The First Thing to Ask the Most Successful Person in Your Field
It has nothing to do with how or even why they were successful…
When I first started as a writer, my only goal was publication. I knew exactly what I wanted, and it was a book deal with a major NYC publisher. It didn’t occur to me that there were other levels of success. That some book deals were better than others; some come with marketing plans, some came with movie deals, some actually had movies get made.
The longer I was in the business, the more goals I had to set my eyes on. I achieved my initial goal of a major book deal at a major house, but that meant my goal posts shifted. And, as with all fields in the arts, one of the ways I defined success quickly came to mean (a) steady work and (b) steady pay. I love traditional publishing, but I wanted to explore more options, so I researched self publishing on the side. I threw myself into learning about all sides of publishing, believing that diversity was the key to longevity in my career. I talked to other authors, agents, and publishers.
And I learned that my definition of success was not specific enough.
The thing very few people want to actually talk about is numbers — what a thing costs, both in time and money, and what the results are, both in sales of units and profits. So when, for example, I asked someone what a successful marketing campaign looked like to them, they may say a newsletter campaign or a specific type of advertising. I would then invest my time and money in imitating that campaign…but the results were not what I’d wanted.
That doesn’t mean the campaign failed. It means I had asked the wrong question.
The most important question you need to ask before you ask for advice is what, exactly, a “successful outcome” of that advice would be.
For some people, success is a numbers game. It’s worth it to price an ebook as free or ninety-nine cents if that means more people download it. For some, it’s about profit — a higher price is better if it means a higher profit margin, even if that means fewer sales overall. Others are focused on exposure, some want reviews, some want to position a book as a loss leader for future sales, some want to collect data (such as emails for future newsletter campaigns).
When I first explored self publishing as an option, advice came from every other person I met. There was one author who took me under her wing, suggesting I invest a specific amount of money in a certain strategy of advertisement campaigns. Being so new to the self publishing game, I was eager to take her advice.
“Here’s what you do,” she told me, outlining exactly which marketing outreach programs she used, the dollar amount, and the time she ran them. She’d been self publishing for years, and I was grateful to have her advice.
I followed her plan exactly. And then I watched the numbers, carefully using link tracking to see exactly where and how the sales went. Self publishing is a good model to test marketing theories as you can see results quickly and fairly accurately.
As my results of this marketing campaign came in, my heart sank.
I had failed. The money wasn’t entirely wasted — I did make a profit — but it was minimal at best.
“What’s wrong?” my friend asked.
“All that time and money, and I only made a little profit,” I said. “I don’t know what I did wrong! I probably only moved a hundred or so copies of the book doing this.”
“A hundred copies?!” she exclaimed. “That’s awesome!”
And that’s when I realized that it wasn’t that I’d failed; it was that I’d had a different definition of success than her. I already had a traditional book deal with another series and a fan base that I was extraordinarily grateful for. My own marketing campaign, done through research and based on what had worked for me in the past, had moved ten thousand copies of the book by the end of the year. My friend, on the other hand, was starting from a different place and had different expectations of success.
Neither of us were wrong. But we had our eyes on different goals, and that meant that different strategies should be used.
The problem was that we both defined our goals as “success,” and neither of us paused to ask if that word meant different things to the other.
I have come to learn that one of the first things I need to ask when authors come to me for advice is what the goal of the project is. If an author wants to self publish a work for local outreach, it’s a very different writing schedule and editing and marketing process from someone who wants to polish a work for traditional publication submission. If the marketing goal is to move a number of units, it matters to consider the specificity on the number — a marketing campaign with a goal to sell a hundred units will look different (and have a different budget) from a marketing goal to sell thousands or tens of thousands.
Clearly defining what the definition of success for a project is can be the difference between actually meeting your goals, or meeting someone else’s.
