Most authors just want to tell stories, not crunch numbers. But in the world of self-publishing, writing a great book is only half the equation. The other, less glamorous (but equally vital) part is knowing how to track what’s working and what isn’t. That means thinking like a business owner. And every successful business runs on data.

That’s why today, Ginger is going through the steps needed to turn your sporadic writing side hustle into a more sustainable, full-time income. By tracking key metrics like word count, book performance and marketing results, you’ll gain the insight needed to make smarter decisions. Once you start acting on those knowledge, you’ll find it easier to grow your audience, boost your sales, and ultimately stop leaving your publishing success up to chance.

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I’ve mentioned before how I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was 9-years-old—but even back then, I had more of a vision than just sharing stories with readers. I wanted to be a successful writer—to make money out of it! I think this was because my mother was a published writer, and my family had been in printing and publishing for four generations. I felt like I had a legacy to uphold. More than that, I figured that if you were going to pursue anything as a career, you had to at least make an effort to make a good living from it.

But as I grew older, I realized that being a successful writer meant being more than just a writer. As a writer, you’re making a product—just like a carpenter, a blacksmith, or a baker. And while obviously you can’t make a living without a product to sell, making the product itself is only part of the picture.

You’ve also got to sell it—and in large enough numbers to make a profit. Therefore, you need to become a business owner as well as a writer—approaching the craft of putting words onto the page as just the first component of a much larger machine.

And in order to do this, it’s important to have some idea of how businesses work—especially successful businesses. I know a lot of writers don’t like to hear this—after all, you’re hunched over your laptop, coffee gone cold, chasing the muse like it’s a slippery eel, and the last thing you want to do is take time away from crafting your story to do number-crunching instead. You got into this to tell stories and to spill your soul onto the page—not do exactly the same business analysis that you’d hope writing would liberate you from.

But here’s the kicker—being able to do exactly that is what separates successful writers from the rest of the pack. You’re not just an author—you’re also your own agent, publicist, and advertising executive. You’re a one-person empire juggling manuscripts and marketing like a circus act—and if all those years I spent in the job-I-tolerated-before-I-became-a-writer taught me anything, it’s that if you want to stop spinning plates and start stacking successes, it’s time to borrow some tricks from the corporate playbook and use them to your advantage.

A key place to start is something you’re probably familiar with if you’ve ever found yourself in a boardroom as often as I have: KPIs—Key Performance Indicators.

Peter Drucker, the granddaddy of management wisdom, once said: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure” and that’s vitally important advice when it comes to being a successful writer. You have to track things in your business—because without tracking certain metrics and figures, you’re just tossing the books you’ve spent so much time writing into the void and crossing your fingers that they’ll be successful.

But if you can identify the KPIs that can turn your writing gig into a thriving enterprise, you can take charge of your writing career and help build a business out of it, one number at a time.

Your Writing Output: The Engine Room of Your Empire

Let’s start with the basics: how much you write. I’m talking words per day, words per week, maybe even how many projects you crank out in a year. 

Ironically, we all got into this business to be writers—but when you start doing it as a career, suddenly that’s not glamorous. The accountability of sitting down at a keyboard and logging your word count feels like the literary equivalent of counting calories—but experience proved something to me: 

It’s a game-changer. 

I can honestly distill all my success as a writer into a single sentence: “Write every day.”

On the days in which I wrote a consistent 5,000 words a day, I was making five figures a month from book royalties. While I could coast along for a while if I lowered that amount, my earnings would soon follow. 

It might take a while as my earnings dropped off, but eventually it was always the same: My income flatlined the less I wrote. It was as simple as that. 

But when I got disciplined, and started treating writing like a job, I managed to write 5,000 words a day again and it was life-changing. Within a couple of months, I was making a livable income from writing again, and it wasn’t magic—it was math.

Tracking your word count isn’t about bragging rights; it’s about seeing the engine of your business in action. When I hit 5,000 words a day, I didn’t just churn out more books—I built momentum. More words meant more stories, more releases, more royalties. It’s like compound interest for your career. So, if you want to identify the single most important Key Performance Indicator, it’s your word-count. So grab a notebook or a fancy app and start counting. Set a target, achieve it, and watch how those little daily wins stack up into something big.

Book Performance: Your Writing Deserves a Report Card

The daily word-count is a metric you’re responsible for yourself. Now, let’s zoom out to your books. 

When you treat writing as a business, you recognize each of your books as a product on your shelf—and you need to know how your customers react to them. 

Are readers downloading them? Reading them? Or are they collecting digital dust-bunnies? This is where book performance KPIs come into play. These are figure related to how other people react to each book in your catalog, and every new title you release. It’s important to keep track of them and compare.

If you run a free promotion when you launch your book, for example, track those downloads. My most successful books logged 11,000 downloads on release day, for example—and you can bet I started to analyse everything readers seemed to like about that title to try and repeat that success.

