Four Writing Metrics You Should Ignore

Authors love to talk about their routines. Part of the reason we write is that we love the writing life, right? So it makes sense that we’d obsess over the habits that surround our writing. The problem comes when we start to use our routines to measure ourselves against other writers, when we examine our habits (and their results) to determine whether or not we’re real writers. We shouldn’t do that. Let’s all agree to stop the incessant measuring so we can focus on what truly matters. 

Word Count

Let’s start stopping by ending our daily word count. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard or read an interview with a successful author in which the author didn’t talk about how many words they write each day. Writers (and many of the people who follow them) are fixated on how many syllables bestselling authors crank out in every 24-hour period, and it’s a totally meaningless statistic.

The number is without value because it is so inconsistent. Prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson says he writes a minimum of 2,000 words a day, an output rate that apparently allows him to publish about four massive novels a year. Dorothy Parker, on the other hand, claimed she struggled to get her daily word count into the double digits.

“It takes me six months to do a story,” she said. “I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.”

There’s also the question of whether famous authors are being honest about their daily writing claims. A suspiciously large proportion of them say they write a conveniently round figure each day, either 500 or 1000 or 2000 words. Makes me think they aren’t actually counting. And neither should you.

Hours

Similarly, you shouldn’t worry too much about when and how long you write each day. This is where famous authors really like to wax poetic about their quirky routines. They write from dawn until 10:37 every morning, except on the Winter Solstice. They write twelve hours a day, every day, or they write 17 minutes a day, but only on Fridays and only twice a month.

It doesn’t matter. Write when you can fit it in, whenever it works for you. As long as it works—as long as you’re writing—you’re doing it right.

Book Sales

The first thing I saw when I opened my social media this morning was an ad from an aspiring book marketing guru who claimed that she’d used her TikTok platform to sell 60,000 books. The implication was that, if you bought her book, she could show you how to do the same. I am very skeptical of her claim.

Let’s get honest about sales figures. According to Bookstat, only about 4% of published books sell more than 1,000 copies, and about .01% (that’s 1 in 10,000) sell more than 100,000 copies. Most books sell, at best, a handful of copies, and if you sell a few hundred books, you’re doing much better than average.

The danger in comparing yourself against the outliers (who, frankly, are usually misleading you about their sales numbers) is that it makes it so easy to get discouraged.

If you can’t put a “K” behind your sales numbers, are you really even a writer?

But you can take heart in the stark, realistic numbers. Let’s look at it another way. Almost 1 in 20 books will reach more than a thousand readers. When you think about it like that, success—the realistic kind—doesn’t seem unattainable. I encourage you to stop worrying about your daily sales data, and take a moment to celebrate every single book you sell.

Chart Positions

Ever notice how many writers you’ve never heard of claim to be “bestselling” authors? The same guru I mentioned above said she had published a “bestselling” poetry book. I went to Amazon and took a look at the title. It was ranked #1,148,800 in books overall and #3,433 in “American Poetry.” So how could she claim that her book, that hadn’t cracked the top thousand in her subgenre, was a “bestseller”?

The bestseller game works like this. As writers prepare to publish a book, they market the crap out of it in a very short window of time, encouraging people to pre-order the book before it goes on sale. The big retail sales platforms, which are the source of the “bestseller” charts, are heavily weighted toward titles that generate pre-orders quickly, so if you can leverage your marketing to get a decent number of pre-orders, the platform is more likely to show your book to shoppers, at least for a while.

I saw another TikTok guru (there are so many of them) who said that if you’re not making $5K a month with your writing, you’re doing your marketing wrong (and, of course, he knew how to fix it for you).

The retail platforms also categorize titles into very specific niches and track sales within those niches. If your marketing campaign has pulled in a few pre-orders by the time your book launches, and the retailer is actually showing it to shoppers, you might make enough launch-day sales to outpace other titles in your niche at the time of publication, at least for a while. For a few glorious minutes or hours, you could be in the top 10 of “books/fiction/fantasy/epic_fantasy/climate_fiction/women_authors.” You’ll almost certainly fall out of the top 10 by tomorrow, but no matter. You’re a bestselling author now and forever. Congratulations.

Bottom line: don’t chase chart position. The route to a sustainable writing career lies elsewhere. The truth is that the TikTok guru should be proud of her book, even if thousands of other books have sold more than hers.

Income Figures

Finally, stop worrying about how much money you’re making with your writing. I know that’s not an easy thing to do when you’re trying to make a career out of this writing thing, but it’s too easy to fall into the comparison trap and start feeling terrible about yourself.

I saw another TikTok guru (there are so many of them) who said that if you’re not making $5K a month with your writing, you’re doing your marketing wrong (and, of course, he knew how to fix it for you).

Let’s have another reality check. Very few traditionally published authors make a living from their books. Even if they’re among the lucky few who can sell more than 1,000 books, they may make less than $1 in royalties from each book they sell. The average income for a traditionally published writer is less than $8,000 per year.

But, as with the sale figures, there’s hope, as long as you stop comparing yourself to the misleading numbers you’re being bombarded with. Self-published authors tend to sell more books than traditionally published writers, and they keep a larger proportion of revenue from sales. The median annual income for a self-published author is $13,500. Not exactly a living wage, but not a hobby, either.

I’m not saying that you should refuse to take any of these topics seriously. If you’re going to be a writer, you have to write, and that requires spending some amount of time writing some number of words. If you’re going to make a career of writing, you’re going to have to publish, market, and sell your books. All of these endeavors require effort, time, and persistence. But you’re ultimately going to be more successful if you devote more attention to the substance of your writing and marketing than to the numbers behind them.