When your book release flops...
I don’t like to talk about this. In fact, we all AVOID the subject of failed releases. We rave about our books online, and then crawl up in a corner and sob. When we all hide our pain, it’s easy to feel like you are alone in your struggles.
You aren’t.
The longer you write, the greater your chance of both success and failure. With each success, our expectations rise and we put even more pressure on our novels. When they don't perform to that level, it can cause very intensive feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, and depression.
It's the ugly side of writing, and I wanted to address it in today's post because there are ways to overcome it, and Kandi Steiner recently made an awesome video to help you through the dark.
If you don't follow Kandi on Instagram, you're missing out on an awesome series she has through her IG stories, called the Writer Struggle Series. Last week she posted this video, which really spoke to me - and she was kind enough to send me the file so that I could share it with you.
Here are five tips Kandi shares for curing your release flop woes:
Look for solutions. Don't give up after day one. Put a couple of weeks of work into this book. Examine your book's presentation, your marketing, your ads and look for possible issues. Experience and see if anything helps your sales.
Redefine success. Look at the positives that came from this book. Did you branch into a new genre? Write a book you are proud of? Gain new readers?
Let it go. Release your anger and frustration and move on to your next book with fresh and positive energy. Kandi recommends mediation.
Fall in love with writing again. Remember why you write. Find a new idea you are passionate about, dismiss your fears, and pour your energy into a new book.
Make a plan. When you're ready to publish again, look back at your failed release and see if you can pull any lessons from that 'failure'. Learn from your mistakes, ask others for advice, and see if you can move onto the next release with a plan in place.
That summary doesn't capture her full insightfulness and well-needed pep talk - so I encourage you to watch the full video (or save it for a rainy day when you're feeling blue).
If you're in need of another inspiration and motivational pick-me-up, I urge you to attend Inkers Con, either digitally or in person! Early Registration Discounts are now available, so if you've been looking at Inkers Con - now is the time to save your spot! Find out more about Inkers Con here!
I’d love to know ways that you recovered from a failed release. Please use the comments section below to share your experiences!
Full Transcript:
Alessandra: Hi, I wanted to dive into an important topic, which is what to do when your book flops. And flop is a very relative term, depending on where you're at. When I published my first book, I had an entirely different set of expectations than I had six books later and than I had now. So everything changes with time and something that you might see as a failure another author would be a static over in the same. Something that you might be a static over, another author might see as a failure. I was recently scrolling through Instagram and I came across a really great Instagram story by Candy Steiner. It's @candysteiner if you want to follow her. She's a very talented author. She's a friend of mine and she has a writer struggle series that she has, that she does through her Instagram story. So if you aren't already following her, I highly suggest it.
And I loved this video that she did that talks about five ways to overcome the depression and any, and the heartache that happens when your book doesn't do what you wanted it to do. So I reached out to her. She was kind enough to share it with all of you, so stay tuned. It's about to start. Just a warning, this was done for Instagram stories so it's a vertical image and it has some words and effects on it. So if it looks a little different than my other videos, that's why. Either way, the content is top-notch, I think you're really going to enjoy it, keep watching.
Candy Steiner: And we are going to talk about what to do when your release flops. So that's a fun subject. I had a personal request for this and the reason I chose to tackle it was because I recently struggled with this feeling. And so, I have a lot that I can kind of offer on it. When it comes to this subject I want to first say that I think success is relative, right? Failure is relative. It really just depends on what you've had happened to you so far, what your goals are, and what is in your definition of what success is, whether it be money or rank or how many people read it or getting a Vita signings, whatever; there are so many different levels. There's group numbers, there's Instagram numbers; success is definitely very relative. But regardless of what your goals are, I think that there are five things that I could recommend when you feel like your release has tanked. So I'm going to go over those, and then I want to hear from all of you all hold please.
Before I tell you my five recommendations for what I think you should do when you have a bad release, I wanted to share with you a personal story, because I don't want you to think that I'm like talking about this and then it's never happened to me. Because I think from the outside, looking in some things can be a little deceiving. And so I want to let you guys know that I've definitely been in this situation where I have felt like my release flopped or didn't do what I expected it to do or hoped it would do, right. And this is actually just recently happened to me with the release of What He Never Knew. This book, even though it hit number 90 on Amazon's chart, after three weeks, it has made not even a quarter of what my last release, The Wrong Game made in its four weeks, first four weeks, so very drastic down cline.
