Does Making Money, Success, and Publishing a Book Happen Together?

Publishing a book is easy.  

If you have written a book, and sent it off to literary agents and edited it, the process of publishing is possibly the easiest part of your book.  It is out of your hands to determine on what time frame a publisher will have your work ready for your readers to purchase.

But still, it is success — you have published that book.  As a writer you must be proud of this amazing accomplishment.

It’s exciting, and you will make money with that book right?

You wrote it, and you should be seeing some sort of earnings for your book and you should be happy about what you have done, you have done one thing that many want to do.

But will you call this a success?

In some ways I would call it a success, and I would be happy that I am making sales, but I also don’t see simply publishing a book as a success any more.  My goals have changed, and now that I know I can publish something that people would like to buy and read, I also know that another book and its sales will increase my total earnings.

Some of my writing friends might argue that I am thinking purely of profits, where I can sit down and write for a living and continue to publish as I please, but money is something that we need.  And while it shouldn’t be my only yardstick, I look at my earnings as another means to measure success.  I believe that money shouldn’t matter when you write, or you will focus on that too much, but money matters when you are setting your goals for success.

I have to set the bar higher, and in this case, I plan to market my new book more widely and effectively.

It is because I have travelled this road once before that I learned what doesn’t work, and I can try another method to see if that does better for me.  The road in self-publishing is just as complex as the traditional method, and the more you learn the more you will have success.

The more I do, the more success (or something like it)  I can enjoy.  Making money with my writing is one way I can measure how well the three pieces fit together, and how much I need to “raise the bar” in my writing and my views on earnings.