A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-One-Hundred-And-Thirty-Seven

I have been thinking a lot about what it would take to really be in a good position in terms of getting an agent or editor interested in my work.  Now, I want to be clear that I mean this in the least artistic sense possible, at least right now.  This is about the business side, really, and not so much about the specifics of my work itself, and that is kind of absurd, maybe, but I think that it is a helpful thing for me to try and consider that aspect at the moment.  Anyhow, in looking into this I have been trying to think about the question of what makes a book successful for a publisher, and that, obviously, is largely connected to the number of copies that a work sells.  What is surprising is that when you look into the specifics on bestsellers, the actual numbers feel quite a bit more achievable than one would anticipate.  For example, to hit the New York Times Bestseller List a book needs to sell in excess of 5,000 copies over a week, which is significant and more difficult than one might imagine, but certainly a lot more achievable than, say, selling a few million.  Even more, if one considers a book over its lifetime, most publishers would consider selling even 30,000 copies to be at least a moderate success.  Now, obviously, I am not in any kind of position to sell books on any scale, let alone the one I am discussing here, but the fact that these numbers seem relatively low is something that I do think it points at a possible strategy for attracting opportunities in publishing, and that is to try and focus, as I have been, on building an audience of people interested in reading my work.  That has been, of course, a large part of my strategy for some time now, and I know it is a slow process, at least at first, but considering it in this way has helped me to get a bit more of a realistic perspective on it, and that has been strangely uplifting, at least in the moment.