About a decade ago I finally decided to try the Jack Reacher books since one of my friends loved them and was always recommending them. I got a copy of the first book - Killing Floor - from my local library. It was an anniversary edition with a new foreword by Lee Child.

In it, he said how his writing career started. He lost his day job working in TV production and had six months salary saved. He wrote and wrote and wrote and in that six months wrote KF and got an agent and got a publishing deal. It's been mainstream success since.

Granted, this was basically a lottery winning statistic, but it happened.

Contrast with Stephen King. A good five to six years selling short stories and getting novels rejected. Then he wrote Carrie and even after it came out, he still kept his teaching job. It wasn't until Salem's Lot that he went full time and was unsure if he could make a living on his writing then. Granted, now we know he's an industry to himself, but it was a long road there.