Geoff Mann used to be the lead singer with 80s neo-prog rockers Twelfth Night. I saw them play the Marquee Club in London – one of my earliest gigs – although not until after Mann’s departure from the line up. It seems that he had grown tired of fronting a less-than commercial band who didn’t sell many records, so he left to record a series of even less-commercial solo albums, reaching an even smaller audience.

Several years after Mann’s departure, I came across an interview with him in a prog fanzine (we didn’t have the Internet in those days). Since leaving Twelfth Night he had kept himself busy with his solo ‘career’, getting ordained and working at an inner-city Anglican Church, as well as writing and putting on a play. The interviewer asked how the play had gone.  

‘Oh, it was marvellous’, replied Mann. ‘It was really, really successful. [beat] I mean, it lost lots of money, but it was a huge success.’

I love the idea that success can be measured in different ways. Books, like any other creative work, are products, My publisher will be aware of the figures and know at what point they have sold enough to have recouped their investment and start turning a profit. I would imagine that’s a crucial part of their definition of success. I get that, but for the creator of the work (that’s me!) there are different ways of assessing success.

Around the time I was reading the Geoff Mann interview, I was also a volunteer leader on church camps for teenagers. I was struck at the time by the overall leader reminding us that we weren’t responsible for results, for whatever came out of the camps. Our responsibility was simply to do the work in front of us, the task we had been called to do. If we were faithful in that then the camp was a success, and any results were God’s business, not ours.

There was something hugely liberating about that, and it’s something I’ve tried to keep in mind in other areas of my life. When I managed a grassroots kids’ football team, I used to tell parents that my aims were for the boys to enjoy their football, for the team – individually and collectively – to improve, and for us to win some matches. But I made it clear that winning games came after the other two. Something of that philosophy has woven its way into my new book, Foul and Fair, which reflects the idea that life, like kids’ football, isn’t all about results.

I’m posting this on the day that Foul and Fair is officially published. Don’t get me wrong, I want it to do well; I want it to be successful in commercial terms and to make my publisher happy (so if you haven’t bought it yet, please do so as soon as possible). But my understanding of success isn’t just measured in sales. I’ve written before about how I spent 15 years ‘failing better’ in my attempts at getting published. During that period I carried a sense of frustration that maybe I’d missed my chance, that I’d left it too late and somehow wasted whatever potential I might have had in becoming a published author. The day I got the email from Chloe at the Book Guild offering to publish Dead Man Singing, something lifted off me and it hasn’t come back since. That, for me, was the success. Everything since then is a bonus.

A writer’s responsibility is to his stories, his characters and his readers. I want to make my books as good as they can be, to polish them and tease all the details into place to best tell the story in my head. I want readers to love reading the books, to get caught up in the characters and their lives and to be able to lose themselves in the story. I want them to see things a different way, or to better understand something about the world through reading my books. Or, just to pass the time and enjoy the experience. There are so many ways of measuring the success of a book beyond sales figures. It’s not all about sales and – like life – it’s not all about results.

That said, please buy my books.