Building a readership

Part 1: Zero to 1 Martian

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Let me tell you a story.

Andy Weir uploads a book to Amazon about a snarky astronaut on Mars and three minutes later, he’s a bestselling author and Matt Damon is playing his main character in the movie adaption.

Well, not quite.

Here’s what really happened.

Andy Weir started posting free chapters of The Martian on his blog in 2009 every 6-8 weeks. When the book was done, his readers complained that it was kind of hard to read the whole thing on a computer, so he turned it into a PDF.

That wasn’t so good either, so he turned it into an ebook file and uploaded it on his site.

That still left something to be desired, so he uploaded the ebook to Amazon, intending to make it free, but Amazon required a minimum price of 99 cents, so that’s what he picked. The book took off and soon, he had an audiobook deal, a traditional publishing deal, and had sold the movie rights.

Closer, but still not the whole story. We have to go back even further.

Andy Weir started posting free chapters of The Martian on his blog in 2009 every 6-8 weeks. At that time, he had 3,000 regular readers going to his website because he had been posting short stories on there for 10 years.

He challenged his readers to find any scientific inaccuracies and they obliged. When he needed to correct the science in prior chapters, he would send out release notes on what had been revised.¹ He eventually uploaded the ebook to Amazon so his existing readers could download an easy-to-read copy and, buoyed by his fanbase, the book rose to the top of the charts on Amazon, selling 35,000 copies in three months.

What, if anything, can authors and creators learn from Andy Weir’s example?

The overnight success

Version 1 of Weir’s origin story is how a lot of people imagine success in the literary field happens. Publish a novel, lightning strikes, and suddenly you’re a sensation.

Do these exist? Depends on your definition of “overnight.” Even a traditionally published author with a breakout hit spent years honing their craft, followed by years pitching agents, working with editors, and waiting for the book to be released.

Should someone looking to build a creative career plan on becoming an overnight success? Only if you want to guarantee that you’ll only ever release one book.

Unfortunately, most people who know about The Martian (the book) think that the first story is what happened, which feeds into the overnight success myth, which further discourages people from continuing to write after their first book does not have the meteoric trajectory they were expecting.

Brick-by-brick

To be honest, until I started doing research for this post, I thought the second tale was the origin story.

It made sense that you could build a following from nothing by releasing your story over time, gathering readers along the way. It’s one of the reasons I’m serializing my fiction on Substack.

Another analogy would be to write books over a period of years, building a backlist and drawing in new readers with each launch.²

But there remains the issue of actually getting your work in front of readers. Gone are the days where any ebook uploaded to Amazon with a crummy cover would instantly move hundreds of copies. There are now hundreds of thousands of books being released each year, requiring that authors learn a bevy of advertising platforms, become experts in newsletter marketing, and outcompete other sources of entertainment for their readers’ attention.

1,000 True Fans

At the risk of oversimplifying things, I think the third version of Weir’s story lines up quite nicely with Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans theory. Weir had been writing on his website for years, building up his 3,000 true fans. He developed a strong relationship with that audience, and tailored his writing to make them a part of the process.

It was wanting to provide value to his fans that prompted Weir to even upload The Martian to Amazon in the first place. The support of those fans propelled the book up the charts, giving it increased visibility in a crowded marketplace. Those fans also no doubt told their friends about this great sci-fi book that they had been reading for years that was now available for 99 cents on the largest ebook retailer in the world.

Finding your readers

While important, the above discussion is still gloss on top of the fundamental question for a creator: how are you going to get people to read your story? Even 1999 Andy Weir had to start at zero.

Alongside writing my urban fantasy series, I’ve spent the last several years researching author success stories, listening to indie author and marketing podcasts, and experimenting with my own book launches on various platforms, all in an effort to grow my readership.

This is the first in a series of posts on growing a readership in today’s publishing environment, exploring the different avenues today’s authors and creators are using to find readers and fans. I’ll be talking advertising, algorithms, newsletters, and more.

But first, some homework for you! Have you ever found yourself ahead of the curve on a trend or a soon-to-be popular writer or creator? Were you one of the first 100 people to buy a book about a teenage wizard back in the late 90’s? If so, share how you found the “next big thing” before it became big by hitting the comment button below!

1. How Andy Weir Paid the Bills While He Wrote the Books.

2. This strategy has been adopted to the extreme in some instances. Authors release a book a month or even quicker, hoping to rely on Amazon’s visibility boost to newly released books to reach more readers. But oftentimes, this leads to burnout or trend-chasing.