How to Become a Famous Author

I Googled “How to become a famous author” in double quotation marks to force Google to search for the entire phrase. That got me links to 168,000 sites. I don’t know why there are so many articles on the subject because there are only two steps to becoming a famous author.

How hard can it be to describe two steps? Here they are:

1. Produce an exceptional product that is in demand.

2. Be discovered.

Well, that was easy.

Step 1: Produce an exceptional product that is in demand

To complete this step, you must know the principles of writing, many of which are described in my Writing Tips blog stream on this website. These principles will help govern your progress toward becoming a better writer. If you have a suggestion for a topic or wish to provide feedback on these posts, please email me at jeff@jjrlore.com.

For a book to be published traditionally nowadays, it must meet the following three criteria:

• Characters must progress in knowledge, capacity, and character across the span of the story.

• The story concept must be unique.

• The plot must be big enough.

Think of famous novels that pop into your head, stories like Don Quixote, Little Women, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Sense and Sensibility, and Jane Eyre. Do they not all meet these three criteria?

My challenge is that my stories are generally about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. They're tales readers can relate to and insert themselves into. The "situation" is the chief antagonist.

This approach tends not to produce gargantuan plots. I would never, for example, write a story the size of Dune. If publishers are interested in only size, I must compensate by writing more attractively, smoothly, and sapidly than everyone else. It may very well be that my writing is already better than in most published stories.

These are questions we must ask ourselves as we develop and grow our craft.

Read every day

Most new authors have an idea of how much work is required to become a literary success. But a sense is not enough. Do you want to work at 5% efficiency or at 85%? If you want 85% efficiency, then read other authors’ fictional work daily.

This requirement applies to new and seasoned authors alike. In his book On Writing, Stephen King writes that he spends 50% of every working day reading other authors’ fiction. Even Stephen King follows this advice.

I know of only one author who spent no time reading. He said it was because so many ideas came to his head, he had no choice but to write continually to keep up with them. His name was Isaac Asimov. He wrote or edited over 500 fictional and non-fictional books. Unless your last name is Asimov, I suggest you read fiction daily.

My favorite quote on the need to read other authors' fiction is by Ray Bradbury. He didn’t just give solid advice. He gave it like a master:

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria and, out of it, make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.”

― Ray Bradbury

Be patient

No one likes to be told to be patient. Instead, I'm going to tell you something useful and important:

Don't be discovered too early.

"Wait, what?" you say.

If you hit it lucky and get yourself noticed too early, you'll risk flaring out because you won't yet have the skill and expertise to continue producing an outstanding product. You want to be noticed only after you're sufficiently skilled.

If you work hard at your craft long enough, you'll see that your writing gets better over time. As you improve, you'll eventually think, "Why doesn't anyone notice me?"

Dismiss that thought from your mind!

Until you're discovered, your job is to keep getting better. Someday, maybe five years from now, you'll receive acclaim. By then, you'll have the experience, wisdom, and wherewithal to maintain that acclaim. That is when your fan base will increase naturally because you have become genuinely good.

If you try to rush it, you risk becoming a "one-hit wonder."

One-Hit Wonders

Have you ever wondered how a pop band, author, or composer can create an exquisite work that practically takes over the world, yet cannot create a second or third?

Ferde Grofé composed the Grand Canyon Suite, one of the most recognized 20th-century symphonic pieces. This brought him worldwide acclaim. But what about his other compositions, including,

• Ten movie scores

• Forty-seven orchestral works

• Two concertos

• Four ballets

• Eighteen other compositions for concert bands, chamber orchestras, and solo works

Then there is the pop music group Wild Cherry, which performed one of the most famous pop songs ever recorded: Play That Funky Music (1976). Wild Cherry succeeded in performing only one hit song in their career.

Neither Grand Canyon Suite nor Play That Funky Music was the first piece created by their composers. What if Wild Cherry or Ferde Grofé had given up after their first unrecognized piece?

If you want to be good at something,

you must first be willing to be bad at it.

You must be patient as you write without recognition. You must keep working even if you experience a string of failures.

Stephen King, who has published over sixty successful novels, has expressed concern that one of his earlier novels, The Stand, continues to be considered by many to be his best work (On Writing, Stephen King). He continues trying to write a better novel, but it seems that so far he cannot beat himself.

A harsh statistic

About one out of a hundred novels written yearly get published traditionally, meaning bound into physical books and sold in bookstores. This suggests that if you were to write one hundred novels, one of them would be published.

Now that I've demoralized you, let me help you feel a little better. Many of the novels written annually are written by rank amateurs. If you’re reading this post, you’re not a rank amateur.

Furthermore, most beginning authors quit writing at some point and give up. According to Leilanie Stewart, 30 of 1,000 authors finish writing their first novel. Out of those thirty, six go on to see their book published. What do these odds tell you? The message is:

Keep writing.

You will get better over time.

You will eventually succeed.

You must learn how to write before you can become a master author. You must be honest with yourself--and if you continue writing, you will understand that it is highly likely that your first novel is not as good as you think it is. But keep going! By the time you've written your fourth novel, you can go back and fix up your first, second, and third.

As you age, you can add the breadth and width of your life's experiences to your writing.

Summary of Step 1:

I hope you’ve gotten the point that you must be highly committed to your writing if you wish to be a literary success. You must take Stephen King’s and Ray Bradbury’s advice and read for hours daily.

But there is one more thing you must yet do. You must be discovered.

Step 2: Be discovered

As difficult as it is for new authors to manage Step 1, most beginning authors have even greater difficulty with Step 2. Most new authors consider being discovered as an event rather than a process.

You must, on your own, without spending any money or hiring an agent, complete the following two steps:

1. Write well enough that many of your relatives, friends, and coworkers tell you with great intensity, “Really, you need to become a writer. You are good! You write better stories than the last ten novels I've read. I’m serious! You need to do something about this.”

2. The people to whom you’ve given a copy of your manuscript must, on their own, loan it to their friends, who in turn come to you and repeat the same speech your relatives, friends, and coworkers give you.

Until strangers contact you and, with great desperation, insist that you "act immediately on your talent or the world will suffer irreparably," you are not yet good enough as an author.

This is not silly talk or heightened exaggeration to make a point. The world will not accept you as an author more than those you know personally.

If your relatives, friends, and coworkers—

and their friends and coworkers—

are not enthusiastically astonished with your work,

it's not likely that the rest of the world will

be more impressed.

This does not mean you should quit writing!

Keep honing your skills. But do it for free, without agents or marketing managers, until you complete the two steps described above. Meanwhile, keep your day job. If it takes years, then it takes years. So what? Spending money on an agent or a marketing manager won't help you become a better author any sooner.

These ideas are summarized by Andy Weir, author of the hit novel, The Martian:

To get discovered, self-publish the book.

If it’s good, word will get around, and it will sell. Publishers will then take an interest.

― Andy Weir

Notice I haven’t said anything about self-publishing on Amazon, which you can do for free. However, I strongly advise you not to publish your novel on Amazon until after you have been discovered locally and have received significant adoration from those you know and those they know.

If you publish on Amazon too early, you'll receive negative comments that are extremely difficult to remove. These comments will discourage other readers from purchasing your work.

It won’t do you any good to publish your novel on Amazon if it just languishes because Amazon publishes the original published date you submitted your book. It won’t look good to potential buyers if it has sat there for nine years and ranks 945284th in the Kindle Store.