Setting Expectations

And Goals

Hey friends,

I’m doing interviews for my book and this week I spoke with Simon & Schuster Senior Editor Yahdon Israel about various things you’ll find out about when you read the book.¹ We came to the topic of success and what that means to him and his authors and he said he encouraged them to make concrete goals. He’d say: “You want to win an award? Ok, which award? Why that one?” And of course! Many of us would apply this logic to any other goal we’re setting, without hardly thinking about it, like saving up for a home or reading 100 books this year or something like that. But even I have never thought to put such lofty goals in front of a book publication because so many of those things are out of everyone’s control, be that the author, the publisher, or me. Setting these goal, even if it isn’t something you can directly control, sets your path and aligns your priorities. Even if you don’t achieve it, you get somewhere close to it.

Ok, so say you want to be nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award. Fabulous. Here are the questions I would ask my client to help make this more concrete. Does Goodreads offer an award in the genre you write? What kinds of books have been nominated in the past? Are they published by publishers comparable to yours? Were they all New York Times best sellers, or just some of them? Were those authors very active on Goodreads and/or is that something you can do, too? You aren’t going to know the answers to these questions and it probably isn’t the time to ask them if you don’t already have an agent, a deal, and a publication date. But if you secretly wish you were among the nominated, but you never told anyone, never did anything about it, and just hoped you’d be picked out of the ether, then, well, what did you expect? We cannot manifest all our dreams simply by saying them out loud but we cannot expect them to manifest out of nothing, either.

And then this week Emma Gannon of The Hyphen wrote:

The surprising joys of indie publishing

When I was 26, my first non-fiction memoir came out. I found the experience exhilarating, overwhelming, new—and overall: disappointing. It’s not the publishers fault, my expectations were way too high. It was my first wake-up call. Being published does not mean anyone will read your book, and it doesn’t mean you’ll get another publishing deal with that publisher—and it certainly doesn’t mean your book will be available or visible in a bookshop.

Emma’s expectations, realizations, and disappointments are real, and ones I’ve heard from writers over and over again. How could that have changed, though, if the author and her team (agent, editor, etc) spent some time talking about expectations, goals, and reality? I’m not saying if Emma had done this she would have had a smooth and glorious first publishing experience. There will always be bumps in the road. But I’m sure everyone would agree that it’s better to know your expectations are high than to have them popped like a balloon while it’s all happening. A conversation with your team about your goals is the best place to start with that.

So what are your goals for your book, wherever you are in the process? It might be just get published right now, and that’s ok. If you have a deal already, is your goal get rich and famous and repeat that forever? What more constructive, realistic goals can you set instead? Pay off your mortgage? Quit your job? Ok, how much money do you need a year to do that? What can you reasonably expect to get for your book and when does that money come? Even if your dreams are huge—which is ok!! dream big!!—are they attainable at all? If you want your fantasy series to be as big as Star Wars, well, is it a type of fantasy² that a lot of people like? Is the world building rich enough that a director could make it a reality on the screen? Or would bringing your main characters to life require basically a live-action Avatar? Is that possible without costing one billion dollars? You will have a lot of unanswered questions in the end, but you’d be surprised how many people say I want my book to be a TV show! and their book is Waiting for Godot but with talking mushrooms and would call for ten minutes of motionless silence in each episode.³ SO MANY people want to be on Oprah and guys, Oprah hasn’t had a TV show for thirteen years! But I digress.

It may be hard to set goals beyond get published until you have an agent or a book deal, but even when you’re just staring out, it pays to be specific. So you want to be published. Ok, what book? What genre? What audience? If your goal is to get an agent, what do you do after that? Does that agent do that kind of book?

This conversation made me think about my goals for my upcoming book and how to make them more concrete. I want to go to a major book fair like the LA Times Book Fair or the Miami Book Fair. I want a launch event in NYC. I’d like to be in the NYTBR “By the Book” column and have a profile in Poets & Writers and be on NPR, All Thing Considered, preferably but I’ll take what I get. I’d like a starred review. I’d like to be able to repost instagrams of people reading and loving the book six months after it comes out. I want to speak to MFA programs around the country. (Call me!) I want to ask for what I want and to let people do nice things for me, a thing I have been unable to do in the past. I could go on. I won’t get all these things. Some I can just go out and ask for and others are dependent on things I have no control over, like sales, other’s opinions, money, time, and more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ A girl can dream. And I’m going to.

I also thought I’d start linking back to previous posts in Agents & Books for those of you who might have missed something the oh….last five years. 😱

Introducing THROWBACK POSTS:

How Do I Know If I Have a Good Idea?

OXOXOXOXO,

Kate

1. No preorder link yet but I will let you know when there is!

2. Sorry, science fantasy.

3. So, in other words, a TV show no one would watch, but that might work in a book. Maybe.