What Does Success Mean to You?

From my vantage, you look like a success story.

Being able to write about your experience without vomiting blood, heh—that is, somehow with both serene acceptance and not a little pride—signals success to my eyes, ears, and heart.

Mind you, my reaction might be common for those standing out in the freezing rain with no shoes and no coat who have found your window and forget, if only for a few moments, the biting chill while watching you fix yourself a cup of warm cocoa before you return to your sofa in front of the fireplace.

 

I imagine that it feels like success when you see people recommending your work in the wild.

 

I got low expectations.
“Success” just means finishing one project and being able to start on another.
When you can’t move onto the next thing: that’s failure.

 

Last year at an autograph session I signed a fan's boob.

 

Quitting my day job...but signing boobs is a good indicator as well.

 

Signign someone’s boob might be the end of my career... and my life, heh heh.

Now, a relative of a friend is a big-time graphic novelist who was at a Con and had a woman show him a body length tattoo of (I think) one of his characters... something like that, I forget the exact story. When that happens to me, I’ll consider myself a very, very, very weird sort of success. heh heh.

Of course, that’s nothing compared to his real successes, but for me? That’ll work.

 

Deeper answer... I consider things successful, but success is a ladder. Eve of Snows earned fans from around the world, won the first contest I entered it in, got an editor’s pick review from Booklife (Publishers Weekly), got a featured deal on Bookbub, hit #1 Epic in 4 countries including the US because of the Bookbub, made it into the local paper, and I’ve a relative just stumble into someone out in the “Wild” who was reading the book. Hmmm, made some money and put it all back into it... LOL

There are more rungs to grasp and climb, but for a debut novel and the first I ever bothered to finish, I call it success even if it isn’t earning a living. Yet.

 

I find that as I grow older (37 now...) my thoughts about what counts as success have changed. Like Demesnedenoir I've found that for me success is a ladder where there's lots of different steps that count as success. And that getting to the top of the ladder (whatever that might be) isn't necessary to be happy or even desirable.

As a university student first attempting to write, my visions were also of writing the bestseller, with the film rights, million dollar advances and so on. That was what success looked like. And of course, I still wouldn't mind getting to that level of success. But I think there's a lot between where I stand now and that which I would also count as success.

My current long term goal would be to make enough from writing to be able to quit my day job. That's a (very) long term goal and something I would count as success. But there's a lot of different steps to there which I definitely would count as a success:
- just getting a book published
- And then getting someone (other then friends or family) buying said book
- Someone buying a second book
- Selling enough of a book to make back the cost of creating it
- Getting an enthusiastic reaction from someone who read my book
- ...

I can continue that list for a while. But there's a lot of little steps that I would consider a success. And I would be perfectly happy to stop at any of those steps. I think the main feeling (and common denominator) is that I enjoy creating stories. And stories are meant to be read. So it counts as success if someone reads and enjoys those stories I create. And the more people read them the better. It's one of the reasons I put up my short stories on my blog. I have no other place where I can get people to read them. And a story locked away on a hard drive, unable to be read is just a sad story.

 

I remember an interview with a musician where they were asked what it was like to get a gold record [or a million sales or something] for their album... Their reply was that it just showed them how many people had NOT bought it...

 

The funny thing with successful musicians/singers, in particular teen sensations, since their music goes out on the radio and some % of people are forced to listen to it... there are more people totally indifferent to your music or who downright hate it than who have purchased it, heh heh.

 

As a sometime musician, my measure of success tends to be the applause of tonight's audience.

 

I don't consider myself successful at all. Hardly an aspect of my life is excluded from this assessment—certainly, it describes my writing as well. Of which there is none; I don't. I stopped writing some months ago. I hadn't been writing much for months anyway. Then I had a heart attack (or three), that was comparatively minor, but much of my mental focus switched to this new area of life. Health. Finances.

But all that said, I'd guess that "success" merely means being happy with your condition. Whatever your condition.

 

I'd consider success for myself would be to get at least a small fanbase. My personal definition of a fanbase would be a group of people who like your work and don't have any reason to automatically like it (ex. they aren't a family member, your romantic partner, or someone else who's biased towards you.) I'd want to continue to get more out of my work, of course, but I'd be pretty happy if I had an active fanbase of around 100 people.

 

Three heart attacks? That's pretty rough Fifth. No more of those.