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
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