The Martian - Self-Publishing to Major Movie

After watching The Martian I was so glad to see that such a smart movie could get made.  I was particularly happy when I learned that it was based on a book that was originally self-published, though I shouldn't be surprised.  Just as it's hard to get a smart film past studio executives, it's also often hard to get a smart book past the publishers.  While people assume books are the smart form of storytelling, this notion is often mocked by executives at publishing companies and literary agents.

Here's how it seemed to have happened.  Andy Weir was a computer programmer who enjoyed writing on the side.  He began uploading a story about a man stranded on Mars to his blog in 2009.  This slowly got the attention of more and more people who asked him to publish it on Kindle.  Weir had no goals to profiting on this story, so he wanted to put it onto Kindle for free, but Amazon doesn't allow that, so he made it available for 99 cents, using his five free days to give it away to as many people as possible.

This part is critical.  First, it's important to note that this only became possible because Amazon allowed anyone to publish to Kindle.  While Weir was getting a lot of people visiting his blog, Kindle was where he would get the most exposure, and where his fans could share his work most easily.  Without this, we would probably still not know about this wonderful novel.

What's also important here is to note the fact that Weir's lack of greed for the immediate present is what made him a success in the long-run.  If he had priced the book higher and expected everyone to pay for it, it probably wouldn't have been discovered.  But since he grew his audience slowly through blogs, then gave it away for free on Amazon, tons of people saw it and became interested, then they began sharing it, and he exploded onto the scene.

He still didn't make a huge amount of money from this, but it caught the attention of a larger publisher.  They then asked to publish it with their larger promotion engine, and when all was finished, it rose to #12 on the New York Times Bestseller list.  This, in turn, got the attention of film studios, (though it probably also was facilitated by the publisher as they often try to get their books made into movies as soon as possible.)  Once that got done, now everyone knows about it and even more copies are selling.

So Andy Weir, a great example of how a lack of immediate greed can yield large long-term results.