There are many reasons why I could think about like why, right? And that's the first thing I always do is I'm like, my anxiety is like why? And I'm, you know, it was the third in a series. It was teacher, student, which kind of rubs people the wrong way sometimes. There were very sensitive topics tackled in it. There were so many things that could have been the answer. But after all of that, after I kind of like went through peppering myself with why there were, you know, there were a few things I did that really helped me move forward from that. And I'm hoping it will help you, and so here we go.
So I think when a released doesn't do well, our first thing that we want to do is just give up, right. And just say, well, it sucked, it did what it did and now that's just all there is to it. But I really challenge you to, when you feel like maybe it's not doing as well as you want, whether it's by rank, by money, by you know, shares, whatever is look for possible solutions. There are a lot of things that you can try to revive a release. You can change the cover. You can change the blurb. You can do ads on Amazon, ads on Facebook ads on Instagram. You can send out your newsletters, you can ask your friends to send out newsletters for you. You can run a sale on another book in that series. Anyway, there are a lot of things that you can try to do, but that' my first step for anybody who is going through this is to not give up on it after day one.
Spend a couple of weeks putting real time and work and not just like flailing or like, half-assing it, like put in the actual time and work to figure out what could possibly be going wrong? Are people clicking on my ads, but not buying? Well then, maybe there's something wrong with the blurb. Are people not clicking on my ads? Well, maybe there's something wrong with the cover. Are people not enjoying it in the reviews? Well, maybe there's something wrong with the book, right? There's a lot of things that you can kind of think of critically to try to see if there is a solution. So that is always my first piece of advice is to look for a solution that maybe can help you turn things around.
So once you try to change up some things, you've tried some ads you've tried changing your cover, your blurb, getting the word out the best you can, and it's still not doing what you think it should; maybe it's time to kind of redefine success. Don't harp on feeling like this is a failure. First of all failure is a part of success. You cannot have one without the other. And in any entrepreneur's life, you are going to see highs and lows. It's inevitable. It will happen. Instead of beating yourself up and wondering why, and trying to, you know to say that it's a failure and I can't write any books like this anymore, I can't write ever again. I should just give up, whatever; take a moment to redefine success. For me with What He Never Knew, I wrote about diverse characters, which was a huge success to me because I think it's important, and I don't think that our books represent the world enough, the people in the world enough. So, that I was proud of that, and I reminded myself that.
I also tackled some sensitive subjects and told a story that was important to me. And so, that's another way to redefine success. I was getting messages from readers who were really connecting with these characters and saying, you understand something very personal that has happened to me. And it makes me feel so connected to somebody and I don't feel alone. That is success. So whatever it may be, maybe it's, you know, you're early on in your career. Your success might be, well, this book sold more than the last one, even though it didn't hit top 100, even though it did make me boot because of money, it did better than the last one. Or maybe it's not your best release, but you can say, you know what? I'm really proud of that story. I told I did something different. I did something nobody else is doing. Or I went with a cover that was really awesome. Whatever, you know there are so many things that you can find within your book. And at the end of the day, I'll tell you what my boyfriend told me because he's just a freaking amazing human.
He was like, this is not a failure, you wrote a book, you wrote a book and edited it and you published it. He was like, do you know how incredible that is to someone who is like outside of this world that has like, you sat down and wrote words and made it come to life and you didn't give up and you didn't let writer's block stop you and you wrote a book. So if you ever are feeling this way, just remember that you succeeded before you even hit the publish button because you wrote a freaking book. You boss-ass bitch. So yay, you
All right, now you're going to get into the really hard parts. This is hard part number one; it's not as hard as my next piece, but you've got to somehow let go of all your feelings of anxiety and fear and failure that are centered around this release. My top recommendation for how to do that is to meditate. I'm a big, big, big avid proponent of meditation. Download the calm app, C A L M or Insight Timer; both of those are my favorites to use. Deepak Chopra or however you pronounce his name. He's also a really great guy to listen to if you want some guided meditation. But even if you don't want to like full on meditate, just sit and hold your book and close your eyes, and for 10 minutes, put on a timer, I want you to hold your book and I want you to breathe.
