Setting Sales Goals for Your First Novel

As I get closer to sending my first novel, “Killing the Immortals,” sailing out into the world, I’m starting to think seriously about what I want to accomplish with it, what sorts of goals to set for myself. The Nobel Prize for Literature would be all right, I guess. There may be a step or two to get through before that, though. Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about the committee that decides those sorts of things, but my assumption is that they’ve got a high-ish bar.

So, we all may want to have incremental goals shy of a Nobel Prize that will give us something to shoot for in the meantime, until fame and fortune come to whisk us away. I think goals are important, but I also think they’re challenging to figure out when you’ve never published a novel before. You can look at all the “The average self-published book sells 250 (or whatever) copies” blog posts you want, but how does that relate to what you’re doing? So many factors are going to impact how many people buy your book and how wide a reception it gets, from its genres to its cover to the blurb you write to the following you’ve built up to how much work you put into marketing the book to whether or not your story/writing sucks. What does “average” even really mean when so many books are haphazardly thrown together with visions of hefty royalty checks, mahogany-decked libraries, and new elbow-patched jackets without considering the insane amount of work and luck it takes to become the next millionaire author?

In trying to somewhat answer these questions, I ran across this post from Chris McMullen’s blog, and thought it provided a terrific roadmap for new authors in crafting sales goals that are unique to their particular work. It’s from 2014, but the advice applies just as much today as it did a couple of years ago. He provided six steps for setting reachable goals that ramp up over time, and I’ve got comments on each:

1. Regular sales. It doesn’t matter how many. Maybe it’s one ebook per week. It doesn’t sound like much (and, well, it isn’t), but that’s beside the point. It’s a first step down that road. It’s seeing some level of consistency, and knowing this is now sustainable into the future. A walk of a million miles begins with a single step, and all that crap.
2. Improve that frequency over time. So, you’re regularly notching one sold book per week. That’s about 4 per month and 52 per year. Great. Now, aim to ramp that up. Maybe you shoot for getting it to 2 per week. Or 10 per month. Whatever you want. I’m not gonna tell you what to do. I’m not your mom.
3. Set other improvement goals. Beyond mere sales, set goals for learning new skills, or improving your writing in some particular areas. Even as you’re still reaching for your sales goals, if you feel like you know more about self publishing, or you’ve conquered your problem with comma splices, or you’ve gotten past an issue with character development, or you finally cracked the code on some short story you’ve been trying to write, you’ll feel that forward momentum.
4. Hit 1,000 books sold. This will probably take awhile, but that doesn’t matter. This isn’t about time, and it doesn’t have to be on one book. It can be any number of books, and it can take 5 years, 10 years, or 400 years if you happen to live that long. I mean, meeting this goal probably wouldn’t mean all that much to you if you were dead. Although I guess it technically counts either way. Will people still be buying books in 2416? Regardless, 1,000 in sales is a great long-term goal for your published work, and a good milestone to celebrate.
5. Keep up the momentum. Once you hit 1,000, that’s a good reason to think you’ve established yourself as some sort of fancy author-type person. So keep building. Keep writing and publishing. Each novel, novella, short story, anthology, collection, whatever you introduce into your portfolio is another revenue stream. Each one is another product that can bring in money and, perhaps more importantly, can provide readers an entry point into the world of your writing. Once a reader likes one book of yours, the chances increase greatly that they’ll buy the others.
6. Don’t just focus on the numbers. Getting too caught up in sales numbers and royalty checks can be detrimental to reaching your goals, so don’t let the goals consume you too much. The best way to reach them is to not obsess about them. Focus on the journey, not the destination, as they say. If you direct your energy toward your writing, and the marketing strategy for it, the rest should take care of itself in time.

And there’s lots more at the blog post. Be sure to read it all, if this interests you. Setting reasonable goals is challenging when you’re starting out, but I think it’s essential for keeping yourself looking forward to hitting that next milestone, and giving you something new to strive for. What’s my goal right now? Get this damn thing published. Seems like a solid first step. Then the Nobel Prize. Gotta be realistic, after all.