One of the biggest misconceptions about being a writer I had before I was a writer, or at least a published one, is that other writers were my competition. I imagined it would like a Jilly Cooper novel with more coffee. Plots and back-stabbing, big hair and fights in the swimming pool, drama 24-7. Maybe the occasional murder plot, but there’s a reason I write crime!

They aren’t.

Writing might be a competition, but mostly it is with yourself. Well, except when you’ve entered an actual writing competition–in which case the other writers literally are. That’s the exception that proves the rule though.

Other writers are friends or acquaintances. Some you like, some you don’t, and some you’re indifferent to for one reason or another. It doesn’t matter. When it comes to your career, they don’t matter.

Give me a head wind, auto-acceptance on whatever I hand in, and enough coffee that I only need to sleep three days out of ten? Even then I couldn’t write enough books to keep a keen reader supplied with enough books that they wouldn’t need to buy any other author’s books. OK, I’m not the fastest writer out there, but even the nose-down, book-a-month people can only write twelve books a year.

I like to read and I have sporadic insomnia, I’ve read twelve books in twenty-four hours before. That’s a lot of books a year when you think about it. A lot of writers needed to fill that Kindle or stock that bookshelf.

Do I judge myself by other writers? Sometimes. It’s a detached sort of competition though. It’s not so much about the writer as their career progression, the trajectory that I can see and predict for them. It’s not that I want to beat this imaginary writer for their sake, I just want to reach the same places I see them going.

At the same time I have friends who are writers. Some of them are more successful, some of them aren’t as established as me, and some of them are on completely different career trajectories entirely. If I support them—reblog their new books, read their stuff, talk them up—that doesn’t take anything away from me. Writers—people—succeed or fail on their own merits.

My friend Andi Lee’s first novel Mischief Maker comes out on 13 August. I wish her all the success in the world…and none of it will come out of my pocket. Well, except for the coffee I have to buy her next time I see her.

It’s easy to play Dog in the Manger, to tell yourself that if they didn’t have those readers then I would. That you could have written that book or come up with that character. Except you didn’t and you don’t (I mean, no matter how good you are there’s always someone better), and the truth is that they have those readers because they deserve them. If you want a bigger readership then it’s up to you to work harder, to market smarter, to try again. Maybe tomorrow the imaginary writer-nemesis will look at YOUR book and wish they’d written it. Or they don’t know you exist. It doesn’t matter.

End of the day? The only person you are in competition with is yourself. The only person you need to write better than is the you of yesterday. Your last book is the only one that it matters whether it is more than successful that your next one or not.

And by you? I mean me,

Go write.