The Biggest Mistake New Authors Make

Okay, y'all, you know I do not use this descriptor lightly.

The worst mistake in book publishing? I am not just exaggerating here.

And y'all know me, I don't put out a lot of fear mongering episodes, at least I try not to.

But this is a real issue that I have seen almost across the board, literally in almost every single client I have ever worked with and in myself as well.

And what I want to talk about today is not only the fact that what I'm going to talk about is something people don't anticipate.

It is that what I find is that authors tend to be focused on the exact wrong issues.

Now, very often I will see kind of little technical things being the things that authors are worried about.

Is their structure strong enough? Is their voice literary enough? Have they set themselves up with the platform correctly? And those are all things that we need to dig into and explore and really figure out what we're trying to do.

But as I said in the teaser of this video, what I often find is the clients I work with are actually more than reasonable about those kinds of decisions.

oftentimes they come into the process saying, I wanna get this right, so let me slow down a bit, let me get some professionals involved, really take their advice and move forward to make sure this book is excellent, not only kind of in my eyes, but also to my readers, to any kind of industry professionals, either book industry or your work industry professionals.

and anyone else that puts their hand on this book but the problem is that there's a major major mistake that most authors make late in the process and i would say that we can really only rightly describe this as self-sabotage now before you turn off this recording before you tell yourself well i am not somebody that would self-sabotage you know I have mental health support.

I am a strong person.

I know where I want to go.

Again, let me tell you, I have seen this happen in almost every author I have worked with, and I have seen it happen in myself, in my friends, in my family.

This is something that you are not likely to escape.

And the problem I see is that authors will move all the way through the writing process and often into revision, even into editing and production, feeling pretty good about their book.

But then there is always a point where the book starts to feel real.

Up until that point, you are working on what we sometimes call a project or working on your writing, even working on drafting my memoir, drafting my first book.

but at the point that you are about to have not a drafted book not an idea of a book but an actual book well oh my goodness the way that everything will change inside our brains at that point and what i see way way way too often is authors getting to that point that sense of impending realness that sense really of danger and they will follow the impulse to do one or two or three things that really are going to hurt their book.

Now, unfortunately, oftentimes when this happens, I also find that even the strongest, best researched, most reliable, most trusted professionals often will struggle to talk authors out of whatever their preferred sabotage is.

And that makes this a recipe for tanking your book at the last minute.

Right when it's about to become real, you will have the impulse to do something that is going to make it worse.

Now, what I want to do today is I'm going to talk through the kind of five most common ways that I see this happen, because really we can pretty much encapsulate all of the moments that I have seen across my career in five categories of self-sabotage.