This website and the precursor class are titled “Successful Self Publishing”. However, I am a Christian author. When I began self-publishing, I sat down and created a mission statement:
To use modern day parables to uplift fellow believers and minister to seekers in our modern world.
This is who I am, this is what is in my heart.
So, how do I define success?
Self-publishing in a whole is a business. You are the author, you are the publisher. It takes money to run a business, and the ideal plan is that it generates an income in return. However, that is not why I do what I do.
If I write a book and release it and only one person in the world purchases a paperback, and that paperback ends up in a bargain bin in Pocatillo, Idaho, for twenty cents thirty years from now, and someone buys that book and comes to know Christ personally or renews a relationship with God ultimately, then in the eyes of God’s kingdom work, that book is a success. (Please don’t share that sentence with my editor — she would go nuts over the run-onishness of it all.)
It costs me a lot more to put out a book than I would make selling one paperback. Just sayin’.
That said, as I enter into every project; as I pray over every single word that I write and page-after-page is developed and created, my desire, my intent, my mission is to measure success with the world’s yardstick, as in fame and fortune.
My desire, my inent, my mission is to measure my success by the world’s Ruler, as in God.
So that one day I can hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Yes, you’re running a business that will need to have capital in order to stay a business. But, never let the world define your success. Leave that up to the One who designed you.
