Become a Famous Science Fiction Author

For years I’d wrestled with the idea of ‘becoming famous’ This had terrified me in many ways. Especially by the harassment many celebrities and people in important positions receive from media representatives across the world. Not to mention the scrutiny in social media. It is one of the things that stopped me from investing any real time in my writing for decades.

So, of course, I went off and did quite a lot of other things that generated far more interest and coverage within social media than my writing ever has.

Go figure!

One of the jobs I did was as an ESL English tutor, and I asked my Chinese assistant at the time to help me to create a mock IELTS test for me to put on Youtube, not long after Youtube first started. Over the years this gained over a million views.

I hired a great animator via a site called Odesk (now Upwork) who helped me convert a couple of my short children’s stories into simple animated videos with me doing voice overs. 42k views for the first one!

And here I was worrying about too much attention. Taking these into account, I’ve barely scraped the surface with my writing.

So, I thought, why not look up some of my favorite authors on Youtube and see how they’re doing in regards to audio books of their stories. After all, my audio book ‘views’ haven’t made it to three digits yet so maybe theirs are a lot more compelling. Maybe their awesome writing is attracting millions of listeners.

Restrictions were a) audio book (complete or long excerpt) b) uploaded to Youtube c) been there awhile.

So, while Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov interviews were in the millions, and any movies that they had influenced were pretty similar in views, I just wanted to see how an audio book of a science fiction story might fare.

This is what I found:

Isaac Asimov 351k
Robert A. Heinlein 126k
Piers Anthony 82k
Larry Niven 64k
Poul Anderson 46k
Arthur C. Clarke 44k
Greg Bear 26k
Clifford D Simak 15k

Hannu Rajaniemi 11k

David Brin 9k

I couldn’t believe it!

Arthur C. Clarke, behind the movies 2001 a Space Odyssey and 2010 Odyssey Two, only garnering 44,000 views for one of his audio books? Surely it should be in the millions!

Isaac Asimov fared better with 351k for a story he wrote in 1956, but as most teenagers get 20 times more than that in a week per video, that is extremely low. And that video had been online for 6 years.

So, my decades of worry about fame all these years were for nought. Even if I create a hugely popular streaming series, become a scientist working for NASA, and write a massive amount of best selling titles through well-known publishers, I still won’t get an audiobook into the millions on Youtube.

Good! Less media attention means more time to write!

Then again, when a lady eating a cucumber on Youtube can get over 11 million views, perhaps I’m looking at things the wrong way 😛

If you haven’t already, please check my audio book excerpt of The Andromeda Effect, now on Youtube. Read by a Robot!