What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Overnight Success
A lot of people want to see immediate results. But Gabrielle Zevin spent seventeen years proving patience still beats hype.
I hadn’t heard of Gabrielle Zevin until Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow started showing up everywhere. I saw people reading it on trains, posting photos beside their coffee cups, and saying it changed the way they saw love.
She had written other books before. But those were ones that didn’t seem to reach this kind of attention. Then Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow took off and suddenly she was on every bestseller list. Awards, interviews, a movie deal. And almost everywhere I looked, people said Gabrielle’s success came out of nowhere, like she had been discovered overnight.
Last night, I thought about how success often looks from the outside. How it always seems sudden until you see the years behind it. So, I closed my laptop and looked out the window. Somewhere, a writer was celebrating the best week of their life. Somewhere else, another was wondering if it would ever be their turn.
Gabrielle Zevin didn’t come out of nowhere.
She published her first book in 2005, a young adult novel called Elsewhere. It sold enough to keep her writing. A few years later came The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, which found readers who loved books about books. Then she kept going. More stories, more years, more trying. Seventeen years of work before Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow changed everything.
That’s what people miss when they call someone an overnight success. They see the headlines, not the long stretch of days when nothing happens. They see the moment it all clicks, not the drafts that never felt good enough to publish.
Here’s something a bestselling author once told me…
Every writer has a drawer full of failures. Pages that didn’t work, stories that stopped halfway, ideas that sounded better in their heads. But they make progress by writing anyway and resisting the urge to quit when no one’s reading.
That’s the part most authors don’t talk about in press interviews.
Success looks sudden when you only catch the ending. Up close, it’s just years of showing up when no one’s clapping.
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When I was a kid, I used to staple printer paper into little books and hand them to my grandfather. He’d sit in his chair and read every one from start to finish, even when the words barely made sense. Said one day I’d be a bestselling author. I believed him because he said it like a fact, not a dream.
My grandfather passed away a few years ago. At his house, I found one of those books tucked inside his desk drawer. My name written on the cover in pencil. The corners worn.
I’m telling you this story because I opened Substack a few days ago and saw the Bestseller badge beside my name. Hundreds of people paying to read my work. And I sat there for a minute, thinking about every draft I’d started and deleted. Every time I told myself maybe it wasn’t meant to happen. And yet, there I was, a bestselling writer.
People like to call Gabrielle Zevin an overnight success. But there were seventeen years between her first novel and the one that changed everything. So, most people only saw the moment she arrived, not the years she spent getting ready for it.
That’s how it always looks from the outside.
If my grandfather was still alive, I’d hand him my laptop. And he’d probably scroll for a minute, trying to make sense of what Substack even is, before spotting the Bestseller badge beside my name. I can almost hear his laugh. He’d be proud, surprised, and probably a little amused that it finally happened.
My grandfather believed I’d be a bestseller long before I did. So, every page I write now feels like I’m trying to make him proud. And, if he could see me now, sitting here, still chasing the same dream, I think he’d smile and say the words I’ve been waiting to hear for decades.
“You finally did it.”
Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued: it is best thought of as a byproduct of pursuing meaningful goals aligned with your talents and values. For the writer, it is just one aspect of a long journey of connecting with the reader.
This is why it irritates me when I see so many hopping from one social media platform to another hawking $10k in X months. There's nothing wrong with it, but it always obfuscates the years of struggle and exploration that are literally required to make this illusion seem possible. There is no such thing as an overnight success. Period.