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There's No Such Thing as Overnight Success

There's No Such Thing as Overnight Success

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 The bestselling book that came out of left fieldWhere the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens 🌿This book is a prime example of a massive bestseller that came completely out of left field ⚾.* The “Left Field” Aspect: Delia Owens was not a known fiction writer. She was an elderly debut novelist, previously best known as a wildlife scientist and co-author of non-fiction books about her conservation work in Africa. She had no existing platform in the literary world, which is highly unusual for a major commercial hit.* The Massive Success: The novel became a massive, sustained juggernaut seller upon its release in 2018. It topped the New York Times fiction list for multiple non-consecutive weeks, sold over 12 million copies globally, and became one of the best-selling adult books of all time.* The Fuel: Its success was driven almost entirely by word-of-mouth 🗣️ and, crucially, a highly influential selection by Reese Witherspoon for her book club, which launched it into the stratosphere of mainstream consciousness. It proves that a great story, even from an unknown, can still become a global phenomenon.The initial reaction to massive, seemingly instant success is often one of dismissal and condescension—we can call this the “Instant Bestseller Syndrome.” This is the reflexive assumption that if a book or a writer is suddenly and massively popular, they can’t possibly be genuinely good or built to last. We assume they must be a fad, destined to flame out. We’re seeing this right now. BookTok sensations get sneered at. Self-published authors who crack the bestseller list are dismissed as “not real writers.” Debut novelists with six-figure deals face immediate skepticism: “They got lucky. They knew someone on the inside. It can’t be that good.”However, anyone who has studied true, lasting achievement in any field knows to look past the hype and ask the real question: What groundwork was laid? How did this success really happen? What don’t we see?The truth is, for nearly every writer who seems to appear out of nowhere, there is no such thing as an “overnight success.” What the public sees as a sudden, spontaneous appearance is almost always the result of years—sometimes decades—of long, hard, unglamorous work. This is the writer’s grind: grueling labor that often breaks you down before it builds you up. Consider J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series. The world saw a bidding war for a phenomenon, but before that, there were years of private, often financially strained dedication, writing chapters in Edinburgh cafes while living on welfare as a single mother. She was rejected by twelve publishers. Twelve. Similarly, before her Nobel Prize, Toni Morrison wrote her first novel by waking at 4 a.m. to work while juggling a full-time job at Random House and raising two children alone. Her success was not a sudden gift, but the inevitable consequence of a brutal, years-long discipline. Their “overnight fame” was merely the moment the accumulated strength of their craft finally achieved escape velocity.Even authors who appear to “burst onto the scene” with their first book are no exception. Their fame is instantaneous, but their effort is not. When Zadie Smith’s White Teeth earned a huge advance in 1997, she was still a university student—but she had spent years building her skills through rigorous literary study and high-quality short fiction, meaning her “breakout” was a culmination, not a beginning. Similarly, Andy Weir’s The Martian took off like a rocket from a self-published blog to a major movie deal, but only after he had spent 20 years failing as a writer and meticulously “user-testing” the book’s complex technical details on his own website, giving it away for free until readers demanded he charge for it.Look at more recent examples. Colleen Hoover didn’t become a publishing juggernaut overnight—she self-published her first novel in 2012 and spent nearly a decade building a loyal readership book by book before BookTok exploded her career in 2020. That’s eight years of steady work before the “sudden” success. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo became a runaway hit in 2017, but Reid had already published four novels that received modest attention. Her overnight success took five books and nearly a decade.Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing seemed to appear from nowhere to dominate the fantasy romance market in 2023, but Yarros had been publishing romance novels since 2014—nine years and over twenty books before her “breakout.” Alex Aster’s Lightlark faced brutal online criticism when it became a bestseller in 2022, with critics claiming her BookTok following and movie deal proved she was undeserving. What they missed: Aster had written nine unpublished novels before Lightlark. Nine full manuscripts that never saw the light of day.Even in one of the most dramatic recent examples, Lloyd Devereux Richards’ debut ...
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