Luck is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity

But what happens if they never meet?

I have been asked, on rare occasions, to speak about writing and publishing in front of library groups or book clubs. It doesn’t happen often, which is sad because I enjoy speaking before groups, but when it does, I always let people know that publishing is largely about luck.

A lot of things are, if we’re all being honest.

But publishing feels like it’s one of those things that’s even more based on luck than anything else. You need to have a lot of dominoes fall into place to be successful at this game (depending on your definition of success, of course). And sometimes, several dominoes can fall, but not the remaining few, and success will be yanked from you through no fault of your own.

Even John Green said that publishing is about luck:

People like to say little platitudes about luck being the result of hard work. One of my aunts likes to spout, “The harder I worked, the luckier I got.” Which can be true…for people who have gotten some of that luck. But there are infinite hordes of folks out there pounding pavement, busting humps, and getting none of that luck. Doesn’t matter how hard they’re working.

That’s just life.

We can’t all be wildly successful.

When I talk to groups about traditional publishing, the analogy I like to use is this:

Traditional publishing is like having five targets roaming around a football field at random. You have to hit them with a single arrow.

If everything lines up perfectly—and you are accurate with your shot—you win. Some people will spend a lifetime waiting for the targets to line up, and they never will. Some people will have the targets line up several times, but their aim won’t be true. Some people will hit four of the five targets but never the fifth. And some people will never get to the field to even attempt that shot.

(I like weird metaphors. Can you tell?)

When I was a young ‘un, I was in the Minneapolis area for a considerable chunk of the ‘90s. This was a magical time when I think back on it. The Minneapolis music scene was red hot. Groups like Babes in Toyland, Soul Asylum, Son Volt, and Semisonic were breaking out of the many clubs and bars in the Mini-Apple and getting play on MTV. Those of us who were around and about during that period felt a little ownership over those groups.

But they weren’t the best or the most interesting groups in the Twin Cities at that time. They just got lucky. They had the right song at the right time, and the right person saw it and gave it a chance.

There were bands that had better songwriters. There were bands that had better guitarists. Some had better singers. But all their preparation never met opportunity. Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum got to be the new “It” boy for a while, dated Winona Ryder, and got songs on MTV. Those other bands and musicians—they’re largely forgotten to time. Maybe they still play here and there, but most people don’t remember them.

Hell, I don’t remember most of them.

Tina Schlieske had a band most Minnesotans will know of: Tina and the B-Side Movement. I first saw them at one of those horrible, all-day festivals¹ where a dozen bands perform on a single stage. The Gin Blossoms were the headliners that day. Tina and the B-Sides were on early in the day, maybe second or third on the slate.

They were outstanding. Their songs, harmonies, and musicianship stood out in my mind as being the best group on the stage that day, but they never got as big as Soul Asylum. Doesn’t matter that they had better songs. They never got the targets to line up like Soul Asylum did.

And this is no knock against Dave and Company—Grave Dancer’s Union was and still is one hell of a record. The first three tracks on GDU were all hits—Somebody to Shove, Black Gold, and their megahit, Runaway Train. Soul Asylum was worthy of their success and fame, but they weren’t the best band in the area. They had the right look, the right sound, and the right songs at the right time, and someone gave them a chance, and they took it.

Most bands, authors, directors, actors—most creative people in general—will never get that same chance.

We tend to think of popularity as equal to quality, but that is rarely the case. Popular things definitely CAN have quality, but quality does not necessarily guarantee popularity.

In fact, sometimes mediocre stuff can become enormously popular. Sometimes absolutely terrible, horrible, unwatchable things can become cult classics and garner audiences and fame in their own little way.²

No one quite understands why some bands or authors become wildly popular and others are left by the wayside³. It’s not talent. It’s not quality. Let’s get that argument out of the way right now. People like to think “the cream rises to the top,” and it does…sometimes. But not as often as you think it does.

Duncan Watts, a Columbia University researcher, did an experiment in 2006 to prove that quality and popularity are unrelated. He set up a site with downloadable music from obscure and unsigned acts—bands the general public has never heard. He used several groups: the control group had to rank songs without input from any of the others in their group, while several other groups were allowed to see how other members of the group were voting on the songs.

Watts learned two things:

1. The variation in popularity in the control group was much smaller than in the other groups. In the groups where others could see how others were voting, people voted for the bands who already had votes, suggesting popularity breeds popularity.

2. The songs that became popular in the various groups were random. No single song dominated all the groups. One song ranked in the control group at #26. In the other groups, it ranged from #1 to #40. Watts found the objectively “bad” songs never finished at the top, and the objectively “good” songs never finished at the bottom, but a song finishing in the top five in popularity in one group only had a 50% chance of finishing in the top five in any other group.

What this means is that people tend to jump on bandwagons. They flock to what’s hot right now or listen to their friends, or they’re influenced by the masses instead of thinking for themselves.

It has nothing to do with the quality of the product.

I bring this up because I know authors who are struggling out there. There are just too many books and not enough readers, and most of us will never, ever sell enough books to be considered “successful” as writers. But a lot of authors are looking at what’s popular and realizing it’s not well-written. It’s popular but lacks quality. And then they wonder what they’re doing wrong or why they can’t achieve success.

