UnderdogMindset

Free serial book to #1 on NY Times best-seller list

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Andy Weir
JD Lasica / CC BY 2.0
Posted: Jan 23, 2023 Updated: Aug 29, 2023
Book Persistence

Only a few authors' novels reach the number one spot on The New York Times Best Seller list. However, Andy Weir's debut novel, The Martian, achieved just that and became a box office hit. Andy is different from your typical author, though, starting as a computer programmer while writing on the side.

Andy failed initially, trying to write and publish a book in the late 1980s with little success. However, he continued to write for fun, posted short stories online, and even created a mailing list. Finally, at 37 years old in 2009, Weir started writing The Martian and published it as a free serial on his website. He then released it as an ebook after readers requested a non-website version. It shortly became Amazon's number one science-fiction ebook. A bit later, an agent helped him publish the book and sell the movie rights to Fox.

The book was a huge success, eventually reaching the top spot on the New York Times best-seller list and making over 630 million dollars at the box office. Andy has continued writing since then, releasing the books Artemis and Project Hail Mary.

Quotes

It was the standard struggling author’s story, couldn’t get any interest—publishers weren’t interested, no agent wanted to represent me, it just wasn’t meant to be.

Andy Weir

It’s like, hey, out of nowhere, all of your dreams are going to come true. It was so unbelievable that I literally didn’t believe it. I hadn’t actually met any of these people, it was all just e-mails and phone calls, and in the back of my mind I kept thinking, ‘This might just be a scam.’”

Andy Weir
References

  • Andy Weir and the Digital Revolution in Publishing

    There was something remarkable and unprecedented about Andy’s success: Through a series of metamorphoses, a text that started life as a blog on someone’s personal website ended up as an international bestseller and a blockbuster film and, with it, a life and a career were transformed. A generation earlier, none of this would have been possible and a talent like Andy’s might well have gone undiscovered.

  • The Martian author Andy Weir’s path to success began at Sandia

    Weir always wanted to be a writer and even spent three years working on a novel that was never published, time he financed by selling his America Online stock options after being laid off from that company.

  • 'The Martian' author Andy Weir: Private space travel is 'critical'

    The Martian is the sort of success story that will inspire countless authors. Andy Weir initially started writing the story of Mark Watney, a NASA astronaut who gets stranded on Mars, as a free serial on his website. Eventually, fans pushed for him to place it on Amazon's Kindle store, where he offered it for a paltry 99 cents. Soon after that, he had liftoff. It ended up being one of Amazon's best-selling sci-fi books, which led to a major book deal (the print version remains at the top of The New York Times' best-selling paperbacks).

  • The surprising story of how Andy Weir's self-published book 'The Martian' topped best seller lists and got a movie deal

    Andy Weir, author of the wildly popular sci-fi novel "The Martian," is living the publishing dream. It didn't start out that way though. "The Martian" began as a series of self-published chapters on Weir's personal blog.