This post is part of the virtual book tour for Creative Visualization for Writers
When publishing experts discuss how to create a bestselling book, they rarely mention what I call the secret author-success factor. They talk about marketable ideas, author platform, pre-sales, marketing plans, and promotional partners.
Don’t get me wrong. All of these elements are important—and I advise aspiring authors to put them in place, too.
However, you can have all of these elements in place and still fail as an author. Your book might not sell or make it to the bestseller list, you might not attract clients or customers, and you might make little if any money.
Unless you use the secret author-success factor: the power of your mind.
More specifically, the secret success factor is your ability to mentally visualize successful authorship and focus your attention—your thoughts—on creating a book that sells.
Visualize Your End Goal
A publisher once told me that he knew if a book would be successful—and if he should publish the manuscript—when he could see it clearly in his mind’s eye.
The same goes for your book. You have to be able to see it as a finished product. And you need to be able to imagine it on the bestseller lists as well as in your ideal readers’ hands.
Why bother with imagining your book when you have all the other essential elements in place? Visualizing a successful book and career as an author couples the power of your mind with the power of your actions. It convinces your unconscious mind that you can do—and will do—what you say you want to do: become a successful author.
Think about marathon runners. Like many athletes, they spend time visualizing themselves crossing the finish line. They also imagine themselves fighting through fatigue at the halfway point. Why? Because their minds don’t know the difference between a visualization and the actual running of the race. Their muscles fire in the same way in both instances.
If they imagine themselves becoming re-energized half way through the race, their mind registered that visual image as real and accomplished. That makes it easier to create that reality. At the midway point in the race, the mind says, Oh yeah…more energy now! and tells the body to pull all its energetic resources together. As the runner visualizes having more energy, he generates it as well. Together the mental actions create the stamina—the energy—to physically cross the finish line.
The same applies to your desire to make it across the publishing finish line and be awarded the prize of a bestselling book. When you visualize yourself completing the manuscript, launching the book, and seeing the title on one or more bestseller lists, your mind thinks this is the truth. You will and can do this. It aligns your thoughts and feelings with your imagined success.
You work out the details of how to overcome any tumbling blocks, such as your aversion to promoting on social networks, in your mind first. When you hit the wall of resistance, you can recall your visualization and move through. Or, if you’ve visualized easily, happily and successfully promoting you book, you may avoid this block altogether.
In Creative Visualization for Writers I shared, “As you visualize yourself moving through the stages of idea and career creation, your mind and body record the images as real events. When you set the intention to succeed—to win your race to a successful writing career or authorship—you activate the action centers in your brain. This supports your efforts to do something physical to make your vision real.”
The more you visualize, the more easily you create what you desire. The more likely you are to take the necessary action.
Train Your Mind on What You Want
As you deliberately visualize your goal, you also convince your mind you can achieve it. Your mind sees the goal as accomplished.
In this way, you counteract the two primary obstacles to success:
- Your negative thoughts
- Your limiting beliefs
If you constantly think or tell yourself I am not a writer, I don’t know how to promote a book, or no one will want to read my message, those statements become your experience. Also, if you have a tendency to tell yourself I’m stupid, can’t do it, or never succeed at anything, you will find it hard to move toward successful authorship—or any goal, for that matter.
If you believe publishing is hard, few people every make the New York Times Bestseller List, or art and sales shouldn’t be mixed, you will struggle to succeed.
These types of thoughts and beliefs not only make it difficult for you to take action, they provide your mind with a constant flow of negative influences—and visualizations. You convince your mind that these statements are true each time you perpetuate the thoughts and beliefs.
As you visualize success, however, you convince your mind these negative thoughts and beliefs are false. Couple your visualizations with affirmations—I am a bestselling author, I have an important message to share that many people what to receive, or I write and promote my work with ease—and you convince your mind that your positive thoughts and unlimited beliefs are true.
And you encourage yourself to pursue your writing and publishing efforts in the physical world—to do something, like:
- Write your manuscript
- Build an online platform
- Look for an agent
- Self-publish
- Create a promotion plan—and follow through on all the items
When you fill your mind with positive thoughts and unlimited beliefs, you provide just the push—the confidence—you need to take action toward your goal.
In Creative Visualization for Writers I share that, like most successful people or writers, “You need a successful attitude to bring your ideas and career to fruition. Thoughts and beliefs determine your attitude or mindset. Self-talk and self-perception affect your ability to bring ideas into the world and take action toward your goals. How you feel as you move toward those goals makes a difference in your ability to achieve them.”
Author and personal-development expert Brian Tracy says, “As an individual, you become what you think about most of the time. You become the sum-total result of the ideas, information, and impressions you feed into your mind, from the time you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night.”
Therefore, affirmations—positive thoughts that become beliefs—coupled with visualizations of successful authorship feed your mind just what you need to succeed.
Act on Your Vision
Of course, you can’t just visualize yourself to the status of bestselling author. And you can’t just affirm success.
As you focus your mind on successful authorship, you must take action. After all, you live in a physical world. Action takes your visualizations and affirmations and makes them real.
You need to put fingers to keyboard, get out and speak or engage on social networks, and promote relentlessly to become successful author. But you need to do one other thing as well: change your behavior.
Your visualizations and affirmations help you develop the willpower to create new behaviors—habits—that support your efforts to become a successful author. These habits are based upon your positive thoughts, unlimited beliefs, visualizations, and desire to succeed as an author.
Keep these things in mind:
- Your negative pattern of thinking is a habit.
- Your beliefs are born out of this habit.
- A persistent thought becomes a belief.
To employ the secret author-success factor, use the power of you mind. Train your thoughts on what you want to achieve. Make it a habit to train your thoughts of potential negative results.
To do so, try:
- Taking time every morning or evening (or both) to visualize your desired outcome.
- Writing affirmations once or twice per day and pinning them up on your computer so you are reminded of them all day.
- Creating a vision board, a visual depiction of successful authorship. (This is a collage of pictures that elicit the feeling and thought that you have achieved your goal.)
- Coloring or drawing pictures that remind you of the success you desire.
- Journaling about successful authorship.
- Writing a vision of success.
When you utilize all the tools available to you—including your mind—you increase the likelihood of achieving your goal. Don’t rely solely on traditional advice about how to become a successful author. Instead, combine your mental and physical power to help you make your writing and publishing dreams real.
Do you use visualizations or affirmations? How have they helped you move toward your writing and publishing goals?
About the Author
Nina Amir is an Amazon bestselling author of such books as How to Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual and the recently released Creative Visualization for Writers. She is known as the Inspiration to Creation Coach because she helps writers, bloggers and other creative people combine their passion and purpose so they move from idea to inspired action and Achieve More Inspired Results. This helps them positively and meaningfully impact the world—with their words or other creations.
Nina is a hybrid author who has self-published 18 books and had as many as nine books on Amazon Top 100 lists and six on the same bestseller list (Authorship) at the same time.
As an Author Coach, Nina supports writers on the journey to successful authorship. Some of her clients have sold 300,000+ copies of their books, landed deals with major publishing houses and created thriving businesses around their books. She is the creator of a proprietary Author Training curriculum for writers and other coaches.
Nina is an international speaker and award-winning journalist and blogger as well as the founder of National Nonfiction Writing Month (www.writenonfictioninnovember.com) and the Nonfiction Writers’ University (www.nonfictionwritersuniversity.com).
Nina also is one of 300 elite Certified High Performance Coaches working around the world.
For more information, visit www.ninaamir.com or check out her books at www.booksbyninaamir.com.
NOTE FROM EDITOR: I’ve personally read Creative Visualization for Authors and highly recommend it.