What are the markers for success when you’re an indie author? How do you know when you’ve “made it,” whatever that’s supposed to mean?
The implications of this question are more far-reaching than you might think. Just this last week, I visited with Howard Tayler (of the awesome webcomic Schlock Mercenary) up at Salt Lake Comic Con. Howard and I have been friends for a while, since both of us are part of the local writing scene here in northern Utah. As we were talking, he referred to me as an “up-and-coming writer,” then immediately apologized, figuring that I must hate it when people talk about me in such a condescending way. But when he tried to think of what else to call me, he struggled to come up with the right term.
When I first got to know Howard, I was an “up-and-coming writer.” But now, I’m something else. I’ve got twenty books out, a small but growing fan-base, and strong enough sales that writing is my primary source of income. I’m not a beginner, or an amateur, or an aspiring writer anymore–I’m a professional author. I’m living the dream.
At the same time, I don’t really feel like I’ve “made it” yet. I’m not quite making a living off of my books, though if things keep going the way they have been, I should be by the end of the year. I haven’t won any awards, I haven’t hit any bestseller lists, and none of my books are on tvtropes. Outwardly, I haven’t hit any of the obvious markers for success, and that’s what threw Howard off.
Then again, most of the outward markers for success in the book industry are flawed. The bestseller lists are mostly rigged, and even if they weren’t, they still only measure velocity–selling a high number of books in a short amount of time. There are companies that will put you on a bestseller list by buying up a couple thousand copies of your book and disguising the sales so that they look organic, so that even if you never sell another copy again, you can still put “New York Times Bestseller” or whatever on the cover.
As for the awards, they’re probably less rigged, though I suspect that the nomination process for most of them is all about who you know. In speculative fiction, the Hugos and the Nebulas set the standard. The Nebulas are juried, and I doubt I could ever get into them without first forming the right connections. The Hugos, however, are open ballot, and I could get onto them without too much difficulty if I had enough fans among Worldcon attendees to nominate me.
But are awards the best measure of success? Is it possible to succeed without winning any?
I definitely think it is. In fact, I believe that “success” is something that everyone needs to define individually, based on their own goals and aspirations. For some people, getting on a bestseller list is the ultimate measure of success. For others, the recognition that comes from an award is the standard. For me, my primary goal is to make a living as a full-time writer, so that’s how I measure my own success. That’s one of the main reasons why I decided to go indie.
At the same time, though, there is something to be said about the need for a standard. There’s basically two kinds of success: inward success, which is how you measure your own efforts based to achieve your goals, and outward success, which is necessary to put you on the map and get people outside your immediate fan base to take you seriously. The latter is the kind of success that I’m struggling the most with now–how to distinguish myself as a professional within the sf&f community.
But honestly, I’m not too worried about that. I’d much rather focus on pleasing my small but dedicated fan base than making a name for myself in the genre community at large. Perhaps that’s yet another reason why going indie appeals so much to me–there aren’t as many outward markers of success, but it gives you a lot more flexibility and opportunity to reach the inward ones.
To be fair, there are some pretty obvious outward markers for indie success. Every book on Amazon has a sales ranking that is updated in real-time, and every genre is broken down into a series of subcategory lists, each with their own top 100 list. But what all of that exactly means is still very much in the air. For some subcategories, you can hit the top 100 lists with less than 10 sales per day. Also, there are numerous ways to game the system, some of them white-hat (like buying a promotion or doing a giveaway) and some of them black-hat (like buying reviews or using sock puppet accounts).
Since the ebook world is still developing and changing, I don’t put too much stock in any of these new measures of success. In time, I’m sure we’ll figure out what they all mean. Until then, though, I’m going to focus my efforts much more on the inward measures of success and achieving my own goals. Maybe along the way, I’ll hit some of the outward markers by accident, but even if I don’t, the only person whose opinion on my success I care about is me.
