“You are not in competition with other writers. Readers do not want The Best Book; readers want All The Books.” - Naomi Nakashima, marketer and ghostwriter, www.helpmenaomi.com
The world of indie publishing can seem pretty cutthroat at times. At the risk of rehashing old dramas, there’s many a scandal involving review-bombing, backstabbing, badmouthing, and just plain underhanded behavior among some self-published authors when dealing with their peers. It is dishearteningly common on social media groups - a place where authors are meant to support and give feedback to each other - to see one author relentlessly denigrating another over their book’s style, structure, or content.
This is not the constructive the pacing may need revising or have you considered a sensitivity reader type of criticism, either. I’m talking the juvenile, anything I feel threatened by must be dragged through the mud into oblivion or else kind of rhetoric. Things like “no one wants to read that old plot again”, or “that style of prose is too outdated, no one will buy your book”, and other mean-spirited comments that are meant to humiliate the author instead of provide helpful feedback. The worst offenders are the editor/author types who, after mercilessly declaring you the lowest worm to ever crawl along the bottoms of writerhood, then proclaim you shall never rise from the ground again unless you procure their services in particular, often at a predatory rate.
While some of this is just genuine mean-for-the-sake-of-being-mean behavior, most of it comes from a place of fear. These sour-faced authors fear someone else’s book will sell and theirs will languish unbought. They fear they will “lose” the great publishing competition we are convinced we are in by the YouTube gurus who have cracked the secret to writing 20 best sellers a year and promise to teach you the same for only $2000 a course. “If you don’t do it this way, someone else will beat you!”
But there is no game. Authors are not in competition with other authors. Sarah J Maas doesn’t sell less books when Brandon Saunderson sells more. Even those in the same genre are not in competition with each other. A reader never buys only 1 book in their life. They buy many books. All the time. As often as they can. Some readers will only buy 1 genre, but even this is rare, and I’ve never seen an example of a reader in the last 40 years buying books only from 1 author and no one else. Readers want to read. All. The. Time.
And all you, as an author, have to do to make sure a reader wants to read your book is write something interesting to them. Focus your energy on writing the best book YOU can write, regardless of some random internet stranger’s targeted and unfounded jealousy. Good character development, interesting worldbuilding, and a progressing plot are what readers are looking for, not some nebulous “best book ever”.
So go write, and leave the mean-spirited comments in silence.
Until next time,
Stay Magical!
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