The Secrets of Success: A Freelancer's Survival Guide Short Book: Freelancer's Survival Guide, #7

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Once you've become successful, you never have to work again—or so many people believe. But becoming a success is just the start. Staying a success is the hard part. This short book will help you both become a success and remain one. International bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch will show you the secrets to success that will change your life.

Award-winning, bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch has published books under many names and in many genres. She has owned several businesses, and has worked for herself for more than thirty years.

Other books in this series are:

Getting Started
Goals and Dreams
How To Make Money
How To Negotiate Anything
Networking in Person And Online
Time Management
Turning Setbacks into Opportunity
When to Quit Your Day Job

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMGPUBLISHING
• Release date: May 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476410784

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

Book preview

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We all want to succeed. But believe it or not, achieving success is only the first step. Then you have to survive it. This short book will teach you not only how to achieve success, but also how to live with it—and live well.

The Secrets of Success

A Freelancer’s Survival Guide Short Book

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

​ Copyright Information

Copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

First published in 2009 in a slightly different version on kristinekathrynrusch.com.

Published by WMG Publishing

Layout and design © copyright 2012 WMG Publishing

Cover art © copyright Juampilaco/Dreamstime

Smashwords Edition

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

List of all the

Freelancer’s Survival Guide

Short Books

When to Quit Your Day Job

Getting Started

Turning Setbacks into Opportunity

Goals and Dreams

How to Negotiate Anything

The Secrets of Success

How to Make Money

Networking in Person and Online

Time Management

The Secrets of Success

Table of Contents

​Introduction

Defining Success

The World’s Definition of Success

Other People’s Definitions of Success

Your Definition of Success

About the Author

Copyright Information

​ Introduction

Success seems like such an easy topic. Easy to live with, easy to handle. But it’s not. More people fail in the middle of their success than you would ever expect. Most of us aren’t trained to succeed. We’re trained to get by. Believe me, those two ways of approaching the world are diametrically opposed.

Sometimes, people don’t even recognize their success. They continue struggling as if they haven’t succeeded at all. Worse, some don’t recognize their success until they’ve turned that success into failure.

The tips in this short guide should prevent you from turning your success into failure. This entire book was initially published in five sections for my blog, The Freelancer’s Survival Guide. The entire Guide is available as both an e- and a paperback book. But this piece will work better if you remember it was initially published every Thursday and written in real time during October of 2009.

The Secrets of Success is part of the Freelancer’s Guide Short Book series. I carved some of the entries in the Guide into short books because not everyone wants all of the advice in the larger Guide. Sometimes people buy how-to books for one small section. If you’re one of those people, then this short book is for you. I hope it answers all of your questions about success.

If you want to see how others responded or if you want to see the original posts, go to my blog, kristinekathrynrusch.com, and click on the Freelancer’s Survival Guide tab at the top. That will take you to the table of contents. The success posts are clearly marked.

Enjoy this short book. I hope it brings you a lot of success.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Lincoln City, Oregon

August 27, 2010

​ Defining Success

Success. Why, you ask, should we discuss success? Success is success is success, right?

I wish it were that simple.

We need to discuss success because success is more complicated than failure.

Infinitely more complicated.

And sadly, success can cause your freelance business to fail. I don’t have any statistics, but I do know from anecdotal evidence that success has caused a lot more freelancers I know personally to fail than their repeated setbacks did.

Huh? Most of you don’t believe me. But it’s true. Success derails people, partly because it’s unexpected.

First, let’s define success. Even that’s not easy. It takes my handy dandy Macmillan Contemporary Dictionary (which isn’t contemporary any longer since I bought it while in college in 1979) three different bullet points to define the word. It takes my handy dandy Encarta World English Dictionary (which is a bit more contemporary since it came with the four-year-old Macintosh that I write on) four bullet points to define the word. Neither dictionary puts the bullet points in the same order.

So, combining the dictionary definitions and putting them in my own words (since dictionary definitions are copyrighted), with my own numerical bullet points (more than four), here are the