Publetariat

Readers to Books/Books to Readers––Part One: How to find Books in the Kindle Store

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This post, by M. Louisa Locke, originally appeared on her site on 11/5/13.

I have spent an enormous amount of time on this blog giving advice to authors on how they can get their books discovered by readers. But the other day, as I read a post by Mike Shatzkin entitled Finding your next book, or the discovery problem and fumed over his statement that looking for books online is more difficult than it is in a bookstore, I had an epiphany. If this man, who spends his life giving publishers advice on how to sell their books, doesn’t know some of the fundamentals of how readers can find books in an online bookstore, why am I assuming that the average reader has any better understanding of how to discover books in the Amazon Kindle Store? Maybe I have been preaching to the wrong group. Maybe, I should be directing my advice to readers, not just writers.

Even though research suggests that nearly half of all books (print, ebook, audiobooks) are bought online, the process of browsing in an online store is still new for most of us and it can be confusing. Except for the very young, most people who buy books are familiar with how to find them in physical bookstores. So I will begin by describing the experience of browsing in a brick and mortar bookstore—say my local Barnes and Noble––and then I will compare that to the experience of shopping online in the Kindle store.

In the process I will demonstrate that all the methods of finding books to read in a physical bookstore (staff recommendations, display tables, and shelves of books organized by broad categories) exist in the online Kindle store. However, in the Kindle store there are a variety of additional methods of finding a new book to read that don’t exist in physical stores, providing the potential for a shopping experience that can be much faster and more productive.

Not surprisingly, for the authors of books, understanding the different methods of discovering books in the Kindle store is the first step to figuring out how best to make sure their books will be discovered by these methods––which is what I will address in Readers to Books/Books to Readers––Part Two.

I will be focusing on browsing (rather than on looking for a specific title or author in either kind of store since this is an entirely different matter and much easier to do.)

 

Finding books in a physical bookstore:

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on M. Louisa Locke’s site, and also see the second installment: Readers to Books/Books to Reader–Part Two: How to Sell Books in the Kindle Store with the Search Bar.

 

How To Make Your Own Free Book Cover In MS Word

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This post, by Derek Murphy, originally appeared as a guest post on Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn on 10/20/13.

Caring about fantastic book cover design is one of those non-negotiables for all authors.

Derek Murphy of Creativindie Covers is a brilliant designer and has designed a number of my own book covers. But although I personally believe in paying professionals, I’m also aware that some people want to have a go themselves, or need to because of budget restraints. This post is for the avid DIY-ers!

Most indie publishing experts will warn you against making your own book cover, with good reason: the cover design is too crucial an element to self-publishing success to take lightly.

Making your book a bestseller is hard enough without an ugly cover sabotaging your efforts.

However there are many reasons why you may be tempted to give it a shot anyway:

◾ You want to play with cover ideas so you know what you want before hiring a designer

◾ You want more control over your cover design

◾ You’re launching a small project, a short ebook or guide, and you don’t want to invest too much

◾ You’re writing a series and don’t want to pay full price for each cover design

So I’d like to share with you something I’ve been working on for a few months: the secrets of designing a bestselling book cover in Microsoft Word, and then I’ll give you some easy-to-use Word templates so you can get started quickly.

This will be a ‘crash course’ in the minimal skills you need to create a winning cover in MS Word

You’ll learn how to use Word to blend images, add layers and transparency, use font effects and space letters (kerning), strip background, and the general principles of cover design.

These instructions are for MS Word 2010, so they won’t work for everyone, but if you have an older or newer version of Word, the process will be similar. This is a long post, so you should bookmark it. You can also download a PDF version of these instructions and the source files of the cover we’re building so you can follow along; click here to get those. Ready? Let’s begin.

 

Finding and choosing the right pictures

The quality of your book cover will mostly depend on what pictures or art you use, and how well they fit together, so in this section I’m going to teach you what kind of art works the best, where you can find royalty free images, and where you can get cheap Photoshop work done (if you need it).

The RULES for picking photos:
1) Simple is better
2) Needs to cause immediate emotional reaction
3) Not too busy or too many colors
4) Don’t use a GREAT picture: use the overlooked one
5) Blend and match colors

You can use a color wheel to find complementary colors (opposites/across from each other). Blockbuster movie posters usually use orange and teal (a lot of my book covers do also).

Green and purple can work also.
Unfortunately, Christmas ruined red and green, but red still goes well with black or white.

