It's Luck, Not Talent, That Makes You Successful As A Creator

The one question everyone wants to know when it comes to being a creator is, "How do you make it?" There are panels dedicated to it at conventions, it's the question that comes up in every interview, and it's something people endlessly speculate on. What does an artist have to do in order to reach that level where they're famous or rich enough that they never have to work a day job again? Do they dedicate themselves body and soul to the craft? Do they make a deal with the devil? Is there some secret formula that lets you hack social media in order to reach your audience and become successful?

Well, I've been doing this professionally for more than 12 years now. I've talked to a lot of people, been to the panels, listened to the interviews, and there is a single thread that runs through every, single one of them. You have to be lucky.

That's it.

So roll the dice... or don't. But you can't win if you don't play.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

An Echoing Refrain

The first time I ran into this was when I was in my mid-20s working as a reporter for a small local paper and trying to break into fiction as a writer. I was given the opportunity to interview a local author of cozy mysteries and romances, and I jumped at the chance. At best, I figured that if I made a good impression maybe she could help me out. At worst, maybe she could give me a few pointers. And when I got to the question where I asked her how one got a publishing deal with a major company (she'd started off with Viking, if memory serves), she just shrugged and gave me an answer that boiled down to, "Right place, right time."

In short, yes, she'd written a romance manuscript. She'd worked really hard on it, done all the editing, cleaned it up nice, etc., but the major reason she got that first book in was it just so happened to be the kind of romance the company was looking for in that very moment. If she'd submitted it a few months earlier, or a few months later, they probably wouldn't have taken it.

She kept writing books, kept doing the work, kept trying to keep her place... but she had no idea why her books sold or didn't sell. No clue what would work. In short, she lucked out, and was doing her best to stay in the position that luck had gotten her by keeping her momentum as a writer going.

All right... well... that's an anomaly, right?

That was kind of a disappointing answer, but I did my best to take it in stride, and to ask other writers I met along the way how they managed to find success. A handful of writers who started later in life told me they just wrote while living off retirement, and they were able to finally write something that caught on with an audience. Others mentioned that their book's themes just happened to coincide with some trend that put a lot of attention on them. A few writers talked about how the success of someone else's book spilled over onto them, and they rode someone else's coattails.

And then I started looking around, watching trends, and comparing notes. There are a lot of big YouTubers out there right now (Markiplier is one that comes to mind) who got in early-ish on the platform, but who happened to catch on with over-the-top reactions, particularly to scary games and scary content. There are authors who became the subject of BookTok reviews, and it blew up their name and signal without their knowledge or understanding. Chuck Tingle was basically nominated as part of the Sad Puppies scandal, and while I won't say he didn't have a fan base before his name got dragged into that shit show, it definitely catapulted him into the faces of a lot of people who would never have seen his work otherwise, much less bought a copy of a book like Scary Stories to Tingle Your Butt: 7 Tales of Gay Terror.

That is a real book. Seriously, go check it out!

This point was driven home to me once again while listening to this interview with the monster creator Trevor Henderson. Now, you might not know him by name, but you're likely familiar with his most infamous creation Siren Head. A monster artist whose work speaks for itself, he is one of the more influential creators of Internet-based horror, and he currently creates so many scary things that it can seem hard to follow.

But when he made Siren Head he was working a retail job and just trying to squeeze money out of art. He was working hard (he mentions in the interview that he'd come home from shifts and force himself to draw even though he was exhausted), improving his craft, and making interesting things... but his fame came from an outside source. A video game designer came across Siren Head, and asked to use it in his game. Trevor agreed, as long as he was mentioned... and that game showed up on Markiplier's YouTube channel, to bring things full circle. This led to an explosion of popularity for the monster, and a big audience of people who were now aware of Trevor's work, as well as the designer who made the game. And that spring-boarded the two of them in a very big way. But it took 3 years between him finishing that creature's art, and it just exploding onto the scene like that.

Also, shoutout to The Wrong Station's YouTube channel. Go subscribe, and listen to them on Spotify or something. Their show is a LOT of fun!

Now, what I'm not saying is that any of the people I have mentioned, either obliquely or by name, didn't work hard. I'm not saying they don't have talent, or that they haven't refined their craft to create the best things they can. That is always the take away that people have when they reach this point, and it's because there's a very specific lie that so many people believe, and you believing this lie actively harms all of us.

