How Do You Define Writing Success?

I used to have a picture in my mind of what writing success was, and it looked like nothing less than a fairytale.

I imagined that I wouldn't be successful until I could work on my novels full-time and, not only that, support myself fully on what I earned from my writing. As a successful writer, I would live in a nice house and venture out on frequent writing retreats in exotic locales ...

You can probably see as clearly as I can now that I was conflating the ideas of wealth and writing success. I've come to appreciate, however, that success is much more varied and interesting than the number of zeros on a royalty statement. (Which is a good thing because writers are having an increasingly difficult time earning a living by writing alone...)

Your friends who aren't writers might think this fairytale kind of success is as easy as simply becoming the next Stephen King or Colleen Hoover, but you and I know that these writers are the .0001% of the 1%. Thousands of books are published each year and very, very few make more than a tiny ripple in the great lake that is publishing. It's a rare book indeed that makes a splash the size a leaping trout would make, never mind a hearty cannonball splash.

If it seems like there's a lot of good books out there, it's because there are. But even the great authors of these good books don't see the financial windfall we'd hope they would.

So if you've harbored a fantasy similar to mine about what it is to be successful, how do you reassess what success looks like without becoming discouraged?

It helps to think deeply about your why. For me, it goes back to the story. My goal is to entertain readers and create stories that reflect one facet (at least) of what it was like to live at this time in history and to tell that story the best way that I can.

And as a book coach, helping other writers bring their great stories to the page to entertain and reflect the time in which we live, is just as rewarding—just as much a marker of success for me.

I hope you aren’t discouraged by the bleak financial picture for most writers, and I hope you’ll write anyway. We need stories from all corners of the population. We need yours. ✨