When Success Has Nothing to Do With Sales

By Susan Kushner Resnick

The third definition of the word success, according to my Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, circa 1987, whose cloth cover is shredded like an old dust rag from use, is this:

Favorable or desired outcome; also: the attainment of wealth, favor or eminence.

I find it odd that a forum that divides each shade of meaning so distinctly would bunch those two definitions together. Because they’re clearly different. My second book has already brought me success as defined by the first clause, but it may never get me to the second. And right now, during the third official week of its life as a published entity, that’s fine with me.

I was determined not to let this book die on the vine. My first book, Sleepless Days, which should have had wide readership and great sales, died such a death shortly after its birth in 2000. That book is a memoir of my experience with post-partum depression. It was the first one published by an American author. With approximately 200,000 women suffering from PPD every year, there was definitely an audience for it. And though people are still buying remaindered copies of the book and I’m still being interviewed as an expert because of it, the sales sucked.

It’s easy to figure out why. When it came out, the Internet barely existed. Press-sponsored book tours were still the norm, though I didn’t get one. There was no such thing as a blog. In short, authors didn’t self-promote themselves to exhaustion. That wasn’t our job. Our job was to write the book. The publisher’s job was to sell it. Of course a big press like St. Martin’s would sell my book, I thought back then. It’s their business – who am I to interfere?

Ah, naïveté. I know now that nobody’s going to love and nurture a book the way the author does, that the publisher has already moved on to its next infatuation by the time a new book comes out and that self-promotion is as important as writing if you want people to read the thing. So, I’ve been publicizing the hell out of my new book, Goodbye Wifes and Daughters, a nonfiction account of a historic coal mine disaster. There’s less of a natural audience for this book than there was for the first and I’m with a small university press that never promised any promotional help. Yet I’ve already sold more than half of my small print run.

I’ve truly enjoyed marketing the book. I started not knowing a thing about publicity, but managed to get myself TV, radio, museum, bookstore and blog gigs with barely any outside help. It’s actually kind of a trip to boldly ask for exposure and then get it. I’m learning all kinds of new things about myself. Who knew that I’d be good at audience banter? Or that reclusive me could remain in the “on” position for nearly two weeks straight?

Still, I grew concerned when I returned from a (self-arranged, self-funded) book tour and found I’d lost my jones for self-promotion. First, I blamed the lack of energy on physical exhaustion. Then on finally taking care of family obligations. But when those excuses no longer held up and I still wanted to move on to a new writing project instead of emailing one more The History of the American West college professor, I panicked. The book is just starting to ripen, I told myself. You can’t just pick it off the vine and leave it in the bushel!

Then I figured myself out. Promotion wasn’t as important to me after the book tour because I’d already reached my goal. And it wasn’t to sell books.

We all start our projects with a specific aim, whether we articulate it clearly to ourselves or not. For some, it’s as simple as earning a living. For others, the goal is to prove one’s worth as a human. Most of us write to satisfy a jumble of needs and desires.

When I embarked on this project, I was looking for answers. How did this disaster happen? How did its victims move on with their lives? As I started to uncover the answers to those questions, my focus became narrower. I wanted justice for the victims. I wanted to acknowledge that they’d suffered a horrible, needless tragedy. I wanted to tell them I was sorry.

I succeeded. The most gratifying response to my book came from a man who hadn’t been born when the disaster happened, but still lost his grandfather, uncle, sister and many other relatives to the tragedy. Because the event was so awful, he wrote to me in a letter, many people didn’t fully mourn when it happened. They had to get on with life if they were to survive. But by dredging it up 67 years later, I allowed his family at least to finally heal.

The next most gratifying response came after 120 people – more than the museum had ever hosted! – attended my book launch in a tiny town next to the disaster site. It wasn’t the numbers that made me feel so good, but the lack of rancor from that crowd. In my book, I clearly blame the deaths on the mine operators, who were also part of a large local family. I expected heckling. I was terrified that I’d made mistakes and unfair accusations, and that even my kindest sources would turn on me for not telling their story well. But none of that happened. Instead, people hugged me and thanked me and gave me family mementos. No one attacked me for involving myself in their tragedy. I’d said sorry with my book and they’d received and accepted my gesture, which was exactly what I’d wanted. That was my favorable and desired outcome. My success.

It makes sense that I’ve lost some of my self-promotional fire. Even thousands of additional sales and a review in a major publication can’t possibly be as gratifying as hitting the original bulls eye.

Susan Kushner Resnick is the author of Goodbye Wifes and Daughters.