This week, we have been discussing the stages of being an author. We’re going to conclude with the final stage: leveraging your strengths.
The third stage of being an author, as I see it, is a bit hard to quantify. There comes a point in every author’s career when their work, which they’ve been developing and polishing in the second stage, starts to take on a life of its own. They reach a critical mass in their audience, and suddenly, their audience is growing without them really doing anything. It’s a peculiar switch when it happens and it can be almost unsettling. People seem to be encountering your work in the wild, appearing out of nowhere as readers. When we start to see that, it’s an indication that we are approaching this third stage.
In this stage, we feel as if every book we write adds new people to our community. Every new series that we start increases people’s awareness of us. More importantly, after reading one of our books, people go on to read a second, a third, a fourth, all the way through our back catalog. This is the stage where we start to grow beyond just writing.
Remember, in the first stage, we were focusing on finishing our book and understanding what our options were. In the second stage, we were focusing on finishing a series and then repeating that action as many times as possible. Well, in this stage, we’re going to be taking all of those efforts, and we’re going to start scaling. We’re going to push out to whatever our limit is in terms of how far our writing can take us.
You might think of it as a pebble dropped into a still pond. As soon as the pebble hits, it creates a ring that expands outward, only stopping when it either runs out of momentum or it hits the edge of the pond. You might think of running out of momentum as sort of the soft ceiling, a cap on the expansion of your career. In this stage, you’re going to take actions that will allow you to scale up to that point. Those actions might include starting a social media presence, working on getting press for your new books, doing interviews, speaking events, and other ways of getting awareness about you out. It could also include things like advertising. All of these are mechanisms that will help you scale to that soft cap.
No matter how much effort you put in, you are going to hit a soft ceiling. I say soft because it’s not going to stop you forever. You can grow beyond it. It’s just going to take some specific work and new strategies you haven’t yet implemented. The first phase of this last stage is understanding where that soft cap is and exploring until you find it. This can be one of the most frustrating stages of being an author because it feels really uncomfortable to hit that limit to your growth.
That’s when we get to the second phase, leverage. Leverage is almost impossible to quantify precisely as it is going to be different every time. It might be a conversation you have with someone that changes your mindset. It might be a specific tactic that someone suggests to you or that you observe someone else employing. Regardless, leverage is something that multiplies your effort, allowing you to achieve outcomes that were previously out of your reach. When you find these things, they tend to blow those soft ceilings away. Think of it as finding a larger pebble to drop into your pond. The ripples are going to be bigger, stronger, and go further. That’s what we want to do.
In the leverage stage, we are looking for bigger pebbles. We’re looking for things that will have an outsized impact and will allow us to multiply the effect of our efforts. Once you’ve done that, you’re going to find yourself back in the first phase of this stage. You’re going to find yourself scaling once more until you hit a new soft cap. You’ll be in this stage until the day you decide to lay your pen down.
Obviously, you have to continue writing, continue practicing and developing your skill and voice. But you might think of this final stage as a cyclical one. You’ll scale, find yourself at a soft cap, and then apply leverage to break through it, allowing yourself to scale once more.
Being an author is a long journey. It takes a lot of effort and concentration. It requires incredible focus. But understanding where you are in this process, whether you’re in the first stage, the second stage, or the third stage, and which phase of each stage you’re in, is incredibly helpful. It tells you what actions you need to take in order to move forward.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/RGT5TJ0q8_E
Thanks for reading and watching.
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