Signs of Success by Warren Bull

Signs of Success by Warren Bull

Image from http://independent.co.uk

I wasn’t sure how I was doing.

I’ve been writing and promoting a Facebook page named I Love Abe Lincoln in preparation for the release of my next book: Abraham Lincoln: Seldom Told Stories. https://www.facebook.com/rwb10/I’ve never had a Facebook page before. This is my first non-fiction book. How many likes per month would indicate good progress? How much money should advertising cost per individual like? I had no idea about how to measure my performance.

But then I got two “I hate Lincoln” posts telling me what a traitor the sixteenth President was; how pathetic I was not to know that and how utterly clueless my posts were. At that point I knew I had to be doing something right. I heard the “boos.”

When I published my first book, after seven years of work, I told a man I thought of as a friend about my success. His face got red, his chest and shoulders tensed. He glared at me. He told me that for years he had been trying to get a book he wrote published.  He was never again as friendly as he had been before I told him. I was surprised back then. Something like that wouldn’t surprise me now.

I have another friend whose facial expression wobbles between disdainful and envious when the subject of my writing comes up. He has written books of a more academic nature. I mostly write genre fiction. He is a good friend. I like him very much. He likes me, but I don’t really fit into the three categories of writing that a career in an academic setting cemented into his mind. Category one: literary writing; Category Two: literary criticism, Category Three: who gives a flip? If it is not literary, it is irrelevant.  I think my first book was better than he expected, but I guess he thought it could have been a fluke. He was complimentary with a heavy dose of condescension. Some time after that he admitted that he wants to write a mystery but he can’t get past the first chapter. Now that I have five books published, I imagine it’s harder to think I’ve just been lucky. We can chat about publishers, a necessary evil in the life of every writer, but he is not very interested in what I’m working on at the moment.

Of course I could be wrong about his reactions. I’m not a mind reader, but I was a clinical psychologist for 30 years. I can read behavior.

My success does not come at the expense of anybody else. I don’t compete with other writers. I admire many other writers. I try to learn and to teach through a critique group, which is a marvelous way to learn. (More on that in another article. Watch this space.) I figure people are likely to read more than one book in a lifetime. If they like what you write, they might like what I write too. It’s not like acting where there can only be one Hamlet in a production. 

 But there are people who feel jealous. There are people who think there has to be a loser for every winner. You don’t always get applause. Sometimes it’s the “boos” that show you’re heading in the right direction.