In his seminal book Adventures in the Screen Trade, Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman famously came up with the phrase ‘nobody knows anything’. His contention was that no one could predict which films would become blockbusters and which ones would flop hideously and expensively, no matter how experienced they were in the industry.
I guess the same is true in most professions and most walks of life, but I know for sure it is true in book publishing. For more than 40 years I have been taking stories to publishers and have been constantly surprised by the ones they would turn down and the ones that they would get into a bidding frenzy over in their desperation to buy. Once the books are published I am still repeatedly shocked by which ones the reading public take to their hearts and recommend to their friends and which ones sink without trace from the day of publication.
The only thing I know is that if you want to make a living from writing you have to keep producing work on a daily basis and you have to keep trying new things. If one project in 10 does all right and one in a hundred becomes a monster hit you may be okay, but you will never be able to predict which ones they are going to be.
The joy of self-publishing and the developments which Amazon and other technical pioneers have made possible mean that it is now easier to get a hundred projects up and running, no longer being dependent on the whims of publishers to even get into print, but still you can’t predict which of the millions of books being produced is going to turn out to be Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest selling book of all time. Nobody knew that was going to happen, any more than they realised that Ian Fleming and J.K. Rowling had created cultural icons that would become known throughout the world, growing into billion dollar businesses. I doubt if either Shakespeare or Dickens would ever have believed you if you’d told them how widely their writings would still be being read and performed centuries after the work of their contemporaries was largely forgotten.
Perhaps that uncertainty is one of the reasons that make writing and publishing such interesting professions.