Choosing success metrics for an authors' community
July 2024
I’m a partner at Useful Books, where we help nonfiction authors write [see name of company]. We’ve got a book, a community, a software tool, and a couple of courses. Some authors make use of all of them, some just read the book, some just do “course + software.”
What should we be measuring if we want to “do growth”? Here’s what I’ve settled on for now: Entries in our authors’ catalog.
These are books published by people who have used our stuff. There’s a lot to love about this as a success metric—finally getting a book out into the world is a huge deal, a moment worth celebrating. Collecting the assets (book cover, URL to share, etc.) gives me a chance to connect 1:1 with the author and congratulate them. It’s social proof—obviously what we’re doing is working if folks are finishing actual books and letting us share them on our website.
There’s a lot not to love, too. We will never reach a point where we get hundreds of these “conversions” per day. We will never do A/B testing on this metric. It takes a long time from first joining the community or taking a course to having a viable catalog entry.
There are lots of other metrics we might choose. Higher volume and simpler to track. Stuff like “posts in the community” or “minutes of course video content viewed.”
We’re better off ignoring those. Writing a book takes a long time, hours and hours of heads down focus. If you’re stuck, we hope we provide the best forum to post in, or the best minutes of video to watch—but most of an author’s time is spent not-stuck, doing the work. Posting and watching videos can be a way to procrastinate, can easily have a negative correlation with finishing and publishing your book. Easy to measure, but bad metrics. Dead snakes.
There are some upstream metrics worth watching, though. An important part of our recommended process is sharing an early (but intelligible) draft of your book and getting reader feedback. This is (a) an easy place to get stuck and (b) an achievement worth celebrating in its own right. I’ll be instrumenting our system to alert us when folks reach this milestone (so we can congratulate them!), and when they’ve spent a little too long on the verge of it (so we can see if maybe they really are stuck).
There are also downstream metrics I’m choosing to ignore, at least for now. Publishing a book is just the start—even if it’s desirable and recommendable, you still have to do marketing until the word starts to get around. (Here’s the page where I track the process of marketing my first book.) We could choose to optimize for “books that have sold at least 200 copies.” Or even 12 copies, considering that 50% of traditionally published books do not sell 12 copies.
But different authors have different goals. Some want to give their book away to generate more business, land speaking gigs, or reach the largest audience possible. Also it’s hard enough to track sales of your own book, much less keeping track of someone else’s. So this metric gets passed over.
That’s it, then. Two milestones: Getting beta reader feedback, and publishing. Instead of experimentation, I’ll be focusing on having conversations with the authors in our community to learn about where else they’re getting stuck or struggling, and those chats may spawn new success metrics. But for now I’m ignoring the noise and focusing on accurately tracking—and effusively applauding—our members’ most significant successes.