What Not to Ask an Author

[image error]How many?

How many books have you sold? It’s a surprisingly common question of authors. Sometimes it’s from people who most likely don’t know what the numbers even mean. Exactly how many book sales equal “success”? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000 or more?

Do they want to know if being an author has made me rich? Do they also want to know if I got a really huge advance? How huge is huge, anyway? Or do they really want some way to gauge how successful I am as an author?

How to measure success

Success is...