By Raegan Teller
At a recent signing
event, another author said to me, “Selling books is hard.” When he walked away,
I felt a bit overwhelmed. Would I ever master the marketing skills I need? And
then I remembered saying to myself about five years ago, “Will I ever master
the skills I need to write a book?”
If you are writer, you
know there’s a long list of skills you must have, whether you’re producing a book,
short story, or poem. Even if you know how to write a decent sentence, you must
learn structure, pacing, and storytelling, to name a few. The list of required
writing skills is long, but that isn’t all.
Sometime after my first
book was published, I realized that I’m expected to be two, totally different
people: an accomplished writer and a
marketing genius. On top of that, the skills and behaviors needed to master
each role are opposites in many ways. Yen and Yang. How could I become
proficient at both?
To confront my being-two-people
dilemma, I recalled Martin Broadwell’s four stages of learning I had used often
in my consulting practice. When I began writing my first novel, I was at the
level of “unconscious incompetence”: I didn’t know what I didn’t know. After writing
that book for the next three years, I reached the next level of learning: “conscious
incompetence.” I was beginning to realize what I didn’t know—and it was scary. As
they say, “Ignorance is bliss.”
While writing the next two
books, I honed my writing skills through continuous studying and feedback. Now,
I’m able to write at the level of “conscious competence.” But while I have the
skills, writing is still hard work and requires a lot of mental energy.
But what about becoming
the “other” person I mentioned earlier? Could I also become a marketing genius?
Even now, I’m still at the lowest level of learning for those skills:
unconscious incompetence. Every day, I learn something I didn’t even realize I
was supposed to know. Things like learning how to navigate through the behemoth
Amazon maze seems like learning to fly a fighter jet. Slowly, I’m beginning to figure
out what I don’t know when it comes to marketing books. While I might be approaching
conscious incompetence, I’m nowhere near the final level: unconscious
competence. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes approximately 10,000 hours of
practice to achieve that level of mastery. I may not live long enough to see
that day, but one can hope . . . and keep learning.
All of this is to say,
yes, you can be two different people with different skills and behaviors. One
role may be easier and more natural than the other. You’ll learn those skills
quicker. But on a parallel learning track, it may take you a bit longer to acquire
the skills and assume the behaviors you need to become the “other” person. That’s
okay. Just remember, the learning process is the same: one level at a time.
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