Wednesday links: Success and harmful writing advice

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few. Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. How Do I Measure Success?, from Books & Such Literary Management: Everyone wants to feel they’ve succeeded. But what constitutes success? Excerpt: “I’ve heard the strangest theories of what constitutes success. For instance, this from an old Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006: “Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies.””
2. How to Spot Toxic Feedback: 7 Signs That the Writing Advice You’re Getting May Do More Harm Than Good, from Jane Friedman: Not all edits are suited for your story. The trick is knowing which suggestions to follow, and which to decline. Excerpt: “If you suspect you’ve been subject to this sort of feedback, first let me say this: you are not crazy, and the people who have given you this advice are not necessarily malicious.”