On The Measure of Success

One of the things that can be hard about self publishing is how you measure your own success. This problem seems especially present at the beginning, since you never know how much of your books are being bought by family and friends (yeah, that means you Mom) and how many are being bought by new customers. Not only that but there is nobody outside of yourself that can really evaluate your numbers for you. There's no boss, publisher, or accountant looking at your sales and saying "Alright, this isn't working so let's do something different" or "Wow, we're doing pretty good, keep up the pace!" The only current judge of my success is myself, and that is unusual for someone who has spent his life passing other people's tests or trying to meet other people's business goals. The only similar situation has been when I was on my mission and had to set my goals for each week. It's crazy to think that I have that kind of freedom again, only now in a far different field of work.

So I think I will set some benchmarks for Wolfhound's success, just so that I can have them recorded here. That way I can try to adapt and change things if needed. Hopefully we will just sell thousands and thousands based off of my sheer, recognizable writing genius, but my brilliance cannot always carry the day, can it? :)

So, as a benchmark, we have set a minimum, scraping the bottom of the barrel goal of five books sold a month. If that's all that is happening, we are still moving forward, but we should probably look into changing marketing strategies or something in order to increase sales.

Fifty sales in a month are more like an okay number. Not bad, not good, but pretty much average in terms of our expectations. Wolfhound is my first book, after all, and we are hoping that we can sell at least that much until Kingsley goes up in February. It's a bit of an ambitious goal, but it would set us up with a decent base to launch from.

Anything over that would be awe-inspiring. One hundred in a month would make us happy, two fifty would have me dancing in the streets. Dreams to shoot for, but probably not going to happen unless things really take off--or at least until I get multiple books up and start in on the sequels.

So yeah, those are my benchmarks, if anyone was curious. As of now Wolfhound is currently edging towards "okay" territory, and blissfully staying out of "scraping" levels. We are already surpassing the hopes we had for December, and I'm taking that as a good sign of things to come. Thanks for sticking with us and for all of your support. See you around!