Here's the question we all ask. What if my book sucks?
It doesn’t matter how many books you have written (like me); lalunching a book is a nail-biting time for any author. Putting yourself ‘out there’ is so very exposing.
What if everyone hates it?
What is you are seen as a fraud?
What if it fails and nobody even notices it?
These are the very real questions every author faces. Trust me I represent many top authors and they still feel this. It happens….and even to the best of us. Take a look below at a Goodreads review for superstar Bloomsbury author Sarah J Maas.
"Her writing is bad. It is structurally bad, the characters are written thinly and poorly it's littered with terrible clichés."
Or here’s another:
"Verdict: Poor pacing, choppy phrasing, lack of sentence variety, an excess of run-ons. All crutches of an incompetent writer, and it was suffocating to read."
But guess what? Her books have sold over 38 million copies in English alone. I think she is okay with a few bad reviews eh? And EL James of the 50 Shades of Gray fame? That book was panned critically (I think we can possibly all agree on that) but went on to become a bestseller a million times over.
Even great authors get destroyed. How about this Amazon review of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy?
"It took me a couple hundred pages of squinting hard to see the truth: there is no story."
Actually writing at all is exposing. It is far easier NOT to write. It is far easier to be one of those FB or Insta ‘cruisers’ who just watch everyone else create content.
So anyone who writes, and shares it, is brave, big and wants to make a difference in the world.
So if you want to be an author buckle up, strap on your protective armour and finish it.
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