The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People

Well said. You should be a writer…

The part I shake my head at is those who absolutely HATE my tone and my message, and hound me on other message boards for it, like my observations are a personal insult to their philosophy.

Here’s what I say: Fine. I’m an ass hat. Go sell a million books and prove your way is the right way.

Oh. Wait. That would involve selling a million books to prove your way is the right way.

To be clear, I’m not saying my way is the only way, or even the best way. What I’m saying is that with hundreds of discussions with successful authors, a pattern emerges, and it generally involves them having mastered doing away with the bad habits I list.

I share that. Not because I make any money sharing it. I have no How To book to sell. No seminars to hawk.

And people get REALLY pissed. I mean, really pissed.

Go over to the Passive Voice and check out the exchange over there. Immediately after posting my blog, a flurry of comments come in from folks whose names I recognize from KB, who are vigorously changing the subject from my list of habits, to why they’re successful if they feel they are, and so on. Huh? WTFF?

Did I miss the detour to where nothing is actually about the topic, and it’s the same laborious dross that I left KB over?

Who’s got time for that?

The good news is that the market determines the merits of a particular approach. I don’t. They don’t. The market does.

The market has determined that those 7 habits won’t result in any big surge in effectiveness, as measured in this business, by sales.

People get really annoyed by that.

Yes, that’s not a popular sentiment, I can see.

I think I’ll just stick with blogs about puppies. Everyone likes puppies.

I got all that. I admit I unfairly criticized you once I went back and reread my post and yours, which took a few minutes, at which point I removed the offending verbiage, thinking I still had 25 minutes or whatever. Turns out that was a flawed assumption. Having said that, if five people saw it I’d be surprised. Five more than I’d hoped, but still. I’m quite sure you’ve also misread, or posted something grumpy, and gone back to correct it. God knows I have.

As to whether I have the way, I’ve got a pretty damned good way, but not the only way. I get testy when the KB crowd chimes in because it’s always the same ten people who try to change the discussion, and frankly, it gets more than old. So that gets my back up. That said, today I had one person remove themselves from my mailing list (one of the folks in the discussion, go figure) and forty sign up, so overall, the message seemed to be greeted with interest.

My style is no bullshit, and can be abrasive. I tell everyone that if they don’t like it, don’t read it. It’s simple. Nobody’s strapped anyone into a chair with a head brace on forcing them to read my blog. I take the attitude that if someone’s happy with the way their deal’s working out, super duper, have a nice life, go read someone else. I’d hope that’s what they do, but there’s a small but vocal cadre that finds me to be just to the right of Satan, keeping Pol Pot and Stalin company. If I said it was raining, there would be twenty rebuttals, all off-point, going after me. “Don’t be so judgmental.” “Some people like the rain.” And so on. You saw many of them on that thread. I don’t shine when dealing with those folks, nor do I try. I avoid them like the plague. I never really go read other blogs, but I was alerted that mine had been repeated, and I foolishly went and read the comments, and lo, in the first few were one dismissing it without reading it, another saying it was just more rule-mongering (which of course is to be rejected), etc. So my conditioned reaction of going for the throat engaged, and the rest is history. But I pulled back from the five finger death punch within a few minutes, and tried to abridge my responses so they weren’t as abrasive, by which point you’d already read it, so damage done.

No hard feelings. I’m pretty sure neither of our lives will be much changed by any of it.

Ed Robertson suggested that I simply say, “Make tons of money and sell shitloads of books,” instead of using the term success. I agree that’s clearer. My blog counsels how I make tons of money and sell shitloads of books, and I obviously think my approach, which works well for me, and for many of my peers, is a sound one.