Do you want to know what it is? It's the belief that talent and hard work are rewarded.

You can work as hard as possible, and you can make amazing art that deserves to be seen, and everyone who picks it up devours it, thoroughly enjoying every part of this thing you made... but if your signal doesn't grow via word of mouth, and no one lets a big enough audience find out about it, you won't sell copies, get views, or increase your subscriber count. And on the flip side, someone can write absolute drek, create the most low-effort music, or just crap out a few images, and if those things happen to strike a nerve with a current trend, if they become a subject of Internet conversation, or if you happen to be related to, dating, or already a minor celebrity for some other reason, you'll go gangbusters.

If you're a creator, get that lie out of your head right now, because it's going to convince you that if you just work harder, write more, etc., that eventually you have to succeed. Marketing and creating aren't the same thing, and you can't assume the quality of your work will grant you some kind of special dispensation that will spontaneously get you noticed by the public.

And if you're not a creator, you also need to get this lie out of your head because we're depending on you. You are literally the ones who decide whether we succeed or not.

You Have The Power, Here

I've said this before, and I sometimes feel like a broken record, but I'm going to keep saying this until people get it. Artists do not have any power to make ourselves succeed. Yes we can write books, make videos, draw things, and yes we can try to leverage social media to get attention, but we ultimately cannot force ourselves to be successful just by working harder.

The only thing that helps creators succeed is you. The audience. The people we are making things for.

If you don't cheer, we die.

I've used the gladiator metaphor since the beginning of this blog, and it's apt. Because gladiators who got famous were showered in money, they got endorsement deals, they have goddamn merch you could buy at their matches. But the fighters who didn't have that following? Who didn't get the cheers? They got nothing. Didn't matter how good the show they put on was if no one was paying to see it, no one was betting on them, and no one was paying attention.

Your cheers matter... but in this digital age we're living in, they can take a lot of different forms.

If you just want to turn the wheels and help the creators you love get numbers, and get noticed, do the following:

- Read/Watch/Listen to Their Content: The more reads an article gets, the more views a video or podcast episode gets, etc., the more likely the algorithm will push it out to other people. So consume the content (especially the free stuff), and share it on social media platforms to boost the signal.

- Subscribe and Follow: This dialed-in audience is a big factor in who sees us, hears about us, etc. If you have a million subscribers on YouTube, Facebook, etc., the algorithm treats your stuff very differently than if you just have 1,000. Fill the seats, make the arena look full, because it helps us!

- Leave Comments, Reviews, and Ratings: If you're watching a video, hit the Like button. If you're listening on Spotify, leave a 5 star review. If you bought a book, leave a rating and review. The more of this stuff we get, you guessed it, the more likely we are to be seen by others.

- Buy Our Merch: Whether you're buying books, TTRPG supplements, tee shirts, or just using the discount code we get from a sponsor, all of that puts money in our pockets... but more importantly, again, when the numbers go up, the algorithms, sponsors, etc., treat us better. If I get a top-selling book on Amazon, Drive Thru RPG, etc., those sites are going to tell everyone about it because they want more sales... and the numbers to become a bestseller are so, so much smaller than you think...

Again, I'm not saying you have a moral obligation to support all creators. I'm not saying you should spend more than you can afford just to boost someone's signal. I'm just explaining how the machinery works. If you want a creator to succeed (any creator), then pull the levers I just described. Pull as many of them as you can, as often as you can. If you can afford to buy books, buy them. If you can't, don't. But consume all the free stuff, check in on social media, hit the buttons, make the comments, follow all the followables, etc.

If you cheer, we rise. If you don't cheer, we die in obscurity. This isn't even a metaphor... it's literally how the industry works. Period.

And the only way any of us get famous is if our audience grows so big, and so loud, that the wider world finds out about us and what we do. So please... raise your voice, and be that noise.

