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Okay, friends, we’ve been flirting around this long enough. After six years of writing this blog (holy cow, six years!), 303 previous posts, and countless conversations in the comments, I’m finally ready to tell you the secret I’ve been sitting on all this time for how to become a bestselling author.

Are you ready? Grab a pen….

JUST KIDDING! Of course I’m not going to tell you “this one simple trick” for making all your dreams come true if you just click on this, or buy this, or hire me to do this. I’m not going to give you all the answers you so desperately seek to achieve your dreams or the foolproof system you can follow to make every book a bestseller.

As you’re reading this I’m betting you know why already: because there is no such thing. If there were, as I often remind authors who may be scrupulously following some prescribed technique or guru or method, then not only would every other author who did also become a bestseller, but so would the person hawking it. (I was going to say “become a millionaire,” but then I remembered we work in publishing and hahahahaha!)

Read more about vetting the many products and services marketed to writers: “Caveat Scriptor”

Think of your stories as lottery tickets—with each one you’re creating the chance to hit the jackpot, but there are no guarantees and the odds aren’t in your favor.

Think of your stories as lottery tickets—with each one you’re creating the chance to hit the jackpot, but there are no guarantees and the odds aren’t in your favor.

“Oh, you’re crushing authors’ dreams again,” I can hear my husband saying, as he often does when I write about the harsh truths of the publishing business.

But, as I tell him and the authors I work with and speak in front of and write these blogs for, it’s essential that writers know the realities of our industry when they are building their careers within it. Otherwise you may spend your entire writing life chasing a brass ring you may or may not attain (“but according to industry statistics you probably won’t,” inserts that asshole the Dream Crusher), and rather than passing your days doing something you love and are proud of and that is authentic and true, and creating a very satisfying creative career, you may look back at years of toil and heartful effort and inspiration and creativity and feel like a failure, that it was all for nothing.

I care passionately about helping authors build satisfying, sustainable careers as writers—so much so that I wrote an entire book about it.

That’s why I crush their dreams. So that they can lay a foundation of realistic and practical knowledge of what our business is and how it works, and forge a career where they take control of the parts where they have agency and autonomy, and find creative and personal fulfillment and joy despite all the parts where they don’t.

The One Common Component of Success

But this post isn’t about why or how you can build a successful career despite all of the publishing industry’s challenges and realities. I’ve written about that here and here and here—and in all these posts here.

I’ve been holding on to this New York Times article (gift link) for a while now, since it first ran at the end of last year, because I was struck by how varied and unpredictable the path to bestsellerdom was for the five authors/books profiled in the piece.

They include:

• a 70-year-old musician who wrote his first novel mostly as an exercise just “to see if I had the muscle to write a piece of long fiction” and self-published it to ever-building sales before a traditional publisher picked it up and pushed sales even higher (Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden)
• a 39-year-old author ready to give up on developing a writing career until she decided to give it one more shot during the pandemic, penning a story based on her own habit of writing letters to celebrities and strangers, whose sales slow-built over six months until her book hit the NYTimes bestseller chart (Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent)
• a previously self-published fan-fiction serial first released on an open-source site to more than 10 million views and 100K reviews that was picked up by a major publisher and sold 850K copies in its first three months (SenLinYu’s Alchemised).
• a quiet novel about a child and her grandfather visiting museums first published in French by an independent press, which gained word-of-mouth notoriety and sales from booksellers before topping sales charts (Thomas Schlesser’s Mona’s Eyes).
• a middle-aged author who, after decades in a writing career in which he’d long since given up on hitting the bestseller lists, spent six years writing an epic multigenerational story inspired by a scandalous secret within his own family that was picked up by a major publisher and became an instant bestseller (Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye).

What all these stories do not have in common: None of these authors did it the same way. None of them wrote similar stories that conformed to a formulaic system. None had a “typical” path to bestsellerdom.

