Private Commercial Success

There are also private commercial successes, such as selling one book to a total stranger; depositing the small royalty check from an independent, small press; or seeing first three copies, then two, then one, then none, on a bookstore’s shelves. Critical success can come privately as well, perhaps in the form of a note from a respected writer: "read you work—damn fine job. I could not have done better myself," or even revising a work and knowing you’ve built a better scene or chapter, a more interesting character, and so on. Most personal successes are private, coming in the moments when a personal, individual goal is achieved.

Writers also must understand what success is not. In other words, we understand what something is by understanding its opposite, in this case that thing commonly called failure. Failure is a big word, and the concept of failure has many pounds of heavy feelings attached. 

One way to visualize the different kinds and flavors of success is to organize them, along with a portion of the above discussion, into a Writer’s Success Matrix™.

This matrix brings home three points critical to a writer’s well being. First, there a total of six different ways a writer can succeed (public commercial, public critical, public personal, and so on).

This means that if an author limits her definition of success solely to goals or events such as being #1 on a bestseller list (commercial-public) then she immediately eliminates almost 83% of the definition of success. In other words, she has eliminated 5/6 of her opportunities to be successful! As long as our author is #1 on the bestseller list—or enjoys other public, commercial success, she wins. As soon as her book slips to #2, however, she is, by her own definition, no longer a success and perhaps—in her own eyes--a failure.

Such thinking is the equivalent of seeing a pie cut into six pieces, but believing that only one specific piece will satisfy our need for dessert. If someone else takes that one piece, we’re left hungry. Yet, if we see that there are still five perfectly good pieces of pie remaining, we can safely order the ice cream and coffee to go with it.

Of course, not all the slices are equal. In fact, as discussed above, they are all quite different. Yet if a writer’s goal is to be more successful, then one of the quickest ways to do so is to see—and develop an appetite for-- all of the pieces of the success pie.

A second way for writers to have more success is to align the odds --stack the deck —set up the next shot --in their favor. We’ll talk about how to do that with goals later, but for now we can do so by returning to our Writers Success Matrix and examining the probability of (chances of achieving) and opportunities for (chances for attempting) the types of success.

Common sense and a little experience with games of chance and skill tells us that the more we can control an event, the greater the likelihood we can make it turn out to our liking. That same common sense tells us that the more opportunities we have to do a certain event, the better the odds are that we’ll do well at it, unless the event is ruled solely by chance or factors outside of our control. 

No matter how many times we play the lottery, the odds of winning are always the same each time we play, because the lottery is strictly a game of chance—one can’t learn to be a better lottery player. However, if we play games of skill, we can learn to be better players—we can learn to control certain factors. If we also have repeated opportunities to play those games, then our odds of winning go up significantly.

How to Set Yourself Up for More Success -3 (Continued)