Too many colors can be distracting, so try to go for one or two main colors (if the whole background is blue, you could use yellow text to stand out…)

 

What kind of images should you choose?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Creative Penn.

 

Publetariat Observes Thanksgiving

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Publetariat staff are off in observance of Thanksgiving. We will resume our normal editorial posting schedule on Sunday, 11/30/13, at 6pm PST.

Here’s wishing best of luck to everyone who’s working hard to get those NaNoWriMo manuscripts finished, a happy and safe Thanksgiving to all our American visitors, and a joyous and memorable Hannukah to all our Jewish friends. See you Sunday!

– April L. Hamilton
Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief

6 Keys to Revising Your Fiction

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This post, by Chuck Sambuchino, originally appeared on his Writer’s Guide to Literary Agents blog on the Writer’s Digest site on 9/20/13.

1) Make sure you’re in love.

I’m not a genius, my stories are not born lovely and perfect, their language strong, their plot lean and exciting. I have to work at it—a lot. And I don’t mind, because I enjoy editing. But I know there’s a big difference between revising a story I love and revising one I’m just fond of.

Perhaps this is obvious but to me the most important factor in ensuring successful revising is to be working on a piece that has legs or emotional resonance for you. If not, you’ll probably give up long before it’s in the best shape possible.

So what’s the key to knowing if it’s love or just infatuation? I once listed all of the stories, screenplays and plays I’d written—over 30—and looked at the themes, characters and plot, and I was able to see certain patterns. Not surprisingly, whenever I loved a story and its themes and characters, I ended up revising it enough that it was perfect—or as perfect as I could make it. And that story usually resonated with others.

 

2) Start from the beginning but don’t get stuck there.

We all know the first pages of a story or novel are critical, have to be sharp, enticing, fresh—generally amazing. These are the pages when a reader (agent, editor or final reader if you get that far) says either “Yes! I’m in” or the dreaded, “Ah, maybe not.”

Because the stakes are so high it can be tempting to stay on those first pages to the point of forgetting about the rest of the piece. Revising can become a sort of trap in which you start to judge the material so much that you never finish. It’s important to know when to move on so that you can get to the end and have a completed piece to revise.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Writer’s Digest.

 

Publish Faster, Publish Less: Futurebook’s “Big Ideas”

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This post, by Porter Anderson, originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 11/26/13.

LONDON: In publishing these days, one person’s big idea is the next person’s belly laugh.

But “The Big Ideas Session” near the end of The Bookseller’s FutureBook conference in London last Thursday was intended to be the day’s most provocative event. (Of course, there were some other provocations, as covered yesterday by Roger Tagholm in Is Government the Only Force Able to End Amazon Dominance?)

In the trademark deep-pink glow of the FutureBook’s backdrop, the segment crackled with lightning glimpses of an industry still picking its way awkwardly, sometimes testily, across a treacherous digital landscape.

Faber & Faber’s Stephen Page energetically hosted a panel of eight industry figures, each of whom had a few minutes to pitch a “big idea” to the 600+ attendees at Queen Elizabeth II Centre, Westminster.

Calling the group into session, Page left no doubt that he hoped for something a bit more than a smooth ride, remarking: “To change, when you’re doing pretty well, is incredibly difficult. We must innovate in the core, in the core of our publishing.”

Adding that he’d like the session to offer particular challenges to publishing houses that still see ebooks as innovative, he said, “It’s nonsense to say publishing doesn’t innovate. Who here today will be who we talk about in 20 years?”

 

Michael Bhaskar: “Don’t Believe the Crap”

The first to take the lectern was Profile Books’ Digital Publishing Director Michael Bhaskar, who took aim at what he sees as three myths surrounding publishing.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post, which includes input from numerous industry experts, on Publishing Perspectives.

 

No, Mike Shatzkin did NOT say that publishing is spiraling down the drain

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 11/21/13.

As part of the promotion of the Digital Book World conference, I do some interviewing with the very capable Jeremy Greenfield, the editor of their blog. And Jeremy takes our conversations and chops them up into short pieces around the themes of our show. Since the focus of Digital Book World is “how digital is changing publishing”, Amazon is a topic of great interest and one we try to address in an original and enlightening way.

In my interview with Jeremy, for which he published very brief but entirely accurate excerpts, I did say that publishers would face a real selling job with authors when Amazon’s share grows by another 25% from its current base or if Barnes & Noble closed. Neither of those things is likely to happen in the next few years. If and when the day comes that one of those things does happen, not all publishers would be entirely defenseless even with today’s arsenal of capabilities. And Jeremy’s piece closes with my suggestion that publishers can help themselves by doing “digital marketing at scale, which is audience-centric in its thinking.”

