Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
There is no one key factor.
You cannot be a bestseller without a certain amount of talent.
You cannot be a bestseller without the support of your publisher, and their marketing team.
You cannot be a bestseller without luck - writing the right thing at the right time.
None of these by itself is enough. It takes all three, and only one is under the control of the author. And one isn't under anybody's control.
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+1
There is a talent to being a good story teller, to reeling in the reader in from the start and make the reader keep reading. However, I have read more than one book that was really, really good, yet for some reason never really hit it big. An author that I point to in this category was Brian Daley ( The Coramonde series among others). A really talented author, with original ideas (loved his Tapestry of Magic stories), yet he never really made it as an author. My guess is that he simply came in when there when there was a flood of new SF&F books and authors and got missed by a lot of people.
With that said, there are a lot of b-list authors out there who are simply missing that special something, yet can make a living writing. I read their books and like them, but it wasn't something that was going to keep me up all night reading.
There are also a very few authors who simply get luck and write a mediocre books that somehow catches the public's fancy. They have that one best seller, and then never have another big seller even though they write more books. But this is a lot rarer than some of the b-list authors think.