The Cold Hard Reality of Being a Best Selling Author.

If you fancy yourself a writer and cruise around on social media for any length of time, you will invariably come across offers to publish your book directly and forego all the drudgery of finding a literary agent and a publisher, which, of course, entials going back and doing things to your book that you may never have envisioned doing to it because that’s how the real publishing business works.

The simple fact is that most self-publishing offers are nothing more than scams. They appeal to your vanity, and your ardent desire to be the next John Grisham or J.K. Rowling, when in actuality, those people are, quite literally, one in a million.

There is a whole industry built up around convincing you that you are an ‘author’ and that you don’t really need to go through all the bullshit of having to deal with agents or publishers.

But the reality of all this lies in the reductive logic of the 80/20 Rule That Governs Just About Everything.

Here’s how it works.

Out of any given set of people who call themselves writers, 80% of them are hacks and 20% of them actually have some talent.

Out of the 20% who have talent, 80% of those people might have one book in them, but would be incapable of following it up in any meaningful way, whereas 20% of them would be able to create at least a second book.

Out of that 20% who have the talent to create more than one book, 80% of them are simply not good enough writers or have interesting enough stories to tell, and 20% of them are good writers and have good stories.

So you can see that this boils down to a very small number of people who are going to actually succeed, either via the agent/publisher route, or the independent route.

Plus, out of this scant few who make it to the point where they have books that are selling, 80% of those people will not make enough to support themselves, and 20% might.

And finally out of that 20%, there may be one or two John Grishams or J.,K. Rowlings.

And this explains why, across the entire literary universe, there are relatively few who really make it to a state of true ‘stardom.’

Because it’s not just about the ability to write, or the ability to weave a good yarn, or the ability to deal with editors and re-write your book sometimes three or four times, or get out there and push the hell out of your book or follow your first book up with a second book that’s just as good or better. No. It’s the combination of all those things done with 100% of your energy that will turn you into a Grisham or Rowling, and gain your entry into a literary elite that comprises a whopping big 1% of everyone who is trying to do the same thing are you are.

If you think there is any kind of shortcut available to you, and the ads you see on the Internet really try and convince you there are, well good luck with that. The 80/20 Rule never lies.

I’m not telling you this to discourage you.

I’m telling you this because if you are on this road, you need to understand the level of commitment that needs to be made to both the art and the business of your craft in order to be successful.

If you’re not willing to do that, then you are simply in the wrong business. Or your writing is really just a rather fulfilling hobby. And at the end of the day, there’s really nothing wrong with that.

I was a professional advertising writer for quite a few years. And every day I went to work knowing that if the quality of my work showed signs of slowing down or flagging that I would be replaced in a heartbeat. In the world of publishing that’s every bit as true.

Now that I have retired from the advertising business, I have started writing short stories and novellas. But I didn’t go into that area of writing with the idea of becoming the next big thing. In fact, the publishing industry was the thing I wanted to steer completely clear of. So that meant simply giving my stories away, which is what I am doing.

Writing is a great way to express yourself, and to me, it’s not so much about how widely accepted I become as a writer of stories, but how much pleasure I derive from putting them together. And at the end of the day, I’m happy with that.

And that’s the point of this piece. If you want to be a famous writer, go for it, but realize that it’s a huge commitment. If you want to just write, go for that too. Please yourself and the people in your circle. Either way, just try to enjoy the process.

Because when it comes to writing, all the real fun is in the doing.

PS: If you'd like to ready any of my short stories, this link will take you to a directory with brief descriptions of each piece

https://jimmurraysstories.blogspot.com/2023/08/smoke-signals.html