Despite how this is interpreted in some circles, it does not add up to publishing “spiraling down the drain”.

Amazon is already truly disruptive and it isn’t clear to anybody but those on the inside of Amazon exactly how disruptive. I’ve written earlier that we know nothing about the used book marketplace they host and foster, which we must assume cuts into sales, particularly of bestselling books which have many copies in circulation. A recent discussion on a mailing list I’m on revolved around what we don’t know about how many ebooks are being published. Why? Because Bowker, which issues ISBN numbers and therefore helps us count the titles going into the marketplace, doesn’t necessarily get to touch (and count) titles that stay entirely inside of Amazon and therefore only use the Amazon “ASIN” substitute for the ISBN. Other ebook retailers will handle titles without ISBN numbers, but only Amazon has a large enough market by itself to make a substantial number of self-publishers work with them alone.

And now we have the anomaly of sales reporting from the AAP, once again working without totally internal Amazon IP, that suggests ebook sales are going down. Are they going down? Or are self-published titles exclusively inside Amazon taking share away from the part of the business we can see and count for ourselves and masking the ebook sales growth that is actually taking place? I have no evidence, but that strikes me as a more likely reality than that ebook sales have actually fallen year-to-year recently.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

Are Your Family and Friends Sabotaging your Writing Dreams?

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This post, by Anne R. Allen, originally appeared on her blog on 11/17/13.

Writers participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) may discover that friends and family aren’t entirely enthused by your decision to disappear into your computer for a month. (I have a secret suspicion that Chris Baty invented NaNo in order to escape those painful family Thanksgiving dinners.)

But at any time of year, some people in your life will find it difficult to relate to your passion to write. A few will even sabotage your progress, often subconsciously, but sometimes with the deliberate intent of steering you onto another path “for your own good.”

Kristen Lamb wrote on her blog this week about a minister of her church who told her she “had a better chance of being hit with lightning than becoming a published author.” And that she “needed to be an adult and pursue a ‘real’ career.”

Squelch.

What’s a new writer to do?

One thing that can help a lot is networking with other writers. That’s where blogging and social media can be helpful. Kristen’s “WANA tribe” (We Are Not Alone) is a community where writers can find mutual support. Another is Alex J. Cavanaugh’s Insecure Writers Group, which he wrote about on this blog a couple of months ago.

Online or in-person, writers’ groups can be a godsend. I’m lucky enough to live in a town with a fantastic writing community called the SLO Nightwriters. It has members at all writing levels, from fledgling first-timers to New York Times bestsellers. National organizations with local chapters like RWA, SCBWI, and Sisters in Crime can also provide welcome support.

A good writing group will also save you from the mistake so many new writers make: asking friends or family members to read a work in progress.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Anne R. Allen’s blog.

 

Why You Should Be Paying More Than $50 For Ebook Formatting & Conversion

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This post, by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton, originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog on 5/20/13.

I just posted this in response to a service provider who commented on my earlier post, Ebook Madness: Don’t Confuse Ebook Conversion With Ebook Formatting! In his comment on that post, this gentleman said he only charges $40-50 for the typical formatting AND conversion job, and asked if he’s not charging enough.

My answer was an emphatic YES, and I’m reprinting the full response here because I think both service providers and those who seek their services need to get a better understanding of the economics involved. Here’s my response, in full:
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Yes, you are most definitely not charging enough to either do a thorough job or earn a living wage, though I’m sure you don’t realize it.

Let’s assume you begin with an MS Word file containing 300pp, which is the typical length of a typical novel. Let’s say you charge your higher end estimate of $50 to do the formatting and conversion.

You can take $22.50 right off the top for self-employment taxes**, leaving you with $27.50. But you still have to pay income tax on that income, and even if we assume you’re in a very low bracket, say 25%, you’re losing an additional $6.88 in income tax, which means you’re really only earning $20.62 for the job—and that’s before taking out your expenses, as you should be doing before figuring your net income.

**UPDATE – several have questioned my math on the taxes, and since I know math is not my strong suit I’m willing to defer to their judgment. But even if the taxes are only $10 per $50 you get paid as a freelancer (and I’m pretty sure they’re quite a lot more than that), you’re still only earning slave wages by the time you take all the expenses, weekly hours you don’t have booked with paying work, and weekly hours you spend on non-paying but necessary stuff like billing and promotion into account.

