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Comment by Adrenalist | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting that he didn't become a full-time author until 20 years after his book was published. I'm always interested in how successful people became that way.

Mr. Patterson was born in 1947, published his first book at 29 years old (1976) and didn't become a full time writer until 49 years old (1996). He's been writing an average of 2 novels per year since then (!) and is getting more prolific with age. Considering that some people never get around to "finishing their novel", I find these data points amazing.

What are you doing today that will be news worthy 20 years from now?

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> What are you doing today that will be news worthy 20 years from now?

Writing a novel. :)

Seriously though; for every successful writer there are 10's of failed ones. Most get "found" some time after they are first published (fad's like Harry Potter et al tend to be exceptions).

If you have a reasonable amount of writing talent and the spare time to put it down into a book then it's worth doing as a bet against being noticed at some time in the future.

> Writing a novel. :)

Ditto. I've worked in writing, and I've been trying to hone my writing skills with novels. Consistency is a key issue in writing. My goal in life is to publish a novel, not a short story so I never practised short stories. I'm now looking to sell some short stories to qualify for SFWA while I'm working on the book I hope is my debut.

I'm 21 and I've worked in writing since ~16. I fail to see how I can become a successful author unless I try to get myself out there. Perhaps my work will click and I'll hit the big time, however that's an aim for later in the game.

Im 23 and mine has been on/off writing since about 18. Mostly I've written short ideas/chapters and it's only recently they became a cohesive plot :)

Got some ideas for short stories - but writing them has always eluded me!

I believe that there is a "heuristic" to become a successful fiction author, but it is not easy at all. Just write books (not just one) and keep marketing them until you find an audience. Notice that this is based on the idea that for every author there is always an audience, the problem is finding it.

Once your audience knows about you, they will buy more and more of your books (that is why you need to have several books in order to make money this way).

The big problem is that most authors will just stop before writing even the first book. Or, after the first or second book, if they don't find success, they will stop altogether -- they never achieve the critical point after which they are successful.

It is not different from writing non-fiction and market to a niche, but it takes much more effort, because readers in fiction are not so easy to reach as in non-fiction.

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