I’m a big fan of being your own worst critic, I don’t think it’s possible to survive and grow as a creator of any kind if you don’t really, truly, deep down inside hate everything that you do. It’s seeing yourself with the eyes of your detractors and it’s critically important.

That said, there comes a point after you identify your flaws, and turn a light on your mistakes that you have to start believing in yourself. To get a better picture of what I mean, let’s look at a common scenario –

Bill McBlogger spends 500 hours writing a book that he wants to self-publish. Bill understands the effort he put into it, and knows that anyone who reads his book will gain a lot from it. He remembers, very clearly the hours of research, the mind-numbing editing and the half dozen proof copies that he paid for out of his own pocket to make sure that everything was perfect. Bill is trying to figure out how he should price his book, and what he comes up with is $1 over printing costs. Bill knows he should probably charge $5 or $6 dollars more but he’s afraid that if he does he will scare his customers off.

There are multiple flaws in this line of thinking, and all of them have to do with Mr. McBlogger not reconciling his price with his pitch. Bill wants everyone in the world to buy his book, so instead of trusting the book and his marketing to prevail — he decides to compete on price. He scares himself into believing that selling a “cheap” product is the only way to sell anything at all. Bill’s pitch is that his book has value, but his lack of confidence in pricing immediately causes his potential readers to lose trust. It’s the same mechanism that causes people to underbid in negotiations or offer piles of “freebies” to an already great offering.

Believe that your product has value. Believe that your marketing has value. Believe that if you stick to your guns and keep plugging away, the people who need to find you will, and as long as you are realistic from the beginning about the value of your offering, you will find customers to match your price. If, for whatever reason, you can’t it’s much easier to lower your price than to raise it.

When you charge anyone for anything you are asking them to take a leap of faith. How can you expect them to dive in if you’re still testing the waters yourself?

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