Your electricity, internet access and software aren’t free. Neither is the cell phone you probably use sometimes for communicating with clients. But I’m fairly certain you’re not taking these items, or the taxes, into account because if you were you’d realize you’re barely earning minimum wage on each job.

Getting back to those 300 pp…let’s assume you spend two hours reviewing the MS Word file and making your formatting changes. Even if you use a bunch of scripts or other automated processes to do the formatting changes, you MUST at least LOOK at every single page to be sure you haven’t missed anything that needs to be reformatted to be ebook -compliant. Two hours only allows your 120 minutes total for the job, or 24 seconds per page to review each page AND make any additional formatting changes as necessary. If the MS Word file you’ve been given is filled with lots of funky and inconsistent Styles and/or formatting, the job will take even longer but again, you have to at least look at EVERY SINGLE PAGE to know if this is the case.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on the Indie Author Blog.

 

10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained

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This post, by Brad Templeton, originally appeared on Templetons.com.

Note that this is an essay about copyright myths. It assumes you know at least what copyright is — basically the legal exclusive right of the author of a creative work to control the copying of that work. If you didn’t know that, check out my own brief introduction to copyright for more information. Feel free to link to this document, no need to ask me. Really, NO need to ask.

1) “If it doesn’t have a copyright notice, it’s not copyrighted.” This was true in the past, but today almost all major nations follow the Berne copyright convention. For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not. The default you should assume for other people’s works is that they are copyrighted and may not be copied unless you know otherwise. There are some old works that lost protection without notice, but frankly you should not risk it unless you know for sure.

It is true that a notice strengthens the protection, by warning people, and by allowing one to get more and different damages, but it is not necessary. If it looks copyrighted, you should assume it is. This applies to pictures, too. You may not scan pictures from magazines and post them to the net, and if you come upon something unknown, you shouldn’t post that either.

The correct form for a notice is:

“Copyright [dates] by [author/owner]”

You can use C in a circle © instead of “Copyright” but “(C)” has never been given legal force. The phrase “All Rights Reserved” used to be required in some nations but is now not legally needed most places. In some countries it may help preserve some of the “moral rights.”

 

2) “If I don’t charge for it, it’s not a violation.” False. Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in court, but that’s main difference under the law. It’s still a violation if you give it away — and there can still be serious damages if you hurt the commercial value of the property. There is a USA exception for personal copying of music, which is not a violation, though courts seem to have said that doesn’t include widescale anonymous personal copying as Napster. If the work has no commercial value, the violation is mostly technical and is unlikely to result in legal action. Fair use determinations (see below) do sometimes depend on the involvement of money.

 

3) “If it’s posted to Usenet it’s in the public domain.” False. Nothing modern and creative is in the public domain anymore unless the owner explicitly puts it in the public domain(*). Explicitly, as in you have a note from the author/owner saying, “I grant this to the public domain.” Those exact words or words very much like them.
 

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Templetons.com.

 

Quitter, Quitter

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This post, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing on 10/13/13.

I was on Kindleboards reading about the reaction to my last blog post where I shared my numbers.

During the discussion, someone brought up all the writers who have given up. It reminded me of a blog I wrote back in 2005, called Quitting. It’s worth reading. Go do it. You might also want to check out the comments, because I drop a lot of my philosophy about what it takes to succeed. Keep in mind, when I wrote this, I was netting about $25k a year writing.

I realize some may consider that successful, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy me. And it’s a big part of the reason I kept working my butt off.

I can now earn $25k in two weeks, or sometimes in a single week.

So, has my attitude changed since 2005? Do I think differently now?

I’ve said for years now that ebooks are forever, and forever is a long time to find your audience. It took me twenty years, from writing that first novel to making good (not great) money.

Are you willing to work for twenty years without pay? Without success (whatever your definition of success is)? Are you willing to keep at it, keep trying, keep learning, keep experimenting, when you may not have anyone to encourage you but your dog?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

FBI 101 for Crime Fiction Writers: Interview with Scott Nelson

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This post, by A. M. Khalifa, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 11/19/13.

Scott Nelson is the film industry’s leading technical expert on all matters FBI. Most recently he was Clint Eastwood’s main point of reference on J. Edgar, the historic biopic of the FBI’s founder. A former and highly decorated marine, Mr. Nelson rose to head the FBI’s public affairs office where he was instrumental in the creation of America’s Most Wanted, as well as convincing the filmmakers of the Silence of the Lambs to shoot on location at the FBI’s academy in Quantico, Virginia.

