Poe, seashells, and measures of success

I get monthly e-mails from Clemson’s dissertation and thesis service reporting new downloads of my master’s thesis. There are a few dozen every month, which I’ve always found kind of interesting. I’ve even, out of curiosity, turned up blog reviews of that paper online. It’s gratifying to know that all that research is of interest to someone and that people are learning from it. I know I did.

But what I realized at some point in the last year is that all those downloads make my master’s thesis probably—excluding a handful of blog posts that have found their way pretty high into Google’s algorithm—the most widely read thing I’ve ever written. Downloads of that paper outstrip sales of my best-selling novel by a factor of ten.

This doesn’t bother me, by any means—I just find it curious, and even amusing. I certainly don’t think about that thesis as often as I think about my novels and plans for future ones. But it has gotten me thinking about how you measure your own success.

So I was interested to learn from The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, the Edgar Allan Poe biography I referred to last month and hope to review when I get some time, that Poe’s bestselling book in his lifetime, and his only book to get a second edition in his lifetime, was… The Conchologist’s First Book, an introductory textbook on molluscs for which he received no royalties.

If this annoyed or discouraged Poe, there’s no evidence of it. Which points to one of his strengths, even when doing hack work as a writer-for-hire—simply plugging away at the work, moving on to the next project.

While The Conchologist’s First Book has an interesting genesis (read The Reason for the Darkness of the Night for an account of how Poe came to translate/compile/write this book) and Poe actually ended up making serious contributions to the emerging field of conchology, the book is largely forgotten today. When I looked it up on Project Gutenberg I was only the 28th person to download it in the last thirty days. For comparison’s sake, the second volume of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe got nearly 8400 downloads in the same timeframe.

You might not be immediately popular for the work you care most about, but you might end up remembered for the work you do. Food for thought.