First and foremost as a author and a person I am not good at asking for help. I am a help and a people pleaser. I want to help others, but don't want to bother others when I need help. As an author this is detrimental to my career, we need help, we need a street team, a promo group, people to review, and share our work. Word of mouth is the best promotion. I am terrified to ask others to help me, and when I do and they say yes, I'm terrible at directing them. So I tend to do everything myself. Yet with that said, I hate promoting myself because I don't want to seem spammy. So I guess this leads to my next struggle Insecurity.
We as humans all have things we are insecure about. Now I'm going to be very vulnerable and honest here. I am insecure about almost everything. My weight, my hair, my age, my disability, my knowledge. Anyone that knows me personally, knows I am in a constant battle with myself and very judgmental of myself. This also takes part in being an author. I don't want to "bother" others, I don't know why a blogger would want to bother interviewing me or reviewing my book when there are so many amazing authors out there. So I very rarely reach out to them. I'm blown away every time someone reads my books and even more so when they take the time to review and especially like them. I write for me, I write what I like, not whats popular, not what will sell, but whatever story I have in my head. I am very proud of myself for putting my books out there for others because it faces my insecurities head on.
Now this leads to marketing, I really struggle with marketing. As I said above, I don't want to seem spammy, I don't want to "bother" others and i'm scared to approach bloggers for help. Marketing is a huge part of being an author. It doesn't matter if you are traditionally published or independently published, we need to market ourselves and our books or else no one will even know we exist. I don't have a huge advertising budget, but I do run AMS and Facebook ads every now and then. I know I need to do more, but I just don't know how. So this is probably my biggest struggle as an author. Everyday I watch how to videos, I do research and try to learn more. After all learning is how we grow and improve ourselves. One day I will figure this all out.
Now for a few things that I have learned as an author, because I want to have a few happy thoughts in this post. Although I'm a self proclaimed people pleaser, I have learned you can't please everyone. As an author, you will get bad reviews, not everyone will like your work and you know what, that's okay! I appreciate even "bad" reviews because I can learn from them. I recently revised and re-released the Embrace series. After I got my rights back from my publisher, I went through every review. I learned that I was too formal in my writing and now I make special note of that when doing my rewrites. I have also learned that there are some really amazing people out there that will help and support us authors. I've learned that it's okay to be vulnerable like this post, because we can grow fro our vulnerabilities.
My eldest daughter, is a very smart young woman and she is very good at lecturing me on life and trying to help me improve myself. I think she might have been the mom in our past life. She encourages me to take charge of my situation and put myself out there. I think that's what this post is really about, about putting myself out there. No matter what you do for a living, a hobby or are going through in life, know it's okay to put yourself out there too. We are not alone and we all have our own struggles. Thanks for reading and helping me to admit and accept mine.
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| My daughter Jorden, in NYC living her best life. |
XOXO
Charlotte
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