a successful author. Your actions, of course, determine your results.
Like many creative types (and many people), writers tell me they believe, or think, they:
- aren’t good enough
- don’t have anything to say
- won’t get read
- will fail
- aren’t willing to build platform
- don’t want to promote
- are afraid of success
- are afraid of failure
- don’t know how to manage social networks (and don’t want to get involved)
- will get rejected
- will get criticized
- won’t have enough to say
These are just a few of their limiting beliefs and negative thoughts. Maybe you share one or more of them.
Third, if you access your own computer, your mind, you possess one of the primary keys to successful authorship. You then can hack into your mind, discover the thoughts and beliefs that hold you back, and change them. You want to rid your mind of the spam and viruses because they muck up and infect the whole system!
Awareness alone can set you on a new path. Remaining unconscious of how your mind controls your attitude, however, keeps you stuck. If your current behavior isn’t helping you achieve your goals as an author, it’s time to look at the cause. As the adage goes, “Your current habits have only helped you achieve your current level of success. To achieve a higher level of success, change your habits.” To do that, you need to look at the root cause—hack into your mind and determine what is affecting your attitude.
The Results of Hacking into Your Mind
When you discover the limiting beliefs and negative thoughts that affect your attitude, you begin to see how these affect your behavior (your habits). If you then change these using any number of techniques available, such affirmations, coaching, therapy, meditation/visualization, or clearing, you will see your results will change as well.
This could result in something akin to the gamers' usage of WOOT. As your results change, hopefully you will become a successful author, one that produces many marketable books that sell to publishers, if you like, and to readers. If so, you could start gaining some loot, and that might cause you to exclaim, “WOOT!”
Even if becoming an author doesn’t result a huge influx of money, if you manage to get your book published and sell an above average amount, you will be excited, right? That’s reason to exclaim, “WOOT!” Or if writing and publishing a book was simply on your bucket list and you accomplished that goal, you can shout, “WOOT!”
These are good reasons to hack into your mind, change those beliefs and thoughts, get an Author Attitude, and help yourself become an author. Remember, it’s not just one thing that helps you succeed. It’s many; attitude is one of them. So why not add it to your author tool kit?
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Nina Amir, author of the bestselling How to Blog a Book: Write, Publish, and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writers Digest Books) and The Author Training Manual: Develop Marketable Ideas, Craft Books That Sell, Become the Author Publishers Want, and Self-Publish Effectively (Writers Digest Books), transforms writers into inspired, successful authors, authorpreneurs and blogpreneurs. Known as the Inspiration to Creation Coach, she moves her clients from ideas to finished books as well as to careers as authors by helping them combine their passion and purpose so they create products that positively and meaningfully impact the world. A sought-after author, book, blog-to-book, and results coach, some of Nina’s clients have sold 300,000+ copies of their books, landed deals with major publishing houses and created thriving businesses around their books. She writes four blogs, including Write Nonfiction Now and How to Blog a Book, self-published 12 books and founded National Nonfiction Writing Month, aka the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge.
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