15/ The first one star reviews I got on my books devastated me I was so sad about it, took it personally, would go into depressive funks When you only have a few books and a few reviews on them, it seems devastating (and this applies to any content medium)
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16/ Now, when I get a one star review (which is pretty rare these days), I just shrug it off. That person wasn’t the right person for my content. And now I’ve got built in super fans that are always ready to stan my work
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17/ The key really is to build up a group of people who love you because when someone critiques what you’re doing it just means they’re not the right audience for you It’s not personal (even if their attacks are personal) and you need to remember that
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18/ And quality of work is really variable. Depends on your audience. What matters is connecting with people—not that your work is perfect. You’ll get better over time, and if you can connect to people’s emotions you’re 90% of the way to good art already
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19/ Eventually your side hustle can become your main hustle, but you should think very carefully about whether that’s something you want. I tend to get lonely (as an extrovert) when I work solo and I’m still trying to find the right way to balance freedom and social needs
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20/ It can also be a lot more stressful watching the up and down swings of your sales/donations/patreons than getting a guaranteed check in the mail every two weeks from http://Corp.inc
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21/ and then of course there’s accounting, quarterly taxes, managing your advertising, etc etc Small biz is not for everyone It’s stressful and complicated and even if you have a manager it’s expensive and you need to trust them
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22/ Plus! Businesses don’t last forever. Market conditions change. Tech changes. Competitors disrupt. Your passive income stream of today may not work in 5 years. Or 3 years! Things change quickly. You have to be thinking about the future always
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23/ I’m watching things like GPT-2 very carefully right now, for example. I would be surprised if genre fiction for independent authors (pulp romance, mystery, etc) is still a viable job for most authors in 5-10 years. More likely is that “authors” will guide AI with ideas
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Replying to @liminal_warmth
Wow, this is quite the claim to bury in the middle of a thread! Algorithms replacing authors sounds pretty wild, but it could happen. I can see video games using this kind of thing to generate a new plot for each player, but I always thought of a book as somehow different.
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Genre fiction can get pretty formulaic. There'll still be a market for more original stuff, but if you're copying the plot, character archetypes, writing style, etc already...
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