You’re Measuring Your Author Business Against the Wrong Thing
“The Gap and the Gain” proves a coaching tool I’ve been teaching for years: You’re right, right now
After three decades of running publishing ventures and coaching authors to build sustainable businesses, I think one of the most common undoings I’ve seen among talented writers is an ongoing measurement of themselves against moving targets instead of actual progress. I’ve watched too many authors undermine their own success by judging themselves against all the wrong things.
They compare their progress to bestsellers. To six-figure book deals. To authors with massive platforms. To the size of their friends’ publishers. To other people’s reviews, prizes, appearances in Old Guard publications. To where they think they should be by now.
This is what Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy call “The Gap” in their bestselling The Gap and the Gain. When I read their book recently on a recommendation from a client, I saw that it overlapped nicely with how I’ve been helping authors escape these comparisons and shoulds: a coaching tool I call right, right now.
The Gap: How Authors Can Stay Miserable
Here’s how The Gap works:
You set an ideal. Maybe bestseller status. Or, $100,000 in book/author income. Or, 50,000 email subscribers. You focus on it, you work toward it. And even when you make decent, respectable progress, you measure yourself against the big, outrageous goal you haven’t yet attained rather than against where you started.
The ideal keeps moving. You hit $50,000 in book income and immediately the bar becomes $75,000. You get 10,000 subscribers and suddenly 10,000 feels small. You publish your third book and think, “But my author friends have published ten…and have sold some foreign rights…and a couple screen options.”
This is living in The Gap—the space between where you are and where you think you should be. And The Gap is a dispirited place to live in day-to-day and to run a business from.
For authors specifically, The Gap sounds like:
“I should have more book sales by now.”
“Other authors in my genre are doing better.”
“My advance was too small.”
“I’m not getting enough media coverage.”
“My speaking fee should be higher.”
“I should have a bigger platform before I launched this.”
Notice all the shoulds?
