Andy Weir

Do I want to be a writer or do I want to be a software engineer?

And I decided I liked regular meals.

So I went for software engineering.

But I always wrote.

And so I ended up being a computer programmer for about 25 years.

But I was always writing the whole time.

And The Martian was a serial that I posted a chapter at a time to my website.

I mean, at this point, I had about 3,000 regular readers that I'd accumulated over 10 years.

I posted short stories.

I had other serials going on on my site.

The Martian was the one that people liked, so that kind of like spurred me forward to keep working on it.

When I finished it, I figured I was done, but

I mean, it was so popular, I ended up self-publishing it to Amazon Kindle.

And then that sold well enough that that got Random House attention.

And then that got Fox's attention.

And that got Ridley Scott's attention.

And everything just spiraled wildly into control.

To this day, I don't know what I did right.

Because basically, at the time, I had what I consider a very small niche audience of literally 3,000 people.

That was the size of my mailing list.