I sat down with Scott for a coffee and a chat near Westlake Village in Southern California, where he now runs a global security and risk management firm. I wanted to glean some valuable advice for crime fiction writers. This is is the first of a two-part interview. Part two will be posted on Saturday, November 23.

 

A.M. Khalifa: During your time heading the FBI’s public affairs office, did you ever work with crime fiction writers, and if so, what are they typically trying to research?

Scott Nelson: Yes. Typically crime fiction writers want to know how it works in the real world and then how those basic techniques and tactics can be tweaked to create more interest and more drama. Everyone is looking for that new story, and as times change that new story will always emerge. Plus, old stories can be retooled to present new facts and new views.

 

AMK: As an FBI insider, what is the number one misconstrued notion about the Bureau that you would like to set the record straight on here, once and for all?

SN: That the FBI always screws over the “locals” (local and state law enforcement). Simply not so. The Bureau works hand in glove with state and local officers and provides ongoing valuable training, research, services and support. In fact, many joint operations are run every day.

 

AMK: However, I think readers and viewers LOVE it when the smart, omnipotent FBI agent slights the incompetent locals and pulls rank and jurisdiction. They feel secure of a positive outcome when a favorably drawn FBI agent is involved. Do you agree?

SN: Yes, but likewise there is a tendency to show cops merely as doughnut eaters. And therefore, many cops – particularly suits in the front office – are quite defensive and constantly trying to prove their worth. I’ve been blown off on many occasions by locals who do resent the FBI and their own lot in life.

 

AMK: How accessible is the FBI as an organization to independent authors reaching out to it for technical information, and what specific mechanisms exist to deal with such requests?

 

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on the Crime Fiction Collective blog.

 

NaNoWriMo Dialogues: “On Doubt, Talent, Failure, And Quitting “

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 11/18/13.

You: I made a terrible error.

Me: You tried to punch that coyote again.

You: No.

Me: You huffed wood varnish and got lost in the mall.

You: No. Well, yes, but that’s not the mistake I’m talking about.

Me: You ate all the bacon again.

You: That’s not a mistake. That’s me fulfilling my manifest destiny.

Me: It’s a mistake because when you eat all the bacon, I turn into Bacon Hulk and I rip your puny form to Kleenex ribbons out of sheer, baconless rage.

You: I see your point. I didn’t eat all the bacon, it’s still downstairs, chillax.

Me: Nobody says “chillax” anymore. The new word is “coolquilize.”

You: JESUS GOD WHATEVER can I tell you my mistake now or what?

Me: Bleah, sure, go for it.

You: I’ve been reading other people’s work as I write.

Me: Reading is fundamental. Writers who don’t read are like screenwriters that don’t watch movies, like architects who don’t strop up sexually against elegant skyscrapers, like professional killers who do not admire the work of other professional killers from the telescoping lens of a distant hijacked drone. Writers have to read. It is an essential spice to this broth we’re brewing. Writers who don’t read are missing their souls.

You: Fine, yes, yeah, I just mean — some people have been posting their NaNoWriMo projects. Like, snippets or whole sections and, hoooo heeee unnnnh — *rocks back and forth while massaging temples* — I have discovered through this that I am not good enough.

Me: Oh, god, more of this again. Okay. Huddle up. Writing a story is in some ways an act of obstacle management and you’ve gotta manage all the obstacles accordingly — jump all the fences, hop all the ditches, elbow all your enemies right in their spongy tracheas. One of the biggest obstacles is self-doubt. Doubt is the vampire you invite into your house. Doubt is bedbugs and hobos — it fucking lingers, man, like the scent of cigarette smoke in your curtains, or the odor of cat piss in your carpets.

You: So, what do I do about doubt? It sounds like a demon. AN ACTUAL DEMON THAT REQUIRES SOME KIND OF EXORCISM IS THERE A BOOK A HOLY BOOK PLEASE HELP.

Me: The book you’re writing is the holy book.

You: Wuzza?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on terribleminds.

 

14 Ways To Tick Off A Writer

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This post, by Rebecca Makkai, originally appeared on Ploughshares on 11/11/13.

“I love throwing rocks at tigers in the zoo,” you say, “but now that the weather’s cold, I need an indoor activity.” Look no further. Writers are fun and easy to annoy. Minimum effort, maximum rage. Try these 14 simple tricks, and you might never need to pay for the Large Cat House again.