This is a problem because other studies have found that success breeds success. If someone is successful with one book, record, or film, their chances of being successful with another multiply. Success bequeaths optimism, hope, and self-belief. It raises the successful person’s expectations and status.

The only question is, how do we get the success in the first place?

I don’t view myself as successful because I probably have an unrealistic metric of success. When I compare what I’ve managed to accomplish to other people of similar struggling, I’m doing pretty well. I’ve managed to sell more than 70,000 ebooks of my Survivor Journals trilogy (probably closer to 80K now), and that’s pretty amazing. My Abe & Duff novels got optioned for TV (but never made it past pitch meetings). I’m doing amazingly well for a nobody from nowhere with nothing behind him. I don’t market well, I don’t network well, and everything I’ve gotten in terms of what can be measured as “success” in this game is solely because of luck.

When I see other authors on Threads or Instagram wondering what they have to do to become the new TikTok book of the moment or get some sort of notoriety amongst readers, I don’t have an answer for them. It all boils down to luck in the end. You can try your hardest, and that’s a good place to start, but it’s all luck.

You can lead horses to water but can’t make them drink. You can do all the marketing in the world, but it doesn’t necessarily equate to sales. You can post all the videos, write all the blogs, and buy ads on Facebook and Instagram, but it doesn’t mean it will lead to success.

Success is largely ephemeral and difficult to contain. Even the most successful people have benefitted from a good dose of luck.

Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series started when he won a short story contest in Cowboys and Indians magazine. This short story led to an agent contacting him (crazy, right?), and then that eventually led to his book deal. Now, a little more than twenty years later, he’s won all the accolades and awards. He’ll be an honored guest at Bouchercon in New Orleans later this year. Longmire is one of the most-streamed shows in Netflix history.

But there is a world where the judge who selected his short story as the winner for that contest doesn’t pick his story. There is a world where someone else wins that year, and maybe Craig doesn’t break into publishing the way he did, or even at all. As dark as it is to think about, there is potentially a parallel world where that first Walt Longmire novel is still sitting in the bottom of a desk drawer, getting tinkered with occasionally by a Wyoming rancher with dreams of publishing, instead of being 20+ NY Times Bestsellers.

Even the great and powerful Taylor Swift has benefitted from luck. Regardless of her talent and politics, there’s another version of this world where she’s still playing county fairs off the back of a pickup instead of selling out stadiums because the breaks didn’t go the right way for her.

I mean, check out Steve Poltz.

Who?

He wrote a bunch of songs with Jewel, including You Were Meant for Me, which was a #2 hit on Billboard. (He’s the dude in the video.) He also toured with her as one of her musicians for a few years. Steve is a ridiculously talented singer and songwriter, and he’s had a great career…but it never got to Jewel’s level of success. And that’s through no fault of Poltz’s.

It’s just luck.

I’m about to celebrate my 20th anniversary in trying to do this publishing stuff for real. I don’t think I published my first book until 2007, but I wrote the first draft in the summer of 2005. It was horrible. It is still horrible. And I would change so much about it now that it would be an entirely different book.

The longer I’ve been in this game, the more I don’t understand it. I’ve seen really great books get ignored and truly terrible books sell a bajillion copies.

Alex Bledsoe’s Tufa novels are brilliant. They’re smart and clever in a way that most traditional publishing isn’t. There’s a whole world available in those six books, and I wish there were more of them. There’s nothing else out there like them. They should have taken off and soared. They should already be a TV show. They should be being flogged on TikTok as much, if not more, than whatever the hot romance novel is this week, but they’re not.

They should be huge.

Meanwhile, Snooki from The Jersey Shore, put her name on two ghost-written, gimmicky romance novels and both hit the NY Times Bestseller list.

I just finished reading Lawrence Allen’s second book in his Jimmy Cooper series, Big F@!king Deal. This is a delightful series, and it would play brilliantly on television. The premise is pristine: a former alcoholic, druggie, and child TV star is now dried-out, sober, and working as a private eye in Los Angeles. This is a book that should be more popular, and I don’t know why it isn’t.

I don’t know how anything works. And anyone who thinks they do is lying or selling something.

Good lord—most of them are selling something. Every time I see someone on Instagram touting the “secrets to best-selling books,” I want to fling my phone into the nearest swamp. If $37 could buy me a guaranteed best-seller in ten easy marketing steps, I’d do it.

Hell, EVERYONE would do it.

And that’s just why it won’t work. Most people are already doing those marketing steps, and they’re not working. There are only so many books that can be successful because readership and money are finite resources.

Like John Green said: It’s mostly luck.

And that makes it harder to fathom in many ways. Some people will get lucky, but most won’t. Some will catch the breaks, but most won’t. Some will query the right agent at the right time, but most won’t. Some will end up being in demand on the bookstore shelves, but most of us will never see our books on those shelves.

And I don’t have an answer for any of it.

It’s just luck.

1. My only real recollection of that festival, other than Tina and the B-Sides, was getting sunburned to high holy hell. My fair, pasty, Irish ass was not meant to endure the sun. It was the single worst burn I ever got.

2. Please see Plan Nine From Outer Space, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and the trainwreck that is My Immortal.

3. Not even people in the publishing industry. If they did, every book they published would be a bestseller. Instead, they flail blindly and hope to strike gold. When they do strike gold, they mine it for all it’s worth, and other publishers rush to copy.