How Do You Know If Your Book is Successful?

Back when I was laboring in the trenches as an author working with traditional publishers—before the experience broke my soul and wallet—I strived to have a successful book.

The problem was, no one ever told me what success actually meant.

Was it selling a million copies? 1000? Getting reviewed in the Times? Selling enough copies to get a second printing? Getting another book deal? Having a book optioned and actually made into a movie?

No one told me and I never asked and so, much like the millions of delusional authors before and after me, I just figured someone would let me know when that “success” moment hit.

Still waiting for it.

Eventually, the publishers let me know when my books weren’t successful with their semi silence. They didn’t ghost me—it was more like dying, coming back from the dead and dying again.

Their responses to my emails contained sentences like, “No more bookstore orders” and “We pitched you but never heard back.”

Now I know the truth and not just because I’m one of the maybe three people insane enough to have bought and read The Trial: The DOJ's Suit to Block Penguin Random House's Acquisition of Simon & Schuster. Over the years, I’ve had former in-house book publicists tell me that they were forced to lie by omission to 99% of their writers.

See, the publishing houses decided which books were going to be successful long before the books came out, and they decided it with the half-million-dollar+ advances they doled out. When they were giving out the $50,000 or so advances to people like me, they knew they were probably taking a loss but that was okay because their hit books were going to more than make up for it.

While operating at a loss on purpose sounds insane, publishers can’t just publish one big book a quarter; that would be weird. So they plan for the big one and surround it with a whole bunch of others. And it’s worth doing that because they know that when that one book hits, it will more than make up for those smaller advances. They also know that when a book doesn’t hit, there’s no use trying to bring it to life. To me, $50,000 seemed like a fortune. To them, when compared to the millions upon millions a hit book could bring in, it seemed like a rounding error.

I loved something that Jennifer Keishen Armstrong told me when I had her on my podcast a few years ago: when her book, Seinfeldia, hit the NYT list, her publisher reached out to set a big marketing meeting. She was confused; she’d already had the marketing meetings before the book’s release. And then she understood: there was the requisite “we have to give every author a marketing meeting so let’s just tell them some stuff” and then there was the real “you’re officially a success so let’s make you even more of one now” meeting.

(My situation hitting the NYT list was different, primarily because it was a book I wrote for someone who was unsafe verging on violent and by the time the book hit the list, I think we were all done with him and just happy to take the accolades that come with hitting the list and move on.)

Still, I don’t blame publishers for only focusing on their sure things—their Glennon Doyle’s and Malcolm Gladwell’s. I certainly prefer to focus on sure things in my own life. But there is just such a wide berth between a hit book and all the rest of books that it’s almost impossible to explain to someone not in the business. Here’s the closest I can come: it would be like living in a city that had one successful doctor because all the rest of them had gone out of business.

The best way I can make sense of why this happens is that roughly a quarter of our population doesn’t read. So when a book becomes so meteorically successful that it starts to come up in conversation everywhere, the non-readers feel uncomfortable. They must really be missing something if everyone’s talking about it! So they go get their one book that year and read it. In other words, the only way you can reach runaway success as an author is when non-readers are reading you so that they don’t feel dumb when someone brings you up at a party.

Like I said, publishers aren’t doing anything wrong here by betting all their money on the horse they expect to win. The wrong part is that they’re not straightforward about it and they don’t help their non massive authors come up with a plan B.

Yes, it would suck to have to tell someone that they’re probably not going to succeed; I certainly wouldn’t want to have that conversation. But if publishers were willing to, they could then set those authors up with realistic expectations for what success could look like. In doing so, they’d probably be able to quell the post book depression so many authors experience.

Because here’s the thing: if you have your book acquired by a big publisher, you’ve made it. You should dance the Merengue, or whatever Baby and Johnny Castle do in Dirty Dancing. You should celebrate yourself to the maximum for having attained something that roughly one in 10,000 do.

The problem is you spend the two-to-three years between acquisition and publication only semi-relishing in that while mostly preparing, with apprehension and cautious optimism, for the inevitable success that awaits you upon publication. How could success not await you, after all, when you’ve achieved a dream that more than 80 percent of people have and almost none of them manage to achieve?

When your book doesn’t launch to great success, you are mad or sad—entirely appropriate responses to the experience. Because no matter how many times people like me told you during that two-to-three year wait not to get your hopes up because meteoric success is so rare that it’s safer to wish for a pink unicorn to show up at your door, you tuned us out.

“It will be different for me,” you thought. Then you wished we’d be quiet and stop spreading bad vibes or pushing our frustration about our own experiences onto you.

I know this because I’ve seen the look on countless people’s faces. Oh, and I also experienced it with six different books myself.

This is why I’m so obsessed with setting up realistic definitions of success for the authors I work with. No one can control how many people buy our books so why obsess over it? We encourage our clients to not even check their sales figures. (I never check mine.) Instead, we urge them to focus on what their book can do for them.

Even though I’m not a math person, the best way I can explain it is this: if you offer a service where your average client nets you $10,000, you can either try to make $10,000 from one book sale (when your reader hires you after reading your book) or $4 per book on 2,500 book sales. How hard is it to sell 2,500 books? Well, the average book sells roughly 500 copies.3 So does it make sense to focus on selling 2,500 books—something you can’t control—or far fewer books to people who will hire you or buy your product?

I also urge authors to remember that the book is there forever. Traditional publishing is all about the launch; that’s why there’s so much focus on pre-sales (pre-sales count as first week sales figures). But what focusing on the launch means is that if your book isn’t a bestseller out of the gate, you’re a failure. Your publisher treats you like one. The people who ask you how your book is doing seem to be treating you like one. You feel like one, even though two to three years ago, you thought your dreams came true.

Again, these publishing folks aren’t evil people. They’re simply businesspeople. The problem is that authors don’t act like businesspeople back. They tend not to build businesses and then use their books to attract people to them. If they did, then they wouldn’t have to care about how many books they sold. They could instead focus on selling to the right people—people at certain masterminds or in certain communities. They could just give their books away to those people because the value isn’t in the person buying the book but in what they do after reading it.

If you think this all sounds so disgustingly uncreative, so crass, so calculating, I assure you that it’s not. It’s just practical. I wrote On Good Authority because I knew it would attract a lot of clients to Legacy Launch Pad. I 100% used my creativity to write it. People seem to forget that being creative and being practical aren’t mutually exclusive.

If On Good Authority had been published by one of the Big Five, I wouldn’t have been able to put my website or QR codes or links to PDFs to get readers to sign up for my email list in the book. That’s because a publisher’s goal isn’t to get a readers to hire their authors; it’s to get readers to buy more of their books (especially their big book of the season). That’s why they put their own website and not the author’s in the book.

The reason I had such miserable book launches when my books were traditionally published is that I had unrealistic expectations—and expectations, as the saying goes, are resentments under construction. It wasn’t entirely the fault of my publishers. I was delulu to assume I could be the breakout success when I hadn’t been paid an advance that suggested I would be.

The reason I only have glorious launches now is that I choose to focus solely on what I can control—writing a book for my ideal client and getting it into their hands. If other cool things land in my lap, like an opportunity to go on Good Morning America or be featured in the Wall Street Journal, it’s frosting, not the cake. And because of the specific actions I’ve taken, I’m already so full that the frosting isn’t sustenance—just something delicious I can enjoy.