You can cry. You can think about all of the reasons that you have floating around your head for why maybe didn't do well or all those things that you're harboring as far as like, you know, the sense of failure that you feel. But I want you to imagine them as like clouds in the sky and you're laying on your back and you're watching them all float by. Don't stare at one too long. Don't harp on it. Don't focus on that. I want you to acknowledge it and then let it go, acknowledge it, let it go. This is a really important step and I truly truly recommend this for anybody. Because if you just try to keep going, keep going, keep going; you're going to crash. Or you were going to deal with some of the worst anxiety of your life when you try to write again, after feeling like you failed. So this is really important, okay? Super important step. Let go.
So after you let it go, the reason I have that as part of my recommendation is because for me, probably for many of you, and if you've not experienced this yet, maybe for some of you in the future, one of the biggest things that happens after you feel like you've failed is that you develop a fear of doing that thing again, right? This is normal. This is just human nature, because it's like, if you put your hand on the stove and it burns the out of your hand, you're not going to put your hand on a stove again, right? So same thing, it's a mental, it hurt you. This thing hurt you on a very deep level and made you feel achy bad things and so you don't want to do it again. That's why there are many more people who give up. Then there are people who succeed by sticking with it because it's easier to give up, but you're not going to take the easy way out, you're not, because you're a fucking bad-ass. So what you're going to do is you're going to fall in love with writing again. You're going to remember why you write in the first place and you are going to get on your laptop or pick up your pen or get out your dictation, and you are going to write something that you love and care about and want to write. And any time that these fears start to creep into your head and you hear it's like, "What's the point; it's just going to fail anyway." I want you to just let it go write it out. No one cares what you have to say.
That's a lie. No matter what you do, it's going to fail. Put it out. This sucks because you don't know what you're doing anymore. Get it out of there, okay. Go back to... that last time we talked about writer's block, go back to those things that work for you. Put on music, take a walk, take a bath. Talk about your plot to people. Talk about your fears to people and get them out and journal. Whatever you've got to do, but you have to re-find, re-fall in love with writing and with this process. Because if you don't love it, if you start to hate write, if you start to write with like this fury and this, like, I'm going to prove them wrong, or I have to succeed, I can't stop. I have to, I have to just keep writing. Then you're going to lose everything you love about what you're doing. And then what's the point like, yeah, you're kicking your ass to write for a living, but I mean, do you even want to write for a living anymore if you don't enjoy it? So, fall in love with writing again.
Okay. So, Pocket says, hi. Say hi Pocket. So, now you've done a lot of the mental work. You've done a lot of the hard part, I think, because I think a lot of it is mental. But at the end of the day when I release doesn't do well, it does all come back to the fact there's probably a reason, right? That's why we were looking for solutions in step one. But sometimes there are too many variables. You can't figure it out. Maybe there was a natural disaster and social media got tanked, maybe social media cut out altogether. Maybe there were a ton of releases that week maybe Amazon changed their algorithm. Maybe Facebook started hiding things, whatever. There are so many things, but what I do encourage you to do is when you are ready to publish again, make a plan and learn from your failed release, okay.
Look at things that maybe you didn't do great, and look at things that you feel like I absolutely did great and this worked and adapt your strategy. Because if you don't learn from your past, then, you know, history might repeat itself. And so, try to really critically think about some things that you can change, some things you can do differently to get a different result. And I really encourage you to talk to other writers in the industry when you are battling with this and just be like, these are some things I did, but I'm not really sure what to do differently. We're a community for a reason, and I think that the more people you can talk to about this, the better. If you have a husband is really supportive, if you have friends who love to talk about this stuff, get their ideas too, because they're completely out of this industry and they can give you some fresh ideas, which is great.
So that's really it for me; those are my five top recommendations. I really want to hear from you now, but before I turn the mic over to you, I just want to remind you guys that regardless of what your release does rank wise or financially, the fact that you are writing is what is most important. And you are truly already succeeding just by writing what you love. So please keep writing, please keep telling the stories that are inside your heart and know that you're not alone when you feel like you're not doing your best and that you are going to have highs and you're going to have lows. And I'm personally here to cheer you on through all of those, and I hope you'll be there for other people too.
