HOW TO GET RICH QUICK WRITING BIG HIT BESTSELLERS!
By Bruce Bethke
One of the stranger things about being a famous author is that aspiring writers are always trying to get you to reveal “the secret” of how to become successful. They seem to think it’s like joining the Masons or something: there’s a special handshake we all know, or perhaps some secret code phrase we include in our cover letters, that gets us through the door and into the office where Orson Welles is waiting for us with the Standard Rich & Famous Contract, while they’re still out in the cold, collecting form rejections.
Today’s version of this comes from Angelique, who asks: What is the most profitable and easiest path for success?
Seriously?
Okay, as far as I can tell, the most profitable and easiest path to success is to forget writing fiction entirely and instead produce an endless series of books, workshops, and webinars promising to teach other aspiring writers how to get rich quick by writing big hit bestsellers. But I assume there is an implicit “by writing fiction” in the question as originally stated, so will answer that instead.
Get your waders on. The cynicism is about to become hip-deep.
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Many long ages ago I was sitting in a very plush office in Hollywood, with the head of West Coast A&R for some major record label whose name I forget now. After listening to my demo tape—politely at first, and then impatiently, the longer it ran—he decided to give me some advice. The objective, he said, isn’t to be really different. It’s to be just a little different, so your work stands out from the crowd, but at the same time to sound enough like someone else who is already a major hit-maker that the first time listeners hear it, it sounds like something they’ve already heard six times before, and they love it and can’t wait to hear it again, to hear that little bit of something special you bring to the formula.
At the time I thought that was quite possibly the most cynical advice I’d ever received. A lifetime later—well, I still think it’s incredibly damned cynical, but it’s also practical. People like what they like. It’s difficult to get them to try something new. The Amazon sales empire is built on that premise: that it’s much easier to get people to buy more of what they already like than to get them to take a chance on something truly new.
Therefore, if the question is, “What is the most profitable and easiest path for success?”
Attend closely. Today, I’m giving this secret away for free. Soon it will be in my best-selling book, How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!
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Step 1: Write to market.
Really study the market. Find a niche or subgenre that is hot right now—not five years ago, now—and learn all you can about it. Amazon provides a wealth of information, if you look at the book listings. Study the keywords and subgenre breakdowns. Then pick a category you like to read and think will be fun to work in, and figure out what you can do with it that is slightly different from what everyone else and their cat is already doing.
Step 2: Learn the Lester Dent formula.
Lester Dent was a pulp fiction writer who cranked out hundreds of novels under a plethora of pseudonyms and got filthy rich doing so. His universal plot formula was designed for 6,000-word short stories, but with some adjustments works just as well for short novels. Google it. Learn it. Apply it.
Step 3: Pick a pseudonym.
Your name is your brand. Ideally you want to have an entire stable full of names, so that you can switch back and forth as your brands and genres heat up or cool down. Remember, this is not you. You’re in the entertainment business now. Your pseudonym is a character; a stage name; a role you perform for public consumption. It’s a mask you put on before you go out in the morning and take off after you come home at night.
Step 4: First, figure out how your story ends.
To paraphrase Mickey Spillane, while the beginning of your book is what gets people interested in reading it, it’s the ending that determines whether they want to read anything else by you. Your readers are giving you something very valuable: their time. You owe it to them to give them an ending that rewards them for the time they’ve invested in your story and makes them glad they read it.
Step 5: Write short novels.
The day of the BFFB (Big Fat Fantasy Brick) is over. The optimum length for a novel in today’s market is around 50K words. If you feel your story requires a 200,000-word epic, split it up into a four-book series.
Step 6: Forget traditional publishing.
Start with self-publishing directly to Kindle. It’s too hard to get in the door with the few remaining traditional publishers now and their support for new authors is roughly nonexistent. Remember, if you’re successful at self-publishing, traditional publishers will come to you, to beg you to take their money.
Step 7: Consider whether serialization is right for you.
