4 Ways to Move Beyond Discouragement in Your Author Career

This post, by Matthew Ashdown, originally appeared as a guest post on Writer’s Fun Zone on 12/2/11.

Welcome to Artist Entrepreneur Fridays, where we focus having a successful author career from the business and strategic perspectives. This week I have another guest post from Matthew Ashdown, Book Promotion Specialist with FriesenPress. FriesenPress is a fee-for-service self-publisher. Matthew offers 4 useful tools that we can use to overcome being discouraged during our author career. Read on!

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Many self-published authors will move full steam ahead on their marketing path in the first three months after their book is released, with their passion and enthusiasm stoking the fires of their engine. But after this initial period they inevitably start to find themselves slowing down, not selling as much, and it is here that many become discouraged. This is common once we have exhausted our inner circle’s support, and the honeymoon period is over. But how we meet discouraging events is critical in our willingness to go on.

Three years ago, I had a publishing contract with a major publishing company. I was set for book tours for the next couple of years, while my business partner and I were set to speak in front of a large audience of 10,000 people alongside one of our icons. It all came crashing down, though, just before we were set to go to print, and our contract was retracted by the publisher. Our dream seemed to slip away from our grasp. The next two years were a great challenge, but in time I was able to realize that while it lasted, that opportunity was probably one of the greatest gifts in my life. This gift helped me remember what really makes me happy and while it also brought me to writing, which truly means something to me.

In this post, I want to share how you can move beyond the discouragement that comes along the path to success.

These are things that kept me going when the future seemed bleak and little was happening.

“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” –Dale Carnegie

1) Just because you have a low number of retweets or comments does not mean that people are not reading your blog.

 

Read the rest of the post on Writer’s Fun Zone.