I think we all get hung up on certain metrics, and for a lot of us it’s sales. For a writer, that’s a really hard one to use to determine success. After all, sales aren’t just elusive—as a writer they’re also mostly outside of your control. Publishing a book is typically a years-long process and most of the time it’s spent writing, revising, and interacting with agents, editors, and other publishing professionals. If you’re lucky you’ll have choices to make along the way, and hopefully while achieving your goals you can give equal weight to what the experience of publishing is like as much as the end result. You have some control over that, and even if those things you can’t control don’t work out, you’ll have the experience as another measure of success—one that’s much more dependable and perhaps just as rewarding.
—Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates