Backman’s Second Law of Writing Success

It’s not that long ago I wrote my first law of writing sucess. Now, I’m happy to announce that I have another “law” to follow up with.

As with the first law, a billion people have probably had the same idea before me, and it really isn’t all that profound. It’s just my way of expressing my thoughts on the subject, my way of saying that people who become good at what they do and keep doing it, are probably going to be more successful than the people who don’t. So when I’m claiming this writing “law” as my own, it’s really just emphasize how I feel about the subject.

My second law of how to achieve writing success is:

• The more stories you produce, the more likely is that luck will strike you.

(And produced, I mean submit and/or publish as well).

I’m not saying that you should produce hackneyed writing just so you can force out more books a year (though, that has worked for some writers). I’m just saying that the more books you have out there, the likelier it is that one of them is going get hyped by fans, critics, or the marketing department. The more books you have out, the likelier it is that someone will absolutely love one of them and force all their friends to read it and convince them it’s really great.

Even if you look at authors who are reveared mostly for their “literary” merrits, many of the most succesful ones are/were quite productive. Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, or Sheakespeare, for example. Hell, I’m not even sure the latter would be known today if he’d only produced a handfull of plays or poems. No matter how good they were, they might have perished before they could achieve the hype around The Bard that exists in literary crowds today. Or there could be so few of them, that the people who would absolutely loved them never stumbled upon them.

And common for these authors are that not everything they’ve published are of equal quality either. It’s no coincidecse that Fahrenheit 451 is Bradbury’s most succesful book, for example. He’s written some good stuff, but that book is, in my opinion, far better than the rest of his body of works.

Writing something truly great can show the world that you have skills. Write an additional couple of good stories, and people will see that the one great piece wasn’t just a fluke but that you actually are pretty good at this and your books a worth the money and time spent reading. The more “meh” pieces you wrote in between will likely be forgotten or at least be ignored by many readers.

It probably won’t take you many minutes on Google or Youtube either to find professional authors who’ll tell you that success doesn’t happen right away and selling books is easier if you have many different books to sell.

I think some people take this a little too much to heart, though, adapting the mindset that if you just write enough boooks, you’ll eventually be succesful.

Success it never garantied, though. You can only increase you’re chances.

Besides, there’s a reason why I’ve written my “laws” down in this order. First you have to reach a certain skill level and only then should your focus be on the producing content part.

If you puke on the pages and try to sell that as a novel, you’ll probably won’t be successful. Doing it againg and again won’t change that. Because what we end up with is an equation that look like this:
Chance of becoming successful = Skill level X Amount of books you produce

If your skill level is next to nothing, the result, your chance of getting lucky and becoming a huge success as a writer is almost zero.

Likewise, you could be the best writer in the world, but if you never submit anything for publishing, no one will the know. The chances of a friend of a friend of a friend being an editor who just happens to see some of your writing lying around your house and absolutely loving it, well… they’re not that great either.

Your goal is to increase both addends in the equation, but you have to start with the first one, the skill level. If you publish something before you reach an acceptable level, then the published piece will either be a lucky fluke (which won’t help you in the long run), or it’ll be a sub par piece even when you become a better writer later on, which won’t help you either.

I have a feeling, by the way, that there’s more to add to that equation, but that’ll have to wait for another post.