I don’t want to argue the meaning of success. Again, for someone dying, one more day of breath is success. For others, running a company and flying everywhere by private jet. Still others enjoying a sunset. I’m completely uninterested in what people think is success, and only define the term here so that people clearly understand what I’m getting at when I use the term, not defining some absolute that everyone should agree in for every application in their life. Because I use it in a very narrow and defined sense, I don’t understand why people try to convert the discussion into a defense of their interpretation of the word, as opposed to saying, oh, that’s what he means, fine, for this discussion, we’ll agree that’s what the term means. Frankly, that whole parsing of terms thing comes of as defending THEIR interpretation of success, not engaging the discussion in an on-point manner. That’s what drives me batty, because it’s disingenuous, is intellectually sloppy, and most of all, hijacks the topic to their success definition discussion, not the original discussion. It feels kind of troll behaviory, frankly.

I’ve been both poor in financial terms, and poor in terms of quality of life, and being poor in financial terms sucks far worse, trust me on that. I don’t know many careers where you can do really well without putting in massive amounts of time. That leaves the ones where you don’t have to put in massive amounts of time, and they pay crap. For a reason.

Nothing in life’s free. The more something pays, generally speaking, the harder it is to get the gig. In every business I’ve ever been in, anyway.

I think that a lot of people rationalize their unwillingness to do what it takes to be successful in any field as being for their own good – the good of their quality of life, their mental health, yadda yadda. I have no problem with that. But I don’t want to be the person who has to worry about paying medical bills, or not taking a vacation I want, or not having the place I want to live or not living where I want. So I’m willing to make short term sacrifices to achieve long term results.

Again, I’m not suggesting my way is right for everyone. The plain fact is that most people aren’t willing to do the work to get outstanding results. That doesn’t make them bad people, but I think that they’re kidding themselves if they think they can still hope for the outstanding results, but only do the work that brings marginal results.

Highly successful (as I define it) people tend to be highly effective people, in that they use their time wisely, and are laser focused on what they want, and in getting it. That’s the point of my blog. They don’t waste their time, they don’t kid themselves, they don’t do a bunch of stuff that isn’t useful, and most of all, they understand that their time is precious, and thus they must use it to the best of their abilities.

Most don’t do that.

Most also aren’t successful.

By my material standards (the same ones I had three years ago, BTW) as expressed in units sold.

I hope that forever ends the debate about what success means to me, or you, or everyone and else. For a discussion to have meaning, everyone has to agree on the meaning of the terms used, so for my purposes, I’ll go with Ed’s suggestion, which is selling shitloads of books and making big money. If anyone disagrees with it, write a blog about how success isn’t about that. Because this blog is about how to do that, or at least improve your chances of doing that.

Obviously, I don’t mind arguing. Coming from a business background, and my family background, argument is like sorbet between courses.

KS free days haven’t worked for a year and a half. I raised the issue in April/May of 2012, and charted their decline through the beginning of 2013, when I pronounced them DOA.

I recommend several things: Write at least 4-5 books in a series in a popular genre. Run Bookbub ads. Put the first book permafree. Stick with a single genre that’s large enough and popular enough to support you. Blog about things that interest you. Participate in online forums, but not on author forums – in forums where the topic genuinely interests you (say, crocheting with cat hair, or best male strippers at Jalapeno Heat, or whatever), which your interests will eventually have you a popular regular, and you can slip in your author page in your signature. In other words, be yourself, don’t obviously hawk your wares, and be interesting. Beyond that, I have no secret sauce. I had to write a dozen books before I took off, and it took me every waking hour of seven months to do it. Which is still no guarantee it would ever work again, but the more books, the more likelihood someone sees one and finds it interesting.

Bluntly, the marketing and promotion you can do short of having a million bucks is minimally effective, so do the stuff that requires the least time and will give you the biggest bang for your buck. But permafree combined with a good series is the best.

I don’t give marketing advice for the following reasons: it varies from genre to genre. What works well in romance and NA (street teams, giveaways) fails miserably in thrillers, sci fi, etc. So there’s no one thing. That, and I don’t claim to be a marketing expert – and frankly, having paid several and gotten zero bang for my buck, many who do claim to be can’t support the claim. Beware snake oil salesmen.