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Uncertainty is The Worst (and The Best) Thing About Being an Author

The most common piece of advice I've heard since the point I decided to become an author (around age 13 or 14, I think it was), is that I need to have a reliable, steady source of income while I do that on the side. It's not that they didn't think I had the chops or determination to crank out books till the day I died, but rather that there's no telling what the market is going to do when it comes to a writer's trade. You might write one book, hit the lottery, and explode! You might spend a decade or two writing shelves worth of novels, only to become an "overnight success" when someone with a big following tells their fans your work is amazing.

And while most advice you get from people with no experience being a writer is basically garbage, there is a lot of truth to this one. Because writers are self-employed now more than ever before in the age of the gig economy, and your income is going to depend almost entirely on the fickle finger of fate. And I'll be the first to tell you that can be both infuriating, and exhilarating.

Pay your fee, take your shot, and hope for the best!

Before we go too much further, if you want to help me negate some of the uncertainty I'm dealing with (and make sure this blog keeps on trucking), consider becoming a Literary Mercenary Patreon patron! Or, if you don't have the spare dosh for that right now, signing up for my weekly newsletter to ensure you don't miss any of my new releases!

Reliability is an Illusion (Unfortunately)

One of the hardest truths there is about being an author is that your entire profession is largely a matter of luck. Talent helps, developing your skill and craft is necessary, networking is good, and gumption goes a long way, but everything you achieve (or don't) basically turns on the fulcrum of luck.

And this is a door that swings both ways.

Sometimes opportunity doesn't bother knocking.

As an example, take the current pandemic. I had spent several years building up a rather large pile of completed work as a ghost blogger, and it was slowly getting approved, ensuring I had a "regular" check to help bolster all the work I do writing novels, RPG supplements, blogs, and all that other nonsense. Then when the plague crashed across the economy, many of my clients put a freeze on approving any more work. Others cancelled projects (some of which I'd turned in weeks or months before), and still others just ghosted entirely, cancelling their orders and vanishing.

So practically overnight I went from a ghost writer who is hoping to one day quit that job to write novels and RPGs full time, to suddenly relying very much on my body of creative work to make up the difference from the "safe" clients who'd left me hanging.

You know, just like any other job where you're considered an expendable worker, or where the company suddenly takes a nose dive into concrete.

That same zeitgeist can go the other way, as well, putting a surprising amount of good fortune in my pocket when I didn't expect it to be there. For example, a few months back my article Partners and Polycules: Polyamorous Designations Based Off Dungeons and Dragons Dice was randomly shared on a pretty wide scale thanks to a single mention on a subreddit. It picked up several thousand reads, and quickly rocketed up to the front page of my most-read pieces ever on Vocal, suddenly easing my difficulties covering bills that month. In the early summer of 2020 Drive Thru RPG had a big sale on a huge number of World of Darkness game supplements, and overnight my entire 100 Kinfolk project that I'd written for Werewolf: The Apocalypse jumped in sales, pushing my earnings in royalties over $200 for the first (and so far only) time since I started getting a cut of my RPG earnings. I haven't gotten my first check for my noir mystery novel Marked Territory yet, but it's entirely possible that a mystery with a Maine Coon alley cat trying to figure out why a pack of stray dogs is putting the squeeze on a church mouse and her community sold far better than I expected it to.

And one of the hard truths of this job is that while you can tell the story, talk about the story, and try to spread the word, so much of whether or not you succeed is actually out of your hands.

You Can Only Do What You Can Do

Hitting the jackpot as a writer is basically being a professional gambler. You need to read the trends in fiction, understand your audience, learn to recognize interest, figure out what the social media algorithm wants to see from you, and do what you can to gather support from the community. But even if you crunch all the numbers, put your links in the right place, show up to interviews, do readings for your audience, at the end of the day you're basically just gambling. Every book, every blog, every supplement, every article is just one more roll of the dice.

As Captain Picard says, it's possible to do everything right and still fail, when all is said and done.

Even if the odds are on your side, there's no guaranteeing you're going to win. And even if the odds are against you, there's no guaranteeing you're going to lose. The best you can do is put the words on the page in the most compelling way you can, do everything to get it in front of the audience's eyes you can think of, and hope for the best.