1) Go on Amazon and give the book one star because “the plastic wrapping was slightly ripped when it arrived from the seller.”

2) Ask what the new book’s about. After the writer answers, say, “Oh, that sounds exactly like that T. C. Boyle book that came out last year. Have you read that? You have to read it! Yours sounds exactly like it!”

3) When interviewing an author on the radio, make sure to give the wrong title for her book. Just wrong enough to show you care. Is her book called Please Call Home? You might call it Please Come Home or The Homecoming or Home is Calling. Sit back and watch while the author figures out how to correct you on air. Good times!

4) Email saying you want to be a writer too, and you notice the writer lives in the same city, and you wonder if he could spare two hours sometime soon to have coffee and fill you in on how this whole writing thing works. Do not give any indication that you have ever read the writer’s work or care about it in any way. Do not address the author by name. Just cut and paste.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Ploughshares.

 

Book Marketing: Generosity, Social Karma And Co-opetition

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This post, by Joanna Penn, originally appeared on her The Creative Penn blog on 11/10/13.

One of the reasons we write for publication is for other people.

We either want to help them through information or inspiration, or we want to entertain people and perhaps make them think.

Considering marketing in the same way can help you, because it focuses on the other person, the customer, not on you. That serves several purposes:

◾ It makes you think about what they really want

◾ It takes the focus off you and stops you feeling self-conscious

◾ It will give you ideas as to what to share

◾ It will help you to connect with a community

 

Generosity and social karma

The word karma implies that you get back what you give, and I believe this is true in the social environment. If you give, you will receive.

Being useful, helpful and generous is satisfying to you personally, but also builds up a bank of goodwill. When you later mention that you have a book out, or people are attracted to you because of your generosity, and see you have books/products available, they are more likely to buy.

This isn’t woo-woo. It’s based on the science of influence. Read Robert Cialdini’s book ‘Influence’ and you’ll understand that the principle of reciprocity is one of the keys to influencing people’s behavior. I believe that we can utilize such principles, but we don’t have to do it in a scammy or unethical manner.

Co-opetition

Co-opetition is all about the idea of cooperating with your perceived competition so that both parties benefit. When there is a congruence of interests, cooperating together can create greater value than acting alone.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Creative Penn.

 

13 Things Mentally Strong People Avoid

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While this article by Cheryl Connor originally appeared on Forbes.com (on 11/18/13), and is primarily intended for businesspeople, everything in it is applicable to author-publishers too. We struggle with the same issues of self-doubt, motivation and changing marketplace demands just as much as any other businessperson.

For all the time executives spend concerned about physical strength and health, when it comes down to it, mental strength can mean even more. Particularly for entrepreneurs, numerous articles talk about critical characteristics of mental strength—tenacity, “grit”, optimism, and an unfailing ability as Forbes contributor David Williams says, to “fail up.”

However, we can also define mental strength by identifying the things mentally strong individuals don’t do. Over the weekend, I was impressed by this list compiled by Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker, that she shared in LifeHack. It impressed me enough I’d also like to share her list here along with my thoughts on how each of these items is particularly applicable to entrepreneurs.

1. Waste Time Feeling Sorry for Themselves. You don’t see mentally strong people feeling sorry for their circumstances or dwelling on the way they’ve been mistreated. They have learned to take responsibility for their actions and outcomes, and they have an inherent understanding of the fact that frequently life is not fair. They are able to emerge from trying circumstances with self-awareness and gratitude for the lessons learned. When a situation turns out badly, they respond with phrases such as “Oh, well.” Or perhaps simply, “Next!”

2. Give Away Their Power. Mentally strong people avoid giving others the power to make them feel inferior or bad. They understand they are in control of their actions and emotions. They know their strength is in their ability to manage the way they respond.

3. Shy Away from Change. Mentally strong people embrace change and they welcome challenge. Their biggest “fear”, if they have one, is not of the unknown, but of becoming complacent and stagnant. An environment of change and even uncertainty can energize a mentally strong person and bring out their best.

4. Waste Energy on Things They Can’t Control. Mentally strong people don’t complain (much) about bad traffic, lost luggage, or especially about other people, as they recognize that all of these factors are generally beyond their control. In a bad situation, they recognize that the one thing they can always control is their own response and attitude, and they use these attributes well.

 

Click here to read the rest of the article, which includes 9 more things mentally strong people avoid, on Forbes.