If you publish your own work (and I do) or you’re thinking of publishing your own work, I recommend reading this post by Toby Buckell on Survivor Bias in the self-publishing world.
Seriously, I recommend taking a look at those posts. He has graphs! Everyone loves graphs nowadays.
There are a lot of comments I wanted to make on this, but this will be the main one: It’s not a lottery, but luck is involved.
The people who are in the far left of those graphs, selling a ton of books? They’re in that place in part because the books they wrote appeal to lots of people. However, that’s not enough. It’s also not enough for them to be marketed in all the right places and the right ways, to get a cover from a specific designer, or for the author to be online drumming up interest in their work.
There’s luck involved, too. You can do everything right and still not win. But since you can’t control luck, you have to simply create the circumstances where luck will flourish, and keep rolling dice.
Mirrored from Twenty Palaces. You can comment here but not there.