Tag: indie publishing

Fantasies, Aspirations, and Goals

The average self-publisher sells about 250 copies of their work.

Hearing this statistic floored me. I have no doubt that it’s accurate. It’s just that — that’s not a lot of copies. I thought I was being conservative when I set a goal of 400 copies if I self-published.

I thought I was being realistic when I ruled out thousands upon thousands of copies and the New York Times bestselling list. It turns out that my scaled back fantasies — even the 400 copies if I self-published — are too unrealistic. Without realistic grounding, our aspirations are set by our fantasies, and our aspirations in turn set our goals.  

It’s time for me to figure out how to pare back my goals, fueled by fantasy. My fantasy was that I would have an agent and would find a publisher of size (say, one of the Big 5) and go on a book tour where someone else made the arrangements for me and I didn’t have to buy my own copies to sign and sell. 

In a way, this is freeing. This makes me realize that having 20 readers of my blog is perhaps normal, and that the agents who reject me need to so they don’t starve, given the odds of someone picking up a book and reading it.

It also means that I will never get external validation of my work if I gauge success by my fantasies. How many readers is “enough” if the average self-published book gets 250 reads?  What does a rejection mean if the object is not quality but saleability?

My goals will stay the same:

  • Get picked up by an agent or publisher, avoiding vanity presses and publishing mills
  • If the above doesn’t work, research and develop an effective self-publishing strategy, avoiding self-publishing scams

What changes are the standards for success. I’m still working on scaling down my expectations. This will be difficult.

An Epiphany on a Long Drive

Yesterday, I drove past fields of white against a cold blue sky, scattered with wind turbines like ice giants. My playlist, a random mix dominated by the local bands I have known and loved over the years, lulled me into a sense of introspection.

When I was younger, I declared that local music was the salvation of the universe — said in a dry, understated tone for comic effect, of course. Nonetheless, I believed it. The bands I loved ranged from introspective roots rock to bagpipe jazz to Celtic rock fusion, and I loved their energy, their bravado, their desire to create a sound that wasn’t like every other band out there. At the same time I wanted them to become big enough so that other people could enjoy them, I feared what the corporate music machine would do to them.

I hit an epiphany somewhere north of Creston, IA, in the icy white afternoon through which I drove:

Why did I see self-publishing as different from what my friends in local bands went through? 

Why did I see big contracts as something that would kill my friends’ spirit and creativity, but I didn’t see the parallels in my own life?

I don’t know how ready I am for self-publishing, but I am beginning to see it in a different way.