[Guest Expert] Nina Amir – Avoid These 5 Mistakes If You Want to Become a Bestselling Author

A few common mistakes prevent aspiring authors from achieving their goals of becoming successful published authors. You can create bestselling books, however, by avoiding these mistakes—if you know what they are.

5 Mistakes that Stop You from Becoming a Best-Selling Author

The following five mistakes are the primary ones to avoid as you work toward successful authorship:

1. You fail to develop marketable book ideas. To become a successful author, you have to create book ideas that sell. Marketable ideas target your ideal readers’ needs and desires and provide something different from published works in the category in which you book will be sold. If you don’t create—and produce—a unique and necessary book that targets your market, your book won’t find many readers. Without more than the average number of readers, you can’t create a bestseller or become a successful author.
2. You never write your book. This seems pretty obvious. Once you have a marketable book idea, you have to write the book to become a successful author. That means you have to start and finish writing the manuscript. If you don’t do that you remain a writer and an aspiring author—not a published author. Of course, the book you produce must be marketable as well to become a bestseller. That means it must be based upon a marketable idea (see #1), and you must carry out that idea as you compose you manuscript.
3. You don’t develop ways to help sell your book. If you write a marketable book, you increase the likelihood of producing a bestselling book. But if you promote that book once it is published (and I’m assuming you don’t make the mistake of not getting it published), the chances of producing a successful book—and becoming a successful author—increase tremendously. The ability to help sell your book relies on two things: your author platform and your book promotion plan. If you haven’t developed a foundation of potential readers in your target market, your promotional efforts will fall flat. You won’t have anyone to whom to market. That means that once you have a platform in place, you have to know how you plan to promote to your potential readers, or book buyers. You need a promotion plan that contains numerous action items. For you and your book to succeed, you have to make the effort and take the time for pre-release and post-release promotion.
4. You think of yourself as a one-book author and only a writer. Successful authors don’t earn a living from the sales of just one book. Their income includes sales from numerous related books, courses, teleseminars and webinars, coaching and consulting, and speaking—or a combination of one or more of these activities. If you aren’t thinking about how to build a business around your book by spinning one book into many books, products or services, you are missing a huge opportunity for creating a career as a successful author.
5. You aren’t willing to get education or support when you need it. Sometimes it’s okay to go it alone; other times it’s better to ask for help. If you want to speed up your transformation from aspiring author to successful published author, know when you need a teacher, a coach, a tool, a skill, or an accountability buddy. Successful people in all areas of business and art know they need experts to help them advance toward their goals. You are no different. Unwillingness can often sound a lot like excuses, which are just another way to avoid doing what’s necessary to fulfill your dream.

If any of these mistakes sound familiar, don’t worry. Now that you know what mistakes to avoid, you can more easily become a bestselling author. Do things differently! This is the best way to change your results.

About Nina Amir

Nina Amir, the bestselling author of How to Blog a Book and The Author Training Manual, is a speaker, a blogger, and an author, book, and blog-to-book coach. Known as the Inspiration to Creation Coach, she helps creative people combine their passion and purpose so they move from idea to inspired action and positively and meaningfully impact the world as writers, bloggers, authorpreneurs, and blogpreneurs. Some of Nina’s 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 founder of National Nonfiction Writing Month, aka the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge, and the Nonfiction Writers’ University. As a hybrid author she has published 15 books and had as many as four of her books on the Amazon Top 100 list at the same time.