Self doubt and bravery as a writer

This is a topic that comes up again and again for writers.  Sharing your soul with the world can be a scary thing! You need to develop a hide like a rhino to deal with it.  Writer Nathan Bransford put it so well in a recent post:

You have to be strong enough to put yourself out there, brave and confident as you share a part of yourself with the world. You do it because you love it so much you're willing to risk everything negative that can possibly come your way.

But you also have to be self-critical enough to edit your work and fear failure and be worried that your best might not be good enough, which pushes you just that much further. You have to be scared of what will happen if you don't do your best. You can't ever get comfortable.

Terror and joy. Confidence and self-doubt. The best artists live right in that uncomfortable middle.

To read the complete and brilliant post go to:

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2012/12/living-on-edge-of-confidence-and-self.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NathanBransford+%28Nathan+Bransford%2C+Author%29

How do we hear about books?

I recently came across an interesting post about the changing way in which we hear about books on Nathan Bransford's excellent site. Quoting from Nathan:

Two years ago, 35% of book purchases were made because readers found outabout a book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, the single-largest site ofdiscovery. This year, that figure has dropped to 17%, a reflection bothof the closing of Borders and the rise of e-readers. In the same period,personal recommendations grew the most, to 22% from 14%. Somethree-quarters of personal recommendations are made in person, while therest come by e-mail (8%), phone (7%), Facebook (4%) and other socialnetworks (3%).That's an incredibly fast change. Just two years ago a plurality ofpeople were hearing about books in bookstores, now that has dropped tohalf that number.

I sometimes wonder what things will be like 10 years down the line, or even 5 years.  Will there still be bookstores?  Then again, it would be instructive to see how many people who found their book in the store were already stimulated to visit because of a personal recommendation?  Often we may go into a store (or Amazon) to purchase one item, only to end up sidetracked browsing to discover another item.  

Personal recommendation is obviously the crucial factor, and this probably hasn't changed over the years - just the way we receive that recommendation, ie in person, or via a real or virtual channel. What do you think?

To read the post in full go to 
http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2012/10/the-way-we-learn-about-books-is-changing.html

Related posts:
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-future-of-book-shops.html
http://janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/adapt-and-survive.html