How to Overcome The Odds in your Writing Career

I am a writer. I write novels. I write short stories. I write blog posts and reviews. I write twitter posts and comment on far more YouTube videos than is reasonable. I have a newsletter than I put time into every month and even try to give some advice on writing from time to time. And yet I only have a vague idea of what will succeed or fail. I will write something that I think is excellent, and no one pays any attention, meanwhile something else will get far more interest. The same is true of submitting stories.

There is a lot of luck in getting someone to read something and just as much in selling a story. You have to not only get the right person to see it, but catch them at the right time. And even if you get someone to read it, are they the type of person who is going to share it with someone else? There are just a ton of factors you have no control over, and even the ones you do have some control over, like the keywords you use, are still a bit random. Even if you pick great keywords even the people who know the algorithm well enough to gain from that still have to deal with the times the algorithm changes, competition and many other factors. Luck exists and you either you deal with that or you pretend it doesn’t and still deal with it so this article isn’t about how to write a great story or find the perfect subject to write about. It’s about the near misses and frustrations of random chance.

Step 1: Tweak the odds

Just because luck is involved in something doesn’t mean that skill isn’t involved. It also doesn’t mean you can’t focus on things that improve those odds because while the winner of any one hand of poker is random most of the time the best player is the one who wins the night. As a writer, I strongly believe that someone who writes well is more likely to succeed than someone who writes poorly. But there are other things. You can improve the titles, covers, summaries etc to make people more likely to pick up your stuff. For example, we all know that top ten lists are popular but many of us don’t I find myself not wanting to use it because it’s so often used for clickbait. But the thing about clickbait is that it works, that’s what makes it bait.

Step 2: Play the odds

Ask anyone who reviews books, literary agents and people accepting submissions and you’ll hear stories of people sending them things absurdly out of context. People send self-help books to people who publish romance novels or send novels to magazine publishers.

But just sending it to the right type of publisher doesn’t mean it’s the most appropriate choice. Just because you send it to someone who publishes mysteries doesn’t mean that they don’t have preferred types of mystery. Do your research and put your effort into the best choices.

This is just as true with things you get paid for. Guest blogging is a worthwhile way to get attention, but if you’re going to put in the effort to find people who will give you access to their audience, try to find one with fans who are likely to be receptive.

Step 3: Buy more Lottery Tickets

The odds of winning the lottery are terrible, everyone knows that, but if you buy a thousand lottery tickets your odds of winning are a thousand times better than if you buy one. With writing the lottery tickets are the stories and blog posts you write and the times you submit them. So if you want to improve your odds then when you finish one story, novel, blog post or anything else start working on the next one while continuing to promote the first one in whatever way that means. It will get frustrating and at some point you’ll want to stop. That’s when you can improve your odds even more by not stopping, because that is when most people stop.

There is and will always be some luck to writing. What makes someone scrawling notes onto a napkin into a famous author or propel a schoolteacher to the top of the horror genre is more than just than just skill. It is skill, timing, persistence and luck. The difference between the people who get lucky and the people who don’t is whether they stopped trying before they got lucky or not because whether or not you believe it your moment will come if you try long enough.