Everybody works in my industry

I am around authors all day, and my brain used to be consumed with thoughts that every human was an author like me. When you think like that, it’s hard to get excited about finding new readers, because you just assume they don’t exist.

I mean, who else could there be to buy my books if everybody is an author? Why would they want to buy my books when they’re trying to sell their own?

Ever thought like that?

It plagued me for years, but one moment changed all of that for me. I’m used to doing conventions and networking events full of entertainment professionals, but one night I was at a party full of people from my wife’s industry, not mine, and it showed me the way I was thinking was completely ridiculous.

Because here’s the thing.

There were hundreds of people at the party. Yet, not one of them were authors. I’m not saying I talked to every attendee, but I talked to a couple dozen and all of them said the same thing. They weren’t writers. In fact, they were baffled at how I could write things from my imagination. In fact, they told me time and time again that they were completely not creative.

Think about that…

I was in a room full of a couple hundred people, and none of them were authors. Almost all of them were readers though, and most of them told me they read my genres, too, which means a whole bunch of them were my ideal readers.

That opened my eyes.

It made me realize that most of the people in the world weren’t authors, and that changed everything for me. I was spending all my time stuck in a bubble and believed that because most of my friends were authors, that meant most people in the world must be authors, too.

How often do you think that everybody does what you do? All the time, right?

Well, it’s not true.

The truth is that most people don’t do the thing you do. It just seems like it, and because of that it feels like your market is saturated, but that’s because we’re all stuck in our own bubbles.

We have to break out of that. There are seven billion people in this world, and most of them don’t do what you do. Not even close. It’s a huge world out there, and the market isn’t flooded. You’re just stuck in a bubble, just like the rest of us, and you have to pop it.