Laura Miller for Slate offers the following interesting essay regarding British novelist Scarlett Thomas and the hard road to become a successful novelist:

Did Scarlett Thomas Miss Her Chance?  What Happens When Stars Don’t Align For A Gifted Novelist

I wrote a comment after this article, which I’ll reproduce here:

An interesting article, though I can’t help but wonder about the desire to hit it “big”.  With so many, many novels released in the course of a year (including my own!), if one manages to make an impression with even one of them you’re doing good, in my opinion.

Audience tastes are fickle and it isn’t too surprising that a person who hits it big with one novel sometimes doesn’t replicate that achievement with their next.  In music, this is an almost too common event (for those old enough, do you remember how popular Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill was?  Her output since that point hasn’t exactly captured audiences as well as that album, to say the least).

As I said, at least the authors mentioned in this article managed to capture the audience’s attention at one point which is certainly better than many other authors have in the course of their career.

And don’t get me started on people like H. P. Lovecraft or Stieg Larsson or Robert Howard or Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad etc. etc. etc., authors who during their lifetimes achieved minimal success yet after they died their works were suddenly red hot.

Such are the vagaries of “good” fortune!