Playing the Industry Game

Hi Reader,

Part 2 Continued from last week’s excerpt of Becca Syme on the BookFunnel Podcast

More from Becca Syme on how to strengthen your outlook to deal with industry disruption. You got this!

The Wheel Keeps Spinning

"But there are so many things that motivate us that we do not understand and know. We think we're in charge of so many more of our choices than we really are.

Roughly only 5% of our choices are under our control on a daily basis. We think it's so much closer to 100. And so we're doing a lot of work trying to manufacture a lot of things that we can control because so many of us just don't like the feeling of not being in control of 100% of things.

That level of stress makes us try to make changes in things that really we shouldn't even be thinking about. It makes us worry about things that are not important for us to have an opinion about."

The Publishing Lottery and the Need to Keep Playing

"It is so much better for you to internalize the lottery system of a saturated market. Just allow yourself to keep spinning the wheel and spinning the wheel and not take the wheel landing on zero as as a personal affront against your books or your whether you should be writing or not.

The Freddie Mercury Effect

"I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen again, and then at some point I expect it to continue happening over and over again. If I can't figure out how to fix the funnel that's getting me to that place, then I assume I'm always going to get those same exact results over and over again. That's not the rules of publishing. You got to know the game.

You can fail a thousand times and then make $10 million. You can literally write books for 17 years that don't sell and then become a millionaire. So there is no predictability. We all talk about history repeats itself. We think history repeats itself in small segments, but we doesn't realize that a lot of small segments are actually part of bigger patterns.

So if you release a book, it doesn't sell. Release a book, it doesn't sell. It feels like this is going to happen forever,' but we don't see that that's not the context.

You know, Freddie Mercury? He tried to sell himself as a singer over and over and over and over. Nobody wanted it. No one. Everybody thought like, 'This guy's no, never going to happen.' All of a sudden, he got the break, right? The lucky break, and then took off.

If you had stopped his story before the takeoff, it would have looked exactly like what we're describing. It would have looked like fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

'Context' is like, 'Failure is always going to happen then,' but you're just using the wrong metric to determine what story you're in. You don't know what's in front of you. So you have to assume that what's in front of you includes the possibility of having a higher trajectory of sales in the future, because you cannot determine what's going to happen by the past in this industry.”

The industry is too unpredictable. Loki is in charge, not Captain America.

Publishing’s Real King: Your Will to Continue

"So understanding the rules of publishing is basically just us knowing whether or not we are being correct in interpreting the data that we're seeing. And I'll just tell people, most of y'all are wrong all the time. And it's not a bad thing. It's just we get so caught in what we want to get out of it. We get afraid that we won't get what we want to get out of it. And then we start using narratives to convince ourselves that we should just give up or stop. And so much of that is just not understanding the bigger picture of the rules that we're not governed by a mechanical set of rules the way we think we are.

Focus on being a person that no matter what you face, you're going to be okay because you're resilient, and you can handle your emotions, and you can handle whatever comes at you."

Protect Your Desire to Write

Know the game you're playing and what's actually at stake. It's like we're playing chess, and we think that sales is the king. The king is the most important board piece on the board. When the king falls, the game is over, right? And the queen can fall, and the game is not over. The knight can fall, and the game is not over. Any other piece on the board is fine. But when the king falls, the game is over.

Too many of us believe that things that are out of our control are the king. Whether my book launches right, whether I sell or not, whether readers like me. Like Claire Taylor says, 'There are no life and death emergencies in publishing.'

So we shouldn't be responding to emergencies as though they are going to kill us. And we don't realize that that's how we're responding, but we get terrified and stressed and go into fight or flight about things that we don't need to be stressed about on that level.

We can handle whatever happens. The king on the chessboard of publishing is your will to publish. Literally, that is the only thing that matters. You need to maintain your desire and your joy.

We have to future proof our mindset, which means that the king is the only piece that matters. Everything else, it's fine. It will not be fun. There may be consequences, but you will not die.

It will be okay. You will survive to fight another day. You may have to respawn, but that will not kill you. You will be okay. You can do this. So for me, the big thing is, know the ultimate rule, which is, if I lose my will to publish, if I lose my will to write, then the game of being an author is over. So I have got to protect my desire to publish and write at all costs."