Never depend on luck to see you through. At the same time, understand that it is often pure, unadulterated chance that happens to be what makes a book, blog, video, etc. popular. And getting struck by lightning ain't an easy thing to do.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

The Key To a Book Deal? Luck, and Perseverance

I remember years ago when I was still a reporter for a small rag in town that I was asked to interview local author Kate Collins who had just released the 13th book in her ongoing mystery series (Nightshade on Elm Street I believe it was). I was thrilled with the assignment! It was partly because it's always nice to hear a fellow author hold forth about their work and process, but it was also because I wanted to talk to someone who was clearly more successful in the book racket than I was. I had the same burning question that I've heard asked in hundred different panels at a dozen different conventions now.

How did you do it?

Seriously, you got 13 of these, and it's not your only series!

 

The answer Ms. Collins gave was as honest as it was disappointing. All these years later, though, I can vouch for its veracity. None of us like hearing this, and none of us want to believe it, but the sooner you do, the sooner you'll be able to move forward with your career.

It's luck. That's all there is to it. All you have to do is make sure that you, or your manuscript, happen to be in the right place at the right time to close a deal, and you've got it made.

For her, it had simply been putting her manuscript in the right hands by pure chance. She'd submitted a romance novel to Viking more than ten years ago at the time of the interview, and it just so happened to catch the editor's eye while they were looking for the specific flavor she'd penned. It wasn't the font she used, the typeface she wrote in, or some trick of phrasing in her cover letter that made her stand out as more worthy of being read. It was just that she happened to get plucked off the pile that day.

Of all the authors I've spoken with over the years, this is the one commonality that all of us share. When someone asks how we got our books published it was never the culmination of a carefully enacted plan like something out of Ocean's 11. Without fail it's always been because of some random quirk of chance. Someone we talked to at a party, a friend of a friend who heard about what we did, or in my case impressing the right people at a panel.

It's Honestly How I Got My Book Contract

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, my new novel was released at the beginning of the month! It's a mean streets noir story about an alley cat from the Bronx who gets caught up in a pissing contest over turf rights on the south side. At first Leo's just there to help out a church mouse named Charity who's caught up in trouble, but the deeper he digs, the less sense it all makes. When all the twists and turns play out, though, he finds out why a ruined church has suddenly become... Marked Territory!

Come on... you know you wanna check it out!

I finished writing the manuscript for this novel toward the end of last summer, and I was letting it cool for a bit before I went over it and got it ready for submissions. And it was last November that I happened to be on a panel at Windy Con with Joy Ward and Walt Boyes, who in addition to being long-term authors in their own right also happen to work for Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press. This wasn't our first acquaintance either; I'd met Joy a year before and we'd chatted after a panel I was on, which put us on smiling-and-nodding-in-the-halls terms.

 

Con folks will know exactly what I mean.

All three of us were on a panel talking about how to start your career as a writer. The three of us, along with Richard Knaak (whose books you should check out, by the by) were going back and forth, answering questions, giving advice, etc. We had a surprisingly large audience for a small con, and we did our best to just give them the facts. It was after another panel that I happened to be on with Walt and Joy that we found some time to talk about what we were working on. I casually mentioned that I'd just finished this novel that was, "A traditional noir detective story, with all the violence and intrigue, but the whole cast are street animals in New York City."

I was talking for about 30 seconds, just pleased to have some folks who understood what it was like to work on something that was simultaneously difficult, and sort of silly. I remember Walt just nodded, gave me a smile, and said, "So, when are you going to let me take a look at it?"

That was it. No submitting to a slush pile, no going through channels, no inquiries about an agent or asking to see my previous work. I just happened to mention a project that intrigued him, and both Walt and Joy had heard me talk about my experiences on the same panel they'd been on, and so he decided to take a risk on me. I speed-edited the manuscript in a week or so, and got it into Walt's hands as fast as I could.

The rest, as they say, is history.

 

But You Have To Keep Rolling The Dice

They'll come up boxcars eventually!

So it's all about luck? That's the secret?

Well, yes and no.

As I've said so often on this blog, it takes a lot of work to become an overnight success. It's possible that your very first reading on open mic night, your very first time sitting on a panel at a convention, or the first after party you go to, you're going to make that connection that sparks an opportunity. Like picking up the dice, and rolling double sixes straight out of the gate, it can totally happen.

That's not likely to happen, though. But the upside is that every event you go to, every panel you volunteer for, and every time you sit at a table in a dealer's hall or a signing event, that's one more chance for you to meet people. One more chance for your paths to cross with new nodes on your network, and for an opportunity to present itself.

