{"id":4092,"date":"2011-11-04T03:00:11","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/?p=4092"},"modified":"2011-11-04T08:45:22","modified_gmt":"2011-11-04T15:45:22","slug":"predictor-of-author-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/04\/predictor-of-author-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Predictor of Author Success"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Welcome to Artist Entrepreneur Fridays, where we focus having a successful author career from the business and strategic perspectives. This week I have guest post from Tak Shiota, a Social Media Consultant with FriesenPress<\/a>, leading the company’s social media efforts. He also trains authors on social media strategies. FriesenPress<\/a>\u00a0is a fee-for-service self-publisher. Tak offers up a straightforward way to determine if an author will be successful. Read on!<\/p>\n

^*^<\/p>\n

Want to know how you can tell if an author is going to be successful? It’s not their sales figures, or the number of Facebook friends, or Twitter followers, or the number of visits to their blog. Those things measure current success \u2013 but what it doesn’t tell you is whether they can sustain it, whether they have a career as a writer, or whether they’ll create a bestseller one day. The best indicator is to ask an author the following question:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere do you see yourself (as an author) in five years?\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

If an author hesitates for an answer, or if they’ve never thought about it before, they probably won’t be very successful. It’s as simple as that.<\/p>\n

It’s an interesting phenomenon \u2013 because if you ask the same authors what their dreams as an author are, they might talk about making the NY Times Bestseller List, or being on talk shows, or selling a million copies. Yet if you ask them a concrete question about a specific time in the future, they’ve never thought about it. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. If you don’t have a plan on how you’re going to get from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be), you’re never going to get there. You’ll get frustrated and give up in a few months.<\/p>\n

The good news is that it’s easy to come up with a plan. Let’s say in five years you want to be a NY Times Bestseller \u2013 now work backward and ask yourself what you need to do before you can get there:<\/p>\n