On Success

Last month I was honored to be the speaker at the 29^th annual Jim Wayne and Mary Ellen Miller Celebration of Writing at my alma mater, Western Kentucky University. The Millers were fine poets and excellent teachers, and Mary Ellen’s Contemporary Fiction class was life-changing for me as a student at WKU in the 1980s. Besides conducting a student workshop and judging the student fiction contest, I had the opportunity to talk to young writers, among others there to celebrate the Millers, about some of the things I’ve learned about the writing life, particularly over the past year since the publication of my debut novel. My friend, the writer M. Hendrix, was in the audience and encouraged me to share my talk with others.

I won’t go into the full talk here, but the short version is that writers put in a lot of time and work (in my case, about 30 years, off and on) without any guarantee of success and often without much reward, even if they do get published. I cited a recent report from the Authors’ Guild indicating that 2 million books (other sources say 3-4 million) are published every year—by big traditional publishers and small indie presses and self-published, all together—and only 6% of all those books sell at least 1000 copies. 94% of the books published each year never make it to 4-figure sales. (If you’re interested, you can read it for yourself here: “The Cruelty—and Possibilities— of 21st-Century Book Promotion” by Michael Castleman.)

I shared this not to be discouraging to the young writers in the room but because I believe it’s important for aspiring writers to have a true picture of what publishing a book really means. There’s a lack of transparency about what authors make and how likely they are to be able to make a living from writing. We tend to hear about the big mega-sellers but not about the vast majority of books and their authors.

I encouraged the young writers in particular—although I think this is something all of us can consider, no matter what we’re doing in our careers, whether it’s writing or something else, or in our lives in general—to ask themselves a question that I suspect that most of us don’t really want to think about: What is success?

Does it mean fame and fortune? Does success mean finding an agent? Getting a publisher? Getting good blurbs? Having a big book tour? Getting good reviews from Publishers’ Weekly or the New York Times or whatever? Going viral on TikTok? Making the bestseller list? Getting positive feedback from readers? Or just finishing something that you felt a strong urge to put out into the world? Being proud of what you’ve written? All of those? Some of those? One of those? What is the measure of success?

This is a time of uncertainty for all writers, especially young writers just starting out (OK, honestly, for all of us). Everything is changing rapidly: what’s popular, what publishers are looking for now, where and how to buy books, how many people read books with so many digital forms of entertainment out there, the role of AI in writing and publishing, etc.

My message to aspiring writers: You can’t control all those outside factors, but you get to define success for yourself. You determine what success as a writer (or a whatever—fill in the blank) means to you. It’s about how it makes you feel and how it makes your readers feel (no matter how many or how few).

I can tell you that I have a different definition of writing success now than I did at 20. For one thing, the publishing business has changed dramatically since then. The goalposts have been moved. Some of them have been ripped out of the ground completely. And I recently had the realization that something that I used to hear published writers say that would make my eyes roll back in my head is absolutely true for me, and that is that the main joy is in the creation—that satisfaction you get from crafting this piece of art and working on it until you get it as close to perfect as you can, expressing something that you needed to say, and doing it to the best of your ability.

And the second measure of success for me has been a big surprise, because I didn’t think too much about “fans” or getting fan mail or talking to readers. For some reason, that didn’t register for me as a goal. I was thinking more along the lines of I’d like to get a good review in these publications or I’d like to win this award or at least be a finalist or I’d like to have a bestseller. What has been so surprising is how many people—some of whom I know but most of whom I didn’t know—have reached out to me by email or on social media or at events and said, “I read your book, and I want you to know how much it meant to me and how I felt so seen and understood and how much I related to the main character.” I wrote about a character who loves her family and her community and her music deeply but also comes to disagree with her people strongly and has to try to make peace with that change in her belief system and the losses that go along with that. Some people really identified with that and said it helped them face their own feelings and experiences.

So those two things have become, for me, the measures of success: I created something that I felt a strong urge to express, and I’ve had—I don’t know the number, maybe 50 or so—people who have told me how much the book meant to them.

I urged the writers in the audience to give themselves the gift of defining success for themselves rather than taking on someone else’s definition. But I also gave them the following success thoughts that they might put on their list. (Maybe you could use them too.)

Wishing you success,