I’ve made it, right? After all, I just published a book, so obviously my success is assured. I mean, everyone who has a book out is rich and famous, waking up when they want and partying all night. That’s the image I’ve been given about us authors all my life.
Except, of course, that that’s nowhere close to true. My books have yet to sell well, and even if they did, they’d have to sell blockbuster for me to quit my current job and write full time. I’d need to be a big-time name whose fans line up by the hundreds of thousands just to buy my next work, hanging on a thread for the next publishing date.
See, there’s this grand misconception about writers, that we’re all rich and famous and that we worry for nothing but how to craft our next word. If only that were true.
Most writers don’t make enough to do this full time, and most of those that try end up starving. Breaking through in writing, like most things in life, requires talent, hard work…and a break. Like, a big time break. Something to make your work go viral.
Don’t tell most of the public. Most folks know no one who has written and published a book. Since the only writers they know of are named King, Rowling, or Patterson, they assume that anyone who is published has achieved great monetary success. And certainly those people exist, but like the NFL star QB is a tiny fraction of those who ever played football, the stupendously successful writer is a small percentage of those of us who write. Even the people I work with think that I’ll probably quit my job any day now and focus exclusively on writing. I made them a deal – they buy 750,000 copies of my book, and I’ll stop annoying them at meetings and sending emails about the next project.
Success would be great.
It’d be fantastic. But it’s not
guaranteed, and a book isn’t necessarily full success. Remember, any idiot can write a book – see
what’s out there if you doubt that – but only the great and lucky ones
grow wealthy from it.
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