James is almost back from his publicity tour for The Maze Runner, which has me thinking about how he got where he is (and has been over the last few weeks).  The answer is pretty simple: he wrote a good book, and The Hunger Games created a bubble for dystopian YA that raised his good book to the top of Random House’s list.  The first half of that forumla was produced through earned skill and a boatload of hard work over the years; the second half was born of providence, good fortune, or, if you’re not cosmologically inclined, blind luck.

I often meet writers who are looking to be the next Stephanie Meyer.  They actually talk about how to do it, strategize battle plans and the like.  This is a complete waste of time, and trust me, if you’re serious about publishing you have plenty of other things that will more productively fill every single second of your waking life.  Why is it a waste of time, you ask?  Because becoming the bestselling author in the world is a butterfly affect thing.  It is the cumulative result of so many different variables, many of which we are all completely unaware of, that trying to manipulate factors to bring it about is just laughable. 

It’s the nature of all popular culture—and by the way, phenomena like Harry Potter and Twilight are essentially pop culture events.  The biggest bestsellers are always products of adoption by popular culture.  Take the entire body of any story form for mass consumption, whether it be novels or movies or whatever.  About eighty percent have no chance of becoming huge.  They are simply too low in quality, targeted to too small an audience, not distributed widely enough, or something similar.  Some will be every bit as rich and worthwhile as any other narrative put out that season, and they still won’t have a chance to really break out.  Earning bestsellerdom takes more than deserving it, sadly.  You need sufficient quality, a sufficiently large audience, sufficient production and distribution—and a good deal of providence.  And what we find is that between ten and twenty percent of truly professional level stuff fits the first three criteria.  About the top fifth of any genre published has a chance to break out and make it huge. 

Why do so few actually do it?  Largely, it’s a matter of chance, but in this case luck almost always exhibits itself as word of mouth.  Word of mouth can be generated by innumerable factors, some of them quite silly.  In James’s case, he happened to write a book that reminded people at Random House of The Hunger Games—and he wrote it years before The Hunger Games was even contracted.  His timing was, in most respects, plain luck.  He happened to come out with a good book at the perfect time.  That is, in almost every circumstance, the formula for break out success.

So stop planning on being that next person who shakes the world on its foundation and makes Earth settle at a slightly different slant afterward.  For most who deserve such, it doesn’t happen.  And you can’t make it happen.  What you, and I, and any one of us can do is strive to be in that top twenty percent.  We can strive to be in the top fifth in quality, and write things that people really do want to read,  lots of them, and work until people in the industry realize that as well.  At that point, we qualify for bestsellerdom.  Then we just wait and see if the Fates pick our names out of the hat (hopefully, not to cut our threads).  If not, well, I intend to toss my name into that hat again, and I’ll keep on doing it as often as I can for as long as I can manage.