Self-Sabotage Pitfalls: Impatience
Arg. This has me written all over it. The art of patience and how important it is in the indie author biz.
I can't even say, "This is something I struggle with in my author career," because impatience is something I struggle with in ALLLLL aspects of my life. I've been actively toning my patience muscles for a while now, and while I've gotten a lot better, it hasn't been easy.
I've learned why patience is one of the most critical practices as a business owner and writer the hard way. Here are a few of them...
Impatience leads to making assumptions, and assumptions kill (as Jack Reacher would say). They can be detrimental or at least very scarring when they backfire, whether you're publishing a book or making hasty business decisions.
Not giving your manuscript a final read-through or at least run it through a grammar checker before uploading the final version for publication (after you've made a bunch of changes to what was already edited and proofread). It took me a few books before I actually learned my lesson. I'm dyslexic, so the last pair of eyes on my work should never be my own.
If you're impatient, you might miss an important detail, especially in time-sensitive situations.
Not double- and triple-checking that you have the correct manuscript uploaded before your Amazon preorder is locked for publishing, even though you told yourself you should. *Somehow the version that was in there and apparently had track changes from my editor was visible in the ebook too. Fun times.
If you're impatient, you're less likely to trust your gut, or ignore it completely, so be sure to stop and listen to your intuition when it's speaking to you.
When you have a feeling you need to do more character development about XYZ because your mind keeps circling back to that, but it's too much work because you've come so far. Instead, you leave it out, and all of your beta readers tell you to do the thing you ignored, adding additional work when you're up against a deadline, AND now your manuscript is different, and your beta readers have already read through it. *This is when I changed my revision process and instated an alpha reader first. The tradeoff is that the production process is longer when you do it that way.
Sometimes, in the marketing aspect of things, impatience can cost you a lot of time AND a lot of money. You keep trying new things instead of analyzing what you've already got going first. Maybe you're so set on making $1,000 a day that you have so many efforts in the works and you can't give any of them the time and focus they need in order to succeed.
Maybe you spend 3 days creating ads and then let them run for three days, and when you aren't making money, you pull them and move on instead of tweaking or waiting to see what happens when they gain traction. I don't use ads, but if I did, I would have to practice a lot of patience.
Obviously, there are numerous ways impatience can hurt you financially and emotionally, so remember to be kind to yourself. To slow down. To be thoughtful in your business and in your writing process in order to avoid some of the I should haves at the end of the day. It will help keep some of your sanity intact, too. :)