Andy Weir wrote The Martian on his blog. The rest will be a turning point in history if I ever finish writing my Comprehensive History of How to Fail Your Way into a Successful Writing Career.
There is a "correct" way to "succeed" in a career as a writer, and Andy not only didn't do that, he tried it and failed. He took a year off from his engineering career once and queried a manuscript around and got nothing from it.
Like a good storyteller, he decided that he still wanted to tell a story he had, though. On his own website, he started publishing The Martian as a blog series. It gained a readership there, and enough of a readership that he decided to offer the complete book as a downloadable PDF to them. Which, according to Andy in interviews, was considered too hard--people wanted to read it on their Kindles. So he went through the process to publish The Martian as an ebook through Kindle Direct Publishing. He wanted to offer it for free, because he was already doing that on his website. Amazon won't allow an ebook to just be free, though, so he set it for the lowest price possible, then told the people who asked that it was there.
Then apparently he didn't really check it much. Within a week, though, he must have checked it, because that's the amount of time that's pertinent to Amazon number one bestsellers. Because that's what Andy had on his hands at that point.
That's the important part of the story. The next part is that he got a deal to republish through Crown, and then it was adapted into a Ridley Scott/Matt Damon movie.
The moral of the story is that there are many ways to fail into success, depending on your definitions of those terms. Andy Weir demonstrated one possible future of publishing.
There are important takeaways from Andy's story. In no particular order:
Using the internet right works well. Attention spans aren't short, but people are wary of committing to something that might prove boring because they've been burned a lot. So serialization is a great use of the internet.
Plus, serialization helps the three-way relationship between content creators, their audience, and algorithms. Publishing The Martian on his blog changed it from one piece of content released once into twenty to thirty pieces of content published over a number of months. That gave the algorithms a lot more to work with. So don't be discouraged if you do start serializing and the first few chapters don't seem to get any traction: it's a process.
If you have a story to tell, don't be discouraged! Success wears many masks.
There are many emerging "right" ways into a writing career.
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