The Midlist Indie Author Mindset: Find Sustainable Success with T. Thorn Coyle

Chapter Two:

Mindset is a popular current buzzword. But what are we really talking about when we use that word? One big portion is attitude. That’s the core of it. When we change our attitude, we can more readily change our minds. And in changing our minds, it is easier to make changes in our lives.

Now, attitude and mindset are not the only factors at play regarding success, of course. Things such as circumstances, upbringing, imprinting, trauma, systemic support, or systemic oppression impact both how we think and the realities of our lives.

That said, almost anyone can make some changes in their lives beginning with a shift in attitude.

Psychologist and professor Carol Dweck coined the terms “growth and fixed mindsets” in her 2006 book on the topic. A person with a growth mindset believes that things such as skill, talent, or intelligence improve and change with practice. A person with a fixed mindset believes these things are innate. If there’s something you aren’t good at, you’ll never be good at it.

By cultivating a growth mindset, humans are better supported in facing challenges because they believe that they can learn how to face those challenges. People with fixed mindsets tend to be more fatalistic, believing that the deck is stacked either for or against them, and that nothing substantial about their lives will ever change.

Upon examination, we can see how this plays out in our lives. My hope is that this book will help those of us with growth mindsets—what I like to call success, or possibility, mindsets—cultivate even more curiosity about what we can learn next. I hope even more fervently that those of us with fixed mindsets—or what I call defeatist mindsets—begin to find ways to shift our attitude toward greater flexibility and growth.

Action: Ask yourself: Do I currently have a growth or fixed mindset? Why? What are the clues? And is this mindset consistent in all areas of my life, or only a few?

Assessing Where We Are

The bedrock of developing a success—or growth—mindset is deciding what we want and getting out of our own way. Easy, right?

Not really. First, we have to learn to know ourselves well enough to figure out not only what we want but why and how. Not every path is for every person. We all have things we’re better at. We all have ways our brains or intuition or skill-building work. We have different personalities affected by all of the above, mixed in with early messages and training.

These differences are all keys to the maps we need to chart our own success.

We’ll explore more about what, why, and how throughout the course of this book. For now, let’s start with an assessment of our foundations. To cultivate a useful shift in attitude—or mindset—I find it helpful to get the lay of the land, so to speak.

I used to tell my students: “We make magic from where we are, not where we think we ought to be.” The less aware we are of our current condition, the more difficult it becomes to make any significant and helpful changes.

So, let’s assess where we are before getting into further discussion of mindset.

Action: To begin, take a good look at where you are. Write down your skills—e.g., connecting with people, making graphics, a love of spreadsheets, writing good promo copy—and the things you naturally gravitate toward. Then write down a few areas you might want to study.

Then, write down what success feels like to you, and write down ten next steps to help you there.

After that? Back up and pay attention to the first step you wrote down. That’s where you’ll begin.

Curiosity and Generosity

A successful indie author mindset invokes curiosity, generosity, and gratitude, all of which help us as we get out of our own way.

To foster our desired success, we must learn. Learning well requires both curiosity and some measure of determination. Without curiosity, learning is filled with “everyone says to do X, Y, or Z,” without pausing to examine why or whether that’s something we might want to experiment with. Curiosity and experimentation go hand in hand.

Experimentation without curiosity might hit success, but might just as easily place us on a map parallel to the one we want to chart. Experimentation without curiosity is not really experimentation at all, it is rote rule-following without questioning who set the rules in the first place.

Curiosity is important because it keeps us engaged with process rather than product. In building success, we need product, but our process is equally key. Too many indie authors do what others suggest without questioning why, and end up unhappy, stressed, or burned out.

Since this book is about building long-term success, we don’t want any of that! We need to question both the general why and, more importantly, our personal why. For example: “Why do I want to put my books into this exclusive subscription service?” Or “Why do I want to run a Kickstarter campaign?”

If I can come up with one to five good answers to that why question, maybe it’s the right thing for me to experiment with.

This brings me to generosity. Generosity of spirit complements curiosity very well. A generous person listens well, and with interest, and offers what they can in return.

So, one facet of generosity is the recognition that we all have something to offer. Yes, including you.

How many author groups are you part of where someone who joined a week before posts, “Tell me everything you know about marketing”?

Not only is this rude, but it also doesn’t take advantage of the group brain trust in any useful way, and is completely selfish. A generous and curious person reads all they can, researches what is on offer, and then, over time, asks useful questions or offers a different perspective.

Those useful questions and perspectives open community dialogue, which is a generous action.

A generous person gives feedback when it is asked for, even if only to say, “I’m new at this, but as a reader, my experience is…” Or, “In my other career, I learned…”

Another way authors are generous to each other is sharing other people’s projects, whether it is a new book, a Kickstarter, a blog post, or something else. All that sort of generosity requires is paying attention and spending ten seconds to click a button.

Generous people attract generosity in turn. This is different from self-sacrifice. Self-sacrificing people train others to take and take without giving back. That’s the social contract. Generous people are in a power position, rather than a powerless position.

My friend and colleague Katrina Messenger reminds us, “Give only from your excess.”

That is what generous people do: they don’t give from a place of lack; they give from a position of sharing what they have.

The more generous I’m able to be, the more goodwill is naturally sown, and the more others want to help me. This is not transactional, either.

I’m sure author, podcaster, and industry expert Mark Leslie Lefebvre doesn’t think, “Wow, I was generous to Thorn, but what the heck have they done for me?” No. Mark helped me with a free consultation at a very low point in my life—during the worst aftermath of my brain injury—expecting nothing in return but the satisfaction of sharing some knowledge with someone who was struggling.

