How to be a successful author

Hello. Welcome to the guide to being a good, popular and successful author.

You may think that in order to achieve one of these, the others must be left by the wayside. This is incorrect. If one is popular, one is by definition good and successful. As such, the most important pursuit in writing is being popular. This guide will lay out steps to achieve popularity in authorship.

Firstly, don’t listen to critics. Everyone who critiques you is doing it in bad faith. If they weren’t, why would they be critiquing you? Though some may believe that critique is important to improving your work and making yourself well understood, this is wrong. Improving yourself and making yourself well understood necessarily means you’re changing, rather than being true to yourself. Changing yourself is bad, especially if it’s being done for other people. What right do they have to tell you how to be better? None.

This guide doesn’t count as criticism because it’s something all writers should already know but most are too stupid to know they know. If you didn’t already know this, you should stop writing now, as you don’t have it in you to be successful. Changing yourself to suit society is bad. As such, if you weren’t born an author, you will never be one. Treat this guide less so as a critique, moreso as a bible. To all you atheist types out there, pretend it’s instead akin to the writing of Nietzsche, or maybe Plato. This is a system of ethics one should already be implicitly following. Else, they’re a bad author and person.

One may ask, ‘if people shouldn’t change, why should you [I] have a right to inform people as to how they should act? Doesn’t this necessarily mean you’re changing people by giving them additional information?’ The answer to these questions, respectively, is ‘because of reasons I shall now elucidate’ and ‘yes’. One has a right to tell people information and have them change because of it, but only if one’s moral system is good. This definition of ‘good’ is objective and is defined as whatever I say is good. I know my moral system is good because everyone I listen to tells me it is.
In addition, I am only changing you slightly, as opposed to the ‘positive self-actualization’ these self-improvement shucksters fling your way. They want you to become better. This is stupid and evil. I am simply telling you to expose yourself only to my teachings. This is smart and good.

This all necessarily means that when one produces a piece of writing, one should not have beta readers read over it for corectsions. Insead, they shoud read over itto say how good itis.
I know I’m right because everyone I listen to tells me I’m right.
I’m such a clever writer, I utilize literary devices in a guidebook. In this case, I’ve repeatedly told you I listen to the right people. This leads directly into point number two…

Use literary devices. It doesn’t matter how you use them, it doesn’t matter why you use them, you just need to use them. All the popular books have literary devices. The ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ series has the Rich Billionaire who wants to Sex the Slightly Quirky and yet All-Too Relatable and Female Protagonist. The ‘The Hunger Games’ series stars All-Too Relatable and Strong Female Protagonist fighting against Corrupt System and Dystopian World. Also Love Triangle. The ‘Harry Potter’ series stars Cool Orphan who fights Evil Guy with Friends at School. And Wizard stuff. Perhaps you think these devices are too broad. Indeed, they may appear so on the surface, but when one utilizes them in conjunction with others, they become unique. The Dystopian World ruled by the Strong Female Protagonist needs to defeat the Corrupt System with Rich Billionaire Wizards. Boom, interesting concept.

Sure, one may have Female Protagonist, but why not throw one or two extremely broad identifiers onto her to make her more unique and interesting? Make her ‘Wholesome’, ‘Quirky’, ‘Intelligent’, ‘Caring’ or ‘Mysterious’. Never make her appear negative, though. People don’t like seeing people they relate to suffer hardships. I know this because I don’t like suffering hardships and I relate to myself. Also, if she’s female and suffers hardships, the author is sexist. More broadly, though, the author is characterist, in that they treat the characters in the novel different from real people. This is unjust discrimination. A character in a novel that the reader relates to should not be subject to any pain or suffering, and should instead be raised up by the story as perfect. Such works better the more bland they are, but there is a limit. You need the audience to be able to relate to the character in an easy way, such as if they’re the same race or sex. I can’t relate to males, and neither can most women. All the women I’ve listened to have said as such, and all the men I’ve listened to have repeatedly apologized for being such.

The one exception I can think of is if you’re writing for the masochist demographic. In that case, have as much hardship, work and character development hoisted upon your character as possible. Make characters who change over the course of the novel to become better people. Agh, even writing that this should only be the case in specific instances pains me immensely. Be very careful writing like this.

Point number three…

Oxford commas. Use them repeatedly, and liberally. Those who reject this shall get a swift punishment, torture session, and death. My collective concurs.

Point four…

Plots. Who needs a plot? People buy books to see people like themselves be super successful. Such is to show how someone could be if they weren’t born wrong. Plot necessarily means characters overcoming adversity. This is bad. A story should involve a character flying around a city, being loved by everyone and causing the evil people to explode by being in her presence. Plot should exist insofar as having consistent characters throughout the story allows for easier comprehension. Much of the rest of it doesn’t matter - besides making sure to utilize literary devices, of course. Take the example we had earlier.

Strong Female Protagonist flies through her Dystopian Society, purging the streets of those of impure heart. She flies down to Corrupt System. It blows up. She holds out a hand and incinerates all the Rich Billionaires with her Love Lasers. She then flies back home to her Dystopian Society and slowly drifts to sleep. Set up a sequel and you’re golden.

As you can see, it is extremely easy to write a novel, assuming you were born for it. When you’ve created something similar to what I’ve just laid out, contact me, and I’ll indict you into our Collective.

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