The one piece of advice I can give, though, is this; don't try to stack the deck in your favor. Don't be nice to someone hoping they can introduce you to their agent, or chat them up just to get them to look at your book. That sort of thing happens all the time, and it's exhausting. There's also no surer way to completely shoot yourself in the foot, and practically guarantee that the person you're hoping will help you is going to slam the door in your face... potentially literally.

Just make connections with people. Be polite, be professional, be respectful, and just enjoy their company. When you take all that pressure off yourself (and more importantly off the people you're talking to), that's when you're much more likely to find an opportunity drops out of the sky, and falls right in your lap.

Want To Get All of My Updates?

At the insistence of several of my readers, I have finally decided to start a newsletter! The current plan is to put out one every Monday to offer a recap of all my articles, blogs, books, supplements, and other projects so that my readers never miss a trick.

You can sign up here, or scroll down to the bottom of the page (if you're on the web version, rather than the mobile version of my blog). Hope to see you there, and make sure to tell your friends! The first issue is coming out next week at time of writing, and I'm hoping to get at least 50 names on the list by the weekend.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Chance Can Always Make Things Worse, But Never Better

Boiled down to the finest possible description, a novel is nothing more than a series of actions characters take, which we follow. In this way, a book is really just watching cause and effect play out. However, like a set of dominoes that have been laid out in an intricate pattern, these simple physics can be breathtaking when we see the sheer scale it's operating on.

Whoa! I did not see that coming.

Some actions and reactions in books are much more complicated than dominoes, of course, and there are always going to be elements that are outside of the protagonist's knowledge or scope. For instance, Indiana Jones didn't know Elsa was a Nazi in The Last Crusade, so when she was held at gunpoint he thought she was really in danger.

That element was planned as part of the story, and it was always going to come up. However, there are some incidents in a plot that act as pure chance. In Star Wars Han and Chewie run down the wrong corridor, and find themselves in the barracks instead of locating an escape hatch. Our protagonist in Drag Me To Hell doesn't check the envelope she picked up after it got jumbled with a bunch of other junk, and thus tries to break a curse with a coin instead of with the actual item she needed. The protagonists in The Strangers just happened to be home on the night a roving gang of psychopaths were looking for a home to invade. And so on, and so forth.

Big or small, these things all happened due to random chance, and they all put the protagonists in more danger than they were already in. That's just dandy! If you try to do it the other way around, though, then you run into problems.

Good Luck, Deus Ex Machina, and Cheapening Stakes

When bad luck makes things worse for our protagonist (the car won't start, their phone rings while the killer is looking for them, etc.), that raises the stakes and increases the tension. However, if random chance can make problems go away, or it eases the protagonist's path to victory, then that becomes a serious problem.

Well we weren't going to promote you, but since Larry randomly moved to Singapore, the job's yours.

The issue you run the risk of hitting is the much-maligned Deus Ex Machina. If you're not a fan of ancient Greek theater, it was when the gods would come down from Olympus, wave their hands, and fix the situation that had developed. Translating roughly to, "Machine of the Gods," or, "The Gods in the Machine," this trope refers to any seemingly random bit of chance getting a character out of an otherwise impossible situation. As TV Tropes puts it, they fall off a cliff, and a flying robot catches them. Or they get shot, and an innocent bystander with no experience miraculously gets the bullet out and stitches them closed.

To steal a phrase from Emma Coates, "Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating." Why is that? Well, in short, it has to do with the threat we've been presented with, how truthful the stakes are, and a reasonable expectation of danger.

Think of your traditional James Bond death trap scene. The hero is strapped into a machine that's going to kill him very shortly if he doesn't do something to get out of it. And how is that scene played out, nine times out of ten? With Bond doing something to enact his escape. Maybe he manages to strain, and with a colossal effort he gets a hand free, and picks the lock just before the buzzsaw hits him. Maybe he manages to pull one of Q's gadgets out of his breast pocket with his teeth, aiming the laser and disabling the device. Maybe he just punches the shark, swims down to the grate, and escapes before the great white can eat him.

