How to tell if your book is a success
Plus a collection of smart ideas about writing from my curation bucket.
Hey, y’all—
Some of the most delightful books I’ve had the pleasure of working on began as conceptually flawed premises with weak, flat writing. But determined writers with a growth mindset almost always emerge from coaching and editing with a manuscript they’re proud of. Some of these works never see publication, but they do serve as stepping stones to future books that are that much closer.
Is that enough to be worth continuing to work on your novel? If your story never got published, would the satisfaction of writing it be sufficient to keep you at the keyboard?
Join me in exploring how to tell if your book is a success, as we grow in our practice of The Writes of Fiction.
How to tell if your book is a success
“Most of us would agree that the standard estimation of writing ‘success’ is popular acclaim and lots of money. But that definition leaves a lot of writers out in the cold. Are we really failing to measure up if we don’t hit the big time? Or what if we do hit the big time by that definition, only to have our writing largely dissed?
“Maybe I’m satisfied with that technically brilliant book no one is going to read. Maybe you’re satisfied with the knowledge that only a couple hundred readers loved what you wrote.
“And I say, Why shouldn’t we be?”—Listen to or read the rest from K.M. Weiland at Helping Writers Become Authors.
More on defining what’s “good enough”: All of us are born into a world of stories. We hear stories from the time we are babies, we weave imaginary tales into our play, and we craft our own narratives to make sense of our experiences. We’re all storytellers, but not all of us possess the narrative and writing skills to create a novel strangers will pay to read.
And why should you expect otherwise? As bestselling author Ann Patchett observed, “If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, ‘I’ll be playing in Carnegie Hall next month!’ you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker.”—Read the rest at Is my writing good enough?