Chapter 136: What Does Success Look Like?

It has taken no time at all for my students to surprise me, which is one of the delights of my job. The surprise came in response to a question that my colleague James Robinson puts to the class at the start of every semester: how do you define success?

James is one of the wisest people I know about identifying and connecting with audiences, and typically when he poses this question the class responds with a number. As in how many copies of their book they hope to sell. If the 2019 class sold 800, we want to top 1000. 

But that is not how this class responded. Not that they necessarily know at this point what success will look like for their book. But the more they spoke about it, the more they began to consider different definitions: What is the experience they want their book to offer readers, and is a paperback necessarily the best way to achieve it? 

Does selling fewer but more handsome books at a higher price mean more to us than sales volume alone? 

Should the photographs that are the basis of their work – reporting a frozen moment in a photo they’ve chosen – be in color, even though black and white is cheaper?

It is still very early in the semester and the class has time to decide. But the fact that they have opened the door to debate – which inevitably will get messy – is encouraging and exciting. 

It also forces me to pose the same question to myself – both as a writer and publisher.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I had begun the class anxious about how this volume of the Memory Project would do given the transformation of the digital landscape, particularly the upheaval in social media and its usefulness as a way to spread the word about a new book. If the Delacorte Review and so many other small publishers had seen a drop off in traffic, what did that portend for a book by a group of students? 

But now those very students I was worried about were suggesting that perhaps my definition of success was too narrow. There were other ways to measure success beyond sales figures.

There always have been, even if they are difficult to see.

We recently published a terrific story When I Was Blind; A Story of Love and Darkness whose author, Emily Stetler, wrote a note that pleased me as much as it surprised me. She thanked us for publishing her story at roughly 

the length she had written it – about 8,500 words – and for not insisting that she cut it to the standard 3,000. She did not ask how many people had read it. In fact, few of the many authors we’ve published over the past ten years have asked about readership. 

What mattered to most of them was finding a home for their story, and having had an experience in which they were made to feel good about themselves as writers. 

I will confess that too often I forget this – especially as I dive into the analytics – if anyone understands Google’s new and impossible analytics system please HELP!! – and I fall, once again, into the trap of measuring success by counting eyeballs. 

In fairness, it was how I was raised. I recall being interviewed by a wizened- seen-it-all reporter from the Wall Street Journal when my first book came out in 1989 – a year when there was a surfeit of books about my subject, Japan. 

“How many books have you sold?” he asked.

“About 8,000,” I replied.

To which he somehow felt the need to say, “low end of respectable.”

At that moment I was not thinking about the euphoric feeling of writing the final paragraph and knowing that I had done it, or my agent handing me my first copy, or seeing my book in the window of the bookstore in my neighborhood. I was not thinking about having produced something I had only dreamed of one day being able to do.

I was thinking about being on the “low end of respectable.” That was 35 years ago and the fact that those exact words stay with me says more about me than the person who said them. 

What had I wanted that book to bring me? What would have made it feel like a success? I did get good reviews in places that I hoped might notice it. My publisher paid for a modest book tour to the West Coast and I did a bunch of radio interviews. I felt like an author, which is what I so much wanted to be. 

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want more – the more being what was measurable: sales.

Every writer wants to be read, and the more the better. I had put together a 16-page single-spaced marketing proposal for my publisher – my plan was to have them connect me with every Japan and Asia society in the country. My publisher thanked me for my efforts, in effect patted me on the head for putting in the time. 

Be advised that publishers do notice how many copies you sell. On my metaphorical Authors Report Card, my grades, as it were, have ranged from B- to A to a C+. The last one stung. There is correlation between how large an advance a publisher pays – as well as their willingness to publish you again – and their pleasure or disappointment in how a book sells. Publishers do not like losing money, and if the book doesn’t sell, the fault is generally seen as the author’s. 

We’d be naive to believe that sales don’t matter to writers; we write to get paid – no man but a blockhead, Samuel Johnson famously said, ever wrote except for money. And we are subject to the needs, whims, tastes and moods of the market, and publishers. 

But as my students – and Emily Stetler – are now reminding me, there has to be something more. More meaning from measuring success in ways beyond the external: primarily sales and reviews. Those matter. So too do the internal measures of success. 

But because they rarely generate data – what’s my Amazon sales number right now? – they are easy to overlook. There is no empirical evidence to support feeling good about what you have accomplished. But to ignore the feeling – the pride, joy, thrill, exaltation you experience when you see what you have accomplished – is a mistake, one easily corrected by simply reminding yourself to pause and remind yourself of how hard you worked to achieve what had felt all but impossible when you began.

All the rest is pretty much out of your control. The work and the feelings about it are not. 

James mentioned before class today that he had gotten an email from a stranger who had read his new book, More Than We Expected, the story of the life and death of his son. 

The reader felt the need to tell James that he had stayed up late reading the book and given the subject, crying as he read. His wife, he wrote, suggested that he stop. He told her he could not.

For James that was a success beyond imagining. A stranger discovered his story and had to read it, even though it broke his heart. He was moved and thrilled.

Success that transcended measurement. 

Maybe the best of all. 

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.