Professional Writing Tip: Embrace Failure, It Builds Your Success

Here’s my writing tip of the week: keep writing until you succeed. Failure is only feedback—and failure is the only way you’ll succeed.

You can’t avoid failure, so embrace it. I’m offering this insight to you because I’ve had a week of writers telling me that whatever they’re doing (self-publishing, content marketing, blogging etc) “isn’t working.”

One self-publishing author said: “I can’t see how they (she named a couple of bestselling titles) did it. They must be tricking Amazon or something, because…” She continued with a long rant about her own books’ rankings on the Kindle Store.

Please, write your stuff your way, and keep writing. That’s all you need to do: keep going.

From Achieve Your Goals: Avoid Panic With 3 Tips To Overcome Failure:

I mentor writers and marketers every day and know they’re well on their way to success when they’re excited by failure, rather than depressed.

Every professional writer’s best writing tip: keep writing

What other writers do doesn’t affect you.

You need to forge your own path. Back in the day, I had a literary agent who was forever telling me that I needed to write like a then-bestselling author. We parted ways after she sent me a long screed about some other writer’s book. Since it was obvious she wasn’t reading my stuff, her advice wasn’t worth anything.

Keep writing. Expect to fail. Moreover: be pleased about failing—it means you’re moving forward.

You build your success on failure (too true)

At times, I’m nostalgic for the good old days, before email and the web. In those days writers wrote for years, receiving endless rejection slips, and boomeranging manuscripts with “not for us!” scrawled over their cover sheets. Writers expected to suffer through five years of “not for us!”—with zero income—until they broke through.

Contrast that with today.

Today, more writers than ever before are making an income from their writing.

According to this statistic, freelance writers are making an average income of $63,000 per year. Many are making six-figure incomes. There are literally unlimited opportunities for you today. No matter how well or badly you think you’re doing, others’ success should give you confidence and motivation.

Whether you succeeded or failed today, you’ll get out of bed tomorrow morning, and write. You’ll write tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

Please take this writing tip to heart: do your writing your way

Following others’ rules gets you nowhere.

Write your stuff, your way. Try new things. Experiment. Ignore people who tell you what you can and can’t do. And most importantly of all, have fun with your writing. 🙂

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