Three were debuts. One was written over six years. One was the author’s eighth manuscript, after trying to secure an agent/publisher for 18 years. Two were first self-published. Some benefited from traditional marketing efforts from a publisher, some from high-profile review coverage, some from word of mouth from readers and booksellers.

Two authors are in their thirties, one in his forties. One turned 60 just before his novel was published. One is 70.

What they do have in common: Their stories are deeply personal.

And most of all: They wrote.

You have to write. A thing I often tell writers who are feeling discouraged about the often long and complicated process of finishing a manuscript, editing and revising it, and getting it out into the world is that simply by doing it—by putting those first words on the page and continuing to do that until they had a complete story—they are already far ahead of the swaths of people who say they dream of “writing a book one day.”

Because the author actually did it—that hard, frustrating, sometimes overwhelming and opaque work of writing.

If there’s a secret to becoming a bestseller, that’s it. Write.

And then keep writing. Make it better. Keep learning and growing your skills and your understanding of the publishing market. Send your stories out into the world and see how they land.

Then do it again.

And again.

Upping Your Odds

Let me say it this way: Every morning, after I’ve gotten a little coffee into me, I do sun salutations. I’ve done this a long time—twenty years, nearly without fail, day after day after day. A few years ago I added push-ups to my routine, and a few months ago I added getting up off the ground from a cross-legged position without using my hands.

I started strength training seven years ago and I do it twice a week—again almost without fail (including wedging four workouts in onboard the river ship on our recent Rhine cruise in a gym smaller than my first rented room in New York at a women’s residence).

I do these things because, as I like to joke, I’m creating the body I’m going to get old in, and I want it to be as strong and healthy and mobile and pain-free as possible. I do everything I can to make that more likely.

But there’s no guarantee that’s going to happen. I might do all of this and still get some wasting disease that cuts my projected future short or destroys all my dedicated efforts by rendering me bedridden or nonambulatory or pain-riddled or otherwise physically or mentally impaired. I might incur some accident or carry some genetic legacy that causes all those things. I might get hit by a bus. (Why is it always a bus? Considering that most pedestrian accidents are with cars, motorcycles, and bikes, I’m thinking bus drivers have gotten a bad rap.)

But…I might not. I might get the allegorical winning lottery ticket of aging and carry on in robust health and fitness, flexible and spry and fully compos mentis until, after a long and fulfilling and happy life, I die peacefully in my sleep side by side with my similarly healthily aged husband, the person I love most on this earth.

But we probably won’t. The wheel of life has too many pie wedges marked with undesirable outcomes, and we have too little control over how it spins or where it lands.

All I can do is try to widen the good segments—or create more of them—so that my odds are better. Do the stretches. Lift the weights. Get my heart beating. Eat healthy (for the most part) and try to take care of myself, body, mind, and soul.

Day after day after day.

And as a result, I feel great now. In middle age (bleh, that phrase) I feel stronger and in better shape than I’ve ever been, the normal aches and pains of aging so far mostly kept at bay.

You don’t have to write every day. You don’t have to write at all, darlings. But doing it—on whatever schedule works for you, as regularly as you possibly can—is the only way you might achieve bestsellerdom…one day, if the Muse smiles upon you and you keep improving your craft and all the stars in this crazy, unpredictable, subjective business align just as you wish.

I wish it for you.

That’s the only secret to success I or anyone else can offer you.

But don’t just wish. Do.

Authors, do you have a specific writing routine—and do you honor it? For just about my entire career I’ve segmented my weekdays into two parts: mornings are for my own creative work, whatever that may be (writing, course creation, etc.); afternoons are for editing. Because of that my creative muscles stay in shape: When I sit down every morning I’m ready to work and I do, and it’s why I stay creatively productive. Even if you don’t have as much flexibility in your schedule, can you set aside a certain amount of time—even just an hour or a few hours every week—and concretely schedule it, even if that schedule varies, and then honor it as steadfastly as any other “must-do” item on your to-do list? Can you make setting aside time for your creative career nonnegotiable?

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