Now ask yourself how you'd feel if James was saved not by his own efforts, skills, or decisive action, but because of random happenstance. What if a cup of coffee fell on the control panel, shorting out the mechanism because a nameless tech bumped his latte? Or a squirrel bit through a cable, and tripped a breaker? Chances are you'd feel cheated. Because rather than having to do something, or overcome some obstacle, the threat was just hand-waved away by an outside force, allowing our protagonist to continue on his merry way. That can make it feel like the threat was never really valid in the first place, since our hero had to do nothing to circumvent or overcome it, which meant it may as well have never been there at all.

Make Your Characters Sweat For It

If you put obstacles in your character's way, people want to see them knock it down. So give the people what they want, and make your characters sweat to earn their goals. The struggle validates the threat, and it provides the appropriate catharsis for the audience as they watch the character's actions.

Having chance remove the obstacle, though, pretty much just creates literary blue balls; all the build-up and none of the release, if you will.

And nobody wants to pay you money for that kind of treatment.

So, because you declare your story done, go back and ask where fortune might have been a little too generous to your protagonists. Because if you take Lady Luck out of the equation, you'll likely have a much more satisfying tale to tell.

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Luck Makes Your Writing Career (But Persistence Makes Your Luck)

When you ask authors how they got where they are, a lot of them will credit the usual suspects; hard work, several editorial passes, and the gumption to keep submitting while wading through a snowstorm of rejections. Thanks to the advent of social media, you'll also hear authors talk about how they built their brand, created pages that drew and kept readers, and made sure they had a receptive audience for the stories they wanted to tell.

All of that is great. I'm the last person who wants to knock hard work, solid foundation, and clocking the thousands of hours it takes to build a following. However, no successful author is a self-made success. Because the unfortunate fact behind every successful author is that they rolled the dice, and those dice came up a win.

Ha! I did it! I rolled a seven!

This is, unfortunately, a flaw of our myth of the self-made success. We all want to believe we did it ourselves, because that means we're in control of our success. Conversely, it means that if you're not successful, then you have the ability to control that, too. However, it's entirely possible for you to do everything right, and still fail. You can write a great book and get it rejected, or if you succeed in getting it published, fail to make sales.

There's a funny thing about dice, though. If you roll them often enough, sooner or later the pips you want are going to turn up.

Every Roll Is A New Chance

Let's say you wrote a book. It's a good book, too. You have a firm grasp of artistic language, a solid plot, and it is the perfect length. You edit it till it's tight and smooth, and then you send it out into the world. Maybe you publish it yourself, or maybe you get it published traditionally, but the point is it's out there now. You took your shot... and you missed. Your book goes nowhere, and no matter how hard you try to get people to check it out, no one is interested.

So what do you do now? Well, you write another book. And another, and another, and another.

You'll hit the target... eventually.

Have you ever heard about famous movie stars who were total unknowns for years, despite appearing in movie after movie, and TV show after TV show? Until that one role, that one chance, got them out in front of millions of eyes, and people liked what they saw? Well, being an author is kind of like that... but if you give up after your first network slot doesn't get you discovered, then you probably won't make the big time.

If you fire enough bullets, then eventually you'll get lucky. You'll write a book that intrigues (or outrages) enough people to focus a spotlight on you. You'll get nominated for (or win) an award. A celebrity will come across your book, and tell their legion of fans that you are the next big thing. Or you'll finally have collected enough small pockets of fans over the years that when you release your tenth, or fifteenth, or twentieth book, there is a huge scramble by people who want to read it.

Luck works in strange ways. Sometimes it completely ignores you, and your year and change of effort falls flat on its face in a mud puddle. Other times luck wraps its arms around you, and tells everyone how phenomenal you are. But if you never get out of the puddle, and wipe off your face to try again, then you may as well stay where you are.

Sooner or later, those pips are gonna fall your way. Don't stop rolling until they do.

That's all for this week's Business of Writing post. Hopefully it helps keep you humble if luck already gave you a deep, loving kiss. And if it hasn't, don't worry, just rattle those bones and try to make your next throw count. If you'd like to help support this blog, head over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page, and become a patron today. For as little as $1 you can make a big difference in my work, and you'll get a free book, too. Lastly, if you want to keep up-to-date on all my latest releases, then follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.