It’s a long road to become even a moderately successful writer. There are many hurdles and hoops to jump through. So, given a group of people, what are the chances that they will make it.
Worked Example
Here’s some typical steps on the authorial journey. At each stage, I’ve imagined only half make it through to the next step.
50% of people love books
Of those, 50% want to write a book
Of those, 50% create the outline of their first book
Of those, 50% start writing the first chapter
Of those, 50% finish the first draft
Of those, 50% finish the second draft
Of those, 50% finish the edits
Of those, 50% send it to beta readers
Of those, 50% reedit and continue, after receiving beta reader feedback
Of those, 50% improve their writing based on the beta reader feedback
Of those, 50% finish the final draft
Of those, 50% start their second novel while the first is being submitted to agents, publishers and/or competitions.
Of those, 50% finish the first draft of their second novel
Of those, 50% continue with their second novel, even though their first novel has received multiple rejections
Of those, 50% complete the final draft of their second novel
Of those, 50% submit their book to agents
Of those, 50% get agents
Of those agents, 50% successfully pitch to publishers
Of those books, 50% get published
Of those books, 50% are moderately successful
Of those authors, 50% write a third book
Of those books, 50% are moderately successful
Of those authors, 50% continue to write further moderately successful books
Taking the population of Australia which is 26,696,082 – in any given year the number of Australian’s who start writing and will ultimately go on to have a moderately successful career will be
So 2 or 3 people every year in all of Australia. That’s not so many.
Equation
(If you are like me then) it’s fun to spin this out into an equation. Considering the statements and changing from a static percentage to probabilites then it could become
where:
is the number of people who will have a career as a successful writer in a given year
is the initial population of potential writers
is the combined probability of being interesting in becoming a writer – statements 
and 
is the combined probability of writing a first book – statements 
is the combined probability of going on to write a second book – statements 
is the combined probability of being picked up by a literary agent- statements 
and 
is the combined probability of being traditionally published- statements 
is the combined probability of establishing a long term writing career – statements 
Tweaks And Variations
Now we’ve got our exciting equation we can play about with the figures and assumptions
No Agent
Having an agent isn’t mandatory so we could take out statements and and our calculation becomes
So around 6 Australians a year get to be full time authors. A bit better.
Self Publishing
Perhaps we are self publishing as well, so we can also lose 
and 
. No-one needs to pitch anything to anyone – we just do it ourselves. Let’s further imagine that the odds are the same whether we traditionally publish or self publish. Our calculation is
Now its between 24 and 25 people a year which is nicer as that would fill a restaurant table with our new Aussie authors.
Harder Than You Thought
But perhaps it’s all harder than we though. Maybe we do need an agent and do need to be traditionally published but the chances are low of getting either. Let’s drop , , and to a 20% chance of success. It’s hard out there – and our calculation becomes
So there will be a successful Australian author once every 24 years – once in a generation.
What Are The Chances Really
Our calculations reveal that the chances of embarking on a successful authorial career lie somewhere between being invited to to the Governor General’s birthday tea and being crowned the King of Australia.
Fortunately being an aspiring author I can ignore all this. I have the gift of delusional thinking and truly believe these numbers (or any other negative sounding numbers) don’t apply. I’ll just carry on writing with the unproven, uncalculable faith that it will all work out.
I reckon it will.
