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This short video is part of a new series of clips from longer interviews, addressing various aspects of the writing craft and the business of writing. I hope you find the new series useful!

Joanna: What's weird about the publishing industry is there's this assumption that the first book will make you a million dollars and that for some reason, that first book is the best book. But, you know, as a martial artist, you don't start out in day one and win an award, you know, win the black belt, and same with writing.

That body of work that you've built up in both disciplines is what's important.

Alan: Yeah. Like the old adage, you know, “most overnight successes are built on the back of 10 years of hard work,”
As you mentioned at the start, I've got six published novels now. Getting a novel published, selling a novel to a publisher is a fantastic achievement and it's something to be very proud of. But it in itself isn't really a mark of success, because as a writer, success is being widely read, you know, that's the bottom line really, what we're all after.
The awards are fantastic. Being published is fantastic. But what you really want is to be widely read, because that's actually the success that loads of people are reading the stories that you've got to tell.
And a lot of the time, we're all working for that breakout book, that might subsequently make people go, “Ah, I've never heard of this guy before,” and the book goes sort of ballistic, and then when they look, you've got five, six, seven novels previously published.
Dan Brown was the same. Everybody knew him from the “Da Vinci Code,” but “Angels and Demons”or whatever, they were all out. They've been out. He just wasn't huge. He was successful. He got novels published. He was in bookstores but, yeah, he didn't have that breakout novel yet.

So success is a nebulous thing. And I did a series on my blog a while ago where... It was called "The Ongoing Angst of Successful Writers." And I talked to people who were just starting out and people like Margo Lanagan, who's like won World Fantasy Award and published numerous, you know, 20-year career and stuff like that. And the single thing that kept coming up was no matter where someone was in their career, they were always like, "Oh yeah, it's fantastic that I've done this, but I haven't yet done this, and I haven't yet done this." And so you're always chasing after something else.

Joanna: Moving the gold posts.

Alan: Yeah. And it really comes down to that being markers of success in terms of being widely read and widely known. I don't want to be known personally, but I want my work to be much more widely known than it is. So that's what you're as, you know, it's what I'm always after. There's always more readers is what it comes down to it.

You can always find the show notes and links at: [ Ссылка ]

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