I'm writing my first book, what are the odds of it being successful?

My point with Lolita wasn't that it didn't have a story at all, but that it was a story that, to the average person, would not be particularly enjoyable. It is redeemed by the quality of Nabokov's writing, not the story. Same with American Psycho; there technically is a story, but it's so loosely told, so meandering and at times totally non-existant (whole chapters devoted to music reviews, etc) that the story is certainly not what makes it a compelling novel. It's the strength of Ellis' characterisation and the brilliance of his satire and style.

To me, and, I'm sure to many others, the success of a novel relies much more on the style of the author than it does on the story. Anyone can come up with a story, its effortless. Developing a writing style that makes readers want to read your stories is much more difficult, and, I think, should be a writer's first priority.

 

I think that success is easy to achieve but it comes at a price. To write a mega-selling book that will make you millions of dollars then you're going to have to write for the masses. Now if you are part of the masses that should be no problem because you can write what you want and the masses will agree. If you look at the top grossing movies nearly all of them are fantasy (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Jack Sparrow ;D)and if you look at some of the mega millions books they are also fantasy (Harry Potter, Twilight, Da Vinci Code). The story is whats important, people nowadays dont care about beautiful writing they simply want action, a great and simple story and tricks and riddles that are too hard to figure out but not hard enough to comprehend. It's sad but true, Tolken got practically no attention for his books and yet the movie adaptions are some of the highest grossing movies of all time, why? Because although his writing was beautiful and descriptive it was also boring to most and unreadable. The average IQ of an american is 100 and so you can safely conclude that half of your readers are dumber than that. You can write a bunch of books that you want to write and maybe the writing community will respect you but you wont ever be truly successful, your book will never become a movie like those god awful books Percy Jackson and Eragon(also fantasy). Unless you dumb yourself down and please the people and give them what they want (Beautiful heros, cool abilites, vampire love, obvious and useless riddles, dragons, magical swords, etc...) if your first book does not include some of these things, or hell all of them, then no...your first book wont be a success.

 

Well to be fair, Percy Jackson and Eragon are YA novels. How many recent YA novels can hold their own (no matter their authors' skill) against literary heavy weights?

 

You're right that is very true and yet that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that both of those stories are clearly rip offs of the stories before them, eragon being star wars with dragons and percy jackson has so many harry potter references its almost disgusting. Not to say the writing wasnt good, the point is that often to be successful in these times sadly you have to write your stories to follow the tried and true methods of storytelling, as seen with these two books. I've heard interviews from both of these writers as they explained their so called stories and let me tell you it was embarrassing to hear them try and explain their books without making them sound like one huge cliché.

 

It seems now and days the best way to get a book published is to become a book agent. It seems every book agent i've encountered also writes books and gets them published. So what if they're direct knock-offs of Harry Potter or you know what is going to happen before you finish the first chapter? Me, personally, i've given up writing for money. I rather die broke and be celebrated after my death like a true artist.