I’ve watched several writers launch successful careers recently by serializing their novels first on sites like Royal Road, before going to full e-book and print release. If you can work this way—I can’t—it’s a great way to build your fan base.
Step 8: Start an email list.
No one else will do this for you. As your pseudonym, get a website. Build a mailing list. Start to post on social media, but not obsessively. Interact with your fans. Make them feel they are sharing in your success. Everyone loves the feeling of being able to say, “I was reading [name] before it was cool.”
Personally, I’d skip Substack and Patreon. I know a few writers who are making enough on Patreon to justify the work, but far more who aren’t. Ditto for crowd-funding. You must have a crowd before crowd-funding pays off. Focus on building that mailing list! Put at least a quarter of your working time into marketing your work, not to editors, and not to other writers, but directly to readers. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your writing is if no one reads it.
Step 9: Keep writing those books!
If you come up with an idea that really clicks with readers, keep working it! Write a never-ending series! Don’t stop writing it until people stop buying it! Above all, if you get fed-up with telling the ongoing story of your lead character—and you will, it happens to all of us, sooner or later—whatever you do, do not toss your lead character off the top of Reichenbach Falls! Never write your character into an ending so final you can’t bring them back for “just one more sequel,” if your fans demand it.
Conversely, if you’ve gone three books into a series without having a bestseller, it’s time to pull a Doctor Who and regenerate. Kick that pseudonym to the curb, revise your formula, and start over again as someone else.
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As you have no doubt noticed by now, I do not include “Start out writing short stories” on this list. I make this choice with considerable sadness. I love short stories. My career began with reading and writing short stories. I consider short stories to be the hit singles of the literary world, and a well-executed short story can be a brilliant and exquisite miniature, like a Debussy Prélude.
There was a time when there was a well-established pathway from the SF/F short fiction magazine market to the paperback original novels market, and a good short story sale to a “pro” magazine could really open doors for you. There were even a few “slick” magazines that paid nearly as much for a short story or a novelette as some of the lower-end book publishers paid for entire novels.
But that time, sadly, was a long time ago. In today’s market it’s easier than ever to get your short stories placed and published, but almost impossible to get anyone to notice or for you to make significant money by doing it. The pro magazines appear to be following the original anthology series into extinction, and while there are still a few contests that pay quite well if you win – for example, the Story Unlikely contest will pay $3K for the first-place story, this year – since the question was, “What is the most profitable and easiest path for success?” I decided to focus on the easier part.
Understand, writing short stories is good practice. It’s a great way to hone your craft skills and develop your concepts. But if your objective is to make money as a writer of fiction…
Consider this. In software development, we have the concept of the sandbox. A sandbox is a secure, isolated environment, air-gapped from the production system and most other users. It’s like a playground, where a programmer can create, experiment, run tests and debug programs, and in general take risks and develop ideas in a controlled environment that simulates the real world, but without the risk of causing too much damage if something goes wrong or wasting too much time if something doesn’t work.
I suggest that you consider the short story market to be a sandbox. It’s place for you to create, experiment, take risks, develop your ideas and see how they resonate with your test subjects – er, readers and fans – and if you’re lucky, to figure out which of your ideas are worth developing into longer works, which is where the money is.
Which brings us to the tenth and final step.
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Step 10: There is no easy path to success.
Success in this business requires talent, ambition, good craft skills and work habits, and no small amount of luck. We can take ambition as given: if you weren’t ambitious, you wouldn’t be reading this. We must accept luck as a wild card: sometimes enormous gobs of dumb luck will trump all else and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. Accepting also that there is no way to change your innate level of raw talent, here at last is the real secret: focus on improving your craft skills and work habits.
After forty-some years in this business, I have seen that a modest amount of talent, coupled with solid craft skills and good work habits, beats enormous amounts of raw talent and lousy work habits seven days a week and twice on Sunday. Every. Damn. Time.
So don’t sit on your butt waiting for the Muse to whisper in your ear. If you want success as a writer, WORK FOR IT!
Here endeth the lesson.
