Weighting opinions

I understand and appreciate that everybody wants to help out when you ask a question about writing or drawing, but not everybody’s opinion is created equal, unfortunately.

If somebody is telling you “write what’s in your heart” but they have made negative money in publishing, or they haven’t even written a book…their opinion should not be weighted as heavily as somebody who is killing it.

Similarly, if somebody hasn’t made money in a decade, they should not be as heavily weighted as somebody who is making money right now.

Caveat…if you don’t actually care about having a career or doing it right or making money, then this advice goes out the window.

But I see every single day, multiple times most days, that people ask a question on a forum, and then get 20 replied, 19 of them from people who “just want to help” or “give an opinion” but haven’t even done one thing yet, and then ANOTHER person who has been through the ringer and come out the other side successful.

It’s not a problem that everybody replies. It IS a problem if the dissenting voice is the only successful person, but you only weight them as a single data point, instead of really the only data point that matters in that discussion.

You need to be savvy when you ask and provide opinions. Not all opinions are created equal. Not everything is a fact.

If a 20-year publisher tells you something, and then somebody with ZERO or very little experience tells you something different, they are not equal.

They just aren’t.

That doesn’t mean you should automatically follow what the publisher says, either, but it should be given outmoded value compared to people who don’t have as much experience. It’s going to take A LOT to match the publisher’s opinion, because they are literally in the thick of it.

Now, in a different context, that publisher’s opinion would mean nothing. For instance, if I wanted to know about Kindle Unlimited, I would not ask that publisher, because they likely have little to no experience in Kindle Unlimited.

It’s also important to weight advice on how close their genre, release style, format, etc, match yours, and weight them similarly. Romance comics operate very differently than action novels, and then both are quite different than children’s books. Every genre and format has its own rules.

It is not the person giving the opinion’s fault for giving it. It’s yours for not understanding how to weight opinions properly. This is not just true with other writers, either. It’s also true with creating new work and asking for opinions from readers.

For instance, actual READERS of my work, and people who buy my books, are weighted SIGNIFICANTLY higher than somebody who doesn’t when I ask a question about what to write next. You can use this with everything, but not every opinion is valid, and not all opinions are created equal.