I’m sure Mark sees the ways in which I attempt to give back to others, but I’m also pretty sure that as long as I’m not actively taking advantage of people, he doesn’t care, because generosity is not a quid pro quo operation.

If I’m not talking about transactional, tit-for-tat giving, what do I mean?

It’s simple: the energy and attitude of generosity, gratitude, and curiosity breeds more of the same. In this way, what we give out really does return to us.

Celebrating other authors is generosity in action.

Action: What changes in your life will most help you cultivate an attitude of curiosity and generosity? Spend some time with your answers. Meditate on them. Write your thoughts down.

Chapter Ten:

Lane, Highway, or Winding Path

There is a host of both writing and marketing advice out there and plenty of people who will tell you all the ways in which you’re doing it wrong.

How to counter that? Study a lot and trust your intuition.

When I pivoted back to fiction, it seemed like the majority of independent author/publishers were talking about the Amazon algorithm and how to keep it happy. Not only were people encouraged to write and publish a book a month to feed the beast, but we were also told to “not confuse your also-boughts,” aka the books people bought when they also purchased yours.

That meant people like me who seemingly write all over the map were told to use a variety of pen names. That is sound advice for some types of authors, and the kiss of death for others.

I’m in the latter camp.

So, what did I do? I said “nope.” I’d built up years of goodwill with my name both by publishing nonfiction and by teaching globally. The integrity of my name was all I had. No way was I starting from scratch to keep a billionaire’s machine placated.

I kept my name and kept on writing and publishing.

Guess what happened: over time, not only did my fiction overwhelm my nonfiction in searches, Amazon “also-boughts” went away completely, and the search algorithm changed. Then changed again.

Algorithms seem to change every six months to a year. Some people are good at staying ahead of this. Others of us aren’t wired that way and are better off finding other ways to run our publishing businesses.

There’s a similar piece of advice to the “don’t pollute your also-boughts” that I repeatedly saw from certain highly successful authors, and that was, “Stay in your lane.”

In other words: only write one type of book, with certain tropes, in one subgenre, in order to keep your readers coming back. Niche down and stick with it.

That advice works for some authors. It does not work for me, or for many other authors I know. We are writers first, businesspeople second. We write what we want to write when we want to write it. To a certain extent. But more on that, later.

This is where my question of “Lane or Highway” comes in. I’ve added a third option, which is “The Winding Path.”

Some people are “Lane” writers. They want to write small town cowboy romance, or dark urban fantasy, or gutsy space opera, and their readers love it. Book after book, they love it. Lane writers often—though not always—have earlier financial success than writers like me.

Lane authors often write to market, trying to hit the correct tropes and story beats that keep readers attracted and engaged.

For some Lane writers, this works year after year, and their series expands, branches off, and multiplies. Others get bored or burn out. Or their readers get bored.

Some people are Highway writers, which is a phrase I first heard at InkersCon. This means that these authors write in many lanes, though those lanes are connected. That’s likely where I fit. All of my books—even the bonkers paranormal cozy mysteries—have central themes of magic and justice. My nonfiction is no different.

While I sometimes feel I write all over the map, the reality is that I don’t. What I do is write across genres and subgenres, with themes that please myself and my readers. This consistency of theme spills over into my newsletters, social media, and marketing. My voice is also consistent, despite some of my books being more serious than others.

Do I write to market? No. Except…I will purposefully pick some key concepts or tropes to play with in any given series. For example, why not combine three things that people love—a bookshop, a black cat, and a witch—within my own wacky, off-the-rails series? In other words, I write what I want to write, but also make sure I have some elements that will be easy to market.

And I do this consistently, feeding different series until there are enough books in them for readers to binge.

But that’s just me. There are as many ways to be a Highway writer as there are writers.

Last is the Wandering Path writer. This is one that I made up because I see it all the time but have not seen it named.

Wandering Path authors write in multiple genres and subgenres but don’t always have an underlying theme. There isn’t huge consistency among their books. Some Wandering Path writers publish regularly and are able to build a solid, remunerative career over many years’ time. But other Wandering Path writers are not consistent in their publication schedules, either, which means the business aspect of their publishing career also meanders. These writers have a much harder time building a successful business model. They’re too scattershot and haphazard.

In my observation, it can take longer to find a solid readership and financial success as a Wandering Path writer in general. These writers often complain about lack of readership and nonexistent sales.

But as I mention, this does not mean other authors aren’t making a go of it! Wandering Path writers can realize success. They just have to be craftier and get disciplined about publication schedules and the business side of things. They need dogged persistence, too.

This is all just a snapshot, too. Some Lane writers become Highway writers the longer their careers continue. They might write in one lane for a decade and then switch to a different lane for another decade.

Some Highway writers might wander onto a bicycle path off the freeway and stay there for a book or two, just for fun.

Some Wandering writers might fall in love with a set of characters and write four books in a row with them, forming one lane in a possible highway.

What sort of writer do you think you are, naturally?

What sort of writer would you like to be?

All of this will affect your business and your longevity. I’ve seen too many writers burn out and give up because they were trying to have someone else’s career.

Don’t let that be you.

Action: What sort of writer do you think you are naturally? What sort of writer would you like to be? How can you bring these two things closer together? And why?

Hint: Examine what most interests you and notice how that is reflected in what you write and publish.