Aspiring authors deliberately gaining fame elsewhere first

[HareBrain]

A recent blog post by @DG Jones about the ease with which celebs seem to get novel deals, and the difficulty of getting published for us mere mortals, made me wonder if any authors had gained previous fame or notoriety as some kind of celebrity or authority principally with the aim of getting book deals off the back of it.

It seems unlikely, but does anyone know of one?

 

[thaddeus6th]

Can't say I've heard of it. I think people who become famous (whether for serious things or slightly more frivolous, such as Youtubers) then see a book as an opportunity to make some more money.

I could be wrong. I'm not Captain Marketing, I just want to write books, but I'd guess those who really want to be writers focus on that (and they may be good or bad at the marketing/self-promotion aspect).

 

[E.Maree]

You've gotta be pretty committed to succeed, so if you pick up a hobby and try to be famous *so you can do something else*, you're hurting your chances from the off. Your enthusiasm won't be as genuine and that'll hobble you.

Also, if I'm being brutally honest, most forms of fame out there will earn a lot more on its own than being an author will.

The closest thing to this I've seen is YouTube book bloggers getting book deals. But that's a hell of a lot of work, and you'd be kidding yourself if you think it's a shortcut.

 

[Stable]

I can think of one area where people do this: self help and get rich quick schemes. Get yourself famous and known so that everyone will buy your book. Then your audience will turn you into the millionaire you pretended you were already!

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I wonder about bloggers, perhaps. But it's a lot of work and you may as well just write the book.

 

[allmywires]

My only experience of this is fan fiction writers who gain a huge following writing in a fandom, then use that audience to push their original novels. Agreed that most famouses who 'write' books (e.g pay a ghostwriter) do it just to create another revenue stream. Greedy so and sos!!

 

[hopewrites]

It would make a cute plot for a Rom-Com ...

Kinda like Down With Love, but not...?

 

[Phyrebrat]

Famous 'writers' tend to be involved in various forms of memoir or bios, though, don't they, rather than sell fiction.

But there's no reason it can't be done. Most dancers, singers, actors and production staff have side jobs anyway and I've taught enough to know they can do both.

pH

 

[The Big Peat]

*ponders* Maybe I should apply for Big Brother?

I can't think of anyone who's done it. Quite happy to keep it that way. I suppose to a certain extent the blogging and tweeting is there to build as much awareness of me as someone who knows books as possible ahead of releasing something (maybe hopefully) but tbh, I mainly do it because I enjoy it.

 

[Cli-Fi]

I can think of one area where people do this: self help and get rich quick schemes. Get yourself famous and known so that everyone will buy your book. Then your audience will turn you into the millionaire you pretended you were already!

You don't actually have to be physically famous to do this. It just requires good SEO. Good Keywords and to sit atop the Google Search Page when people search. At least that's what people have told me. I don't know much about SEO. It's not in my technical wheelhouse, my site just gets about 150 hits a week. With 0 Marketing except Facebook.

That's where I've seen those crappy, "Do you want to do this________? Then read my book after you read this long passage about nothing!" Wait Don't Leave My Site, You Didn't Buy My Book Yet!!!!!

The doomsdayee videos are also something akin to selling a book or study on the things that whoever is doing the scary doomsday video put together. Usually it's after a hour or more long Flash based video that tells the viewer that all you have to do to avoid this is to buy my book and learn all the secrets. Usually these are just full of more conspiracy theories that no one in their right mind would pay for, but then again. These are people who sat through a whole hour long dribble about it! So why not, right?

Not the people I would like to associate with. I also wouldn't consider any of the people running these scams to be famous. Otherwise they wouldn't have to sell scams!

 

[E.Maree]

I know a little bit about SEO (though again, you wouldn't know it from my websites!). To really dominate the SEO rankings these days my understanding is that you need to spend a lot of money... buying high-ranking placements (celebrity "social media influencers", articles in big publications and websites that are really just reprinted press releases), buying ad placements, etc etc.

It's a 'spend money to make money' approach, and it doesn't scale well when you consider the not-great profit margin on books.

Paid advertising does work -- self-publishers are damn good at it -- but the sheer degree of time and money needed to dominate the SEO results and become a celebrity that way is a lot higher than your average paid advertising campaign.

 

[Cli-Fi]

Paid advertising does work -- self-publishers are damn good at it -- but the sheer degree of time and money needed to dominate the SEO results and become a celebrity that way is a lot higher than your average paid advertising campaign.

Or just acting like an idiot to get your 15 mins of fame and cash out with no ulterior motives like selling a book. I mean some of those people do end up selling books though if they can make a career out of those 15 mins, but then again. It's not usually a fictional book that they just thought of in their head. It's usually a memoir.

 

[millymollymo]

Readers are fairly savvy. Especially in the SFF genres. You can't fake imagination needed to build a world from scratch, let alone the skill to write. (I like to think)

 

[Serendipity]

I wonder about bloggers, perhaps. But it's a lot of work and you may as well just write the book.

If you are blogging for the sake of getting your fiction sold, then yes I agree with you - you might as well write the novel.
Some of use bloggers have ulterior motives... ahem... 'nough said.

 

[Serendipity]

Readers are fairly savvy. Especially in the SFF genres. You can't fake imagination needed to build a world from scratch, let alone the skill to write. (I like to think)

Totally agree on the imagination bit.

I would also like to add that building a world other than beyond the immediate extrapolation in time of Earth or a dystopia that reverts to historical backgrounds we've previously experienced, takes a heck of a lot of work.

I wrote a novel (which needs a complete rewrite) in which I started out with a particular 'world' only to realise that I needed an intermediate 'world' to bridge the gap between us and that particular 'world'. [OK, so I got a really warped mind! - but then I quite normal for a mathematician!?! - or so I'm told.] It's a case of filling in the details, making sure there's consistency and explaining it in simple to understand words or phrases (note to self - must stop inventing words for concepts that are not available in the english language - this really does my brain in - why are there so many holes in this language, which is one of the most comprehensive in the humaniverse.)

 

[AlexH]

I know a little bit about SEO (though again, you wouldn't know it from my websites!). To really dominate the SEO rankings these days my understanding is that you need to spend a lot of money... buying high-ranking placements (celebrity "social media influencers", articles in big publications and websites that are really just reprinted press releases), buying ad placements, etc etc.

It's a 'spend money to make money' approach, and it doesn't scale well when you consider the not-great profit margin on books.

Paid advertising does work -- self-publishers are damn good at it -- but the sheer degree of time and money needed to dominate the SEO results and become a celebrity that way is a lot higher than your average paid advertising campaign.

You can do it with great content, which is more of a time, rather than money, investment. A lot of bloggers that make money from blogging have got there by building up a loyal following due to the great advice/value/enjoyment they provide for their audience (e.g. extensive guides or interviews with experts). It's getting harder and harder in a lot of fields, as many big brands have caught onto this. Paid adverts (for the benefit of SEO) are actually against Google's guidelines, and can get a website penalised in the search results.

I work mostly on the technical side, and simple-sounding things can have a big benefit. Such as having an intuitive website navigation, or making sure a website loads quickly (e.g. by not having a load of embedded widgets or fancy plugins - I had one client that had some code in a separate file to fade out the rest of the webpage when the mouse cursor rolled over the menu, and that bit of code took longer to download than the rest of the page put together).