Are your books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited? That’s the next metric to follow. Keep an eye on KENP page reads (that’s Kindle Edition Normalized Pages, for the newbies) and you can measure how many people start reading your books, and how many continue all the way through to the end (or, if not exactly that, make a calculated guess.)

And, of course, sales numbers are your North Star. Whether you have your book on pre-release or run a launch event after your ARC reviews have come in, the number of books you sell when you’re doing the most marketing is a good indication of how well people like your books.

And that’s the real trick: Don’t just stare at the numbers—compare them. Then you can tell what’s working and what’s not. This will help you decide which books will help you be more successful as an author, and which marketing strategies work best. Then you can adjust your strategy to match.

Did your sci-fi epic outsell your cozy mystery, for example? Maybe lean into spaceships. Did a launch strategy spike your downloads? Double down. These metrics are your crystal ball—use them to see definitively what works and what doesn’t, instead of going by how you feel.

Advertising and Marketing: Stop Throwing Money Into the Abyss

Marketing’s the Wild West of self-publishing—exciting, chaotic, and a little terrifying. Whether you’re running newsletter promos or diving into paid ads, you’ve got to know if your cash is working or just vanishing into the ether. That’s why it’s especially important to identify your KPIs when it comes to spending.

For newsletter promotions, you can track the sales or downloads that pop up right after. Easy peasy. For ads, it’s a bit harder, because it’s difficult to exactly track how many sales or downloads come directly from your ads, and how many come as a result of the increased exposure your ads deliver. My recommendation is to simply compare what you spend to what you earn above your “baseline” (and if you want to know how to calculate your baseline, I wrote a blog post about it here.)

The important figures to keep track of when you do your marketing on Facebook are Cost Per Click (CPC), Cost Per Mille (CPM), and Click-Through Rate (CTR). On Amazon? Watch Detail Page Views (DTV) and KENP page reads like a hawk. You don’t need to worry so much about what these metrics mean individually—but when you start comparing them to different book releases and marketing campaigns, you’ll see valuable patterns emerge.

And I mean it when I say “valuable.” I’ll confess when I started advertising my books nearly a decade ago, I dumped a wad of cash into Facebook ads without a clue what I was doing. Facebook, unlike Amazon, was more than happy to take my money, and I didn’t see an equivalent lift in sales. It was like setting fire to my savings in a windstorm. 

Since then, I’ve learned to track everything—every dollar spent, every sale gained. It’s not sexy, but doing so allowed me to figure out which books resonated with my readers, and which advertising campaigns performed best. Without tracking your advertising KPIs, you’re guessing whether your marketing’s a genius move or a money pit—and in this game, guessing is a luxury most of us can’t afford.

Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting (So You Don’t Have To)

Okay, so you’ve got all these numbers—word counts, sales, ad stats. It’s a lot, and making sense of it can feel like deciphering alien hieroglyphs. That’s where AI swoops in like a superhero sidekick. I wrote a blog post about it recently, as introducing AI into my marketing has been a game-changer for me.

Picture this: you feed your KPIs into a smart system, and it spits out correlations you’d never spot on your own. I just did it for my advertising and marketing, but the bigger the picture, the more valuable the patterns you can spot. There are even patterns between unrelated metrics that might hold the secret to moving your self-publishing career to the next level.

For example, maybe writing 2,000 words a day lines up with a royalty bump weeks later. Or your sales peak three days after a newsletter drop, not two. As writers, we’re wired to zoom in—every sentence, every scene. But the big picture? That’s harder to grasp. 

AI’s your cheat code. It shows how those 500 words you slogged through on a rainy Tuesday ripple out to fatter paychecks months down the line. It’s not about replacing your gut instincts—it’s about arming them with data. All your decisions should be driven by key metrics.

Conclusion: Measure or Muddle Through—Your Choice

As I quoted earlier: you can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you’re not tracking these KPIs, you’re stumbling through your career blindfolded, hoping luck’s on your side. Sure, you might hit a win now and then, but it’ll be a fluke, not a plan. 

But if you want to know if your writing’s paying off, you need to track everything. Track your words. Check those sales. Measure the results of your advertising.

And you can start small if it feels overwhelming—log your word count today, peek at your sales tomorrow. Then let AI connect the dots. You’ll see how the tiny stuff—like that extra hour at the keyboard—ties into the big stuff, like your monthly royalties. It’s not about drowning in data; it’s about steering your ship with purpose. Because you’re not just a writer—you’re a business owner. And only by measuring objective data can you truly know if your decisions are leveling up your career or leaving it in the dust. 

My final piece of advice is to keep doing this long term. The patterns that are truly valuable emerge after months or sometimes even years of tracking data—but when they do, they can totally change the trajectory of your writing career.

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