The thing with being a self published author is it can feel like the success of your book rests entirely in your own hands. You write, edit, format, design, market, and publicise all by your lonesome, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that any sales, or lack thereof, are a result of you and you alone. This is not true, and I’ll tell you why.

I’ve been reading Derren Brown’s book Happy recently. In it he talks about the ‘lost’ art of Stoicism.

At its most basic stoic philosophy is about recognising that there are two things in this world; that which we can control and that which we can’t, and how the things we can’t control aren’t worth worrying about so why bother (although most of us inevitably do which is where a lot of our daily frustration comes from).

But it goes even deeper than that. The things we can control can be divided into two things as well; what we think and what we do. So when you get right down to it all any of us has any real control over are what goes on in our own heads, and what we do about it.

NB: I know it may seem like we have no control over our thoughts sometimes, that they just bubble up unbidden from our subconscious, but we do have control over how much attention we give them when they do appear. We can either feed them, keeping them alive, or we can ignore them, allowing them to rise and fall like miscellaneous waves on the ocean of our mind.

So what’s all this got to do with writing you ask? Simple.

You can put all the effort you like into creating something. You can dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. You can make it look as beautiful as it’s possible for it to be, truly breath-taking to behold. You can shout about it from the rooftops, extolling its virtues until the whole world has heard of your work. But once you send it out into the world that’s it, its success is no longer in your hands. People will either buy it or they won’t, and if it’s just not their kind of thing there’s absolutely nothing you can do about that.

Now I know some of you may disagree with me about this. I know some of you will still believe that if you just try hard enough success is guaranteed, and that’s fine. There’s nothing I can do about what goes on inside your head, which I’m afraid is exactly the point. Because just as I can do nothing about what goes on inside your head, so you can do nothing about what goes on inside someone else’s (no matter what the Big Bumper Book of Marketing tells you).

It is fair to say that if you don’t put the effort in you won’t get anything back in return. The sales of most self published novels die due to neglect more than anything else. But if you do the best you can, if you put your best foot forward, if you give the people every opportunity to engage with you and your work and still your sales are fair to mediocre, so be it. It is what it is.

Simply put, there are so many factors outside of your control within this whole process that to suggest the end result is entirely in your hands is absolutely ludicrous.