As I continue my journey toward fortune and fame in the writing world, I am out of necessity thinking a lot about what it takes to be published. I started thinking about the good novels I’ve read recently and the publicity that surrounds them. And, naturally, I thought about the special, intense kind of marketing and reviewing that accompanies the debut novel. “The next great ______ [insert nationality] novelist/writer/storyteller/etc. of our time!” raves one critic from a periodical, a critic who only fellow writers read anyway.

Debut novels are always things like “triumphs of the imagination” or “sprawling epics” or “first-rate forays into the world of literature.” This got me to thinking, though, how a debut novel could possibly be anything but first-rate. Think about it: with how impossibly hard it is to get your first story published (even for short stories or poetry, even with the abundance of online outlets for fictional but usually-somewhat-autobiographical debut novels/stories/poems), how could any published debut novel ever be bad?

Imagine a terrible debut novel. The editor that allowed it to be published would be shot immediately. Perhaps only in a limb, or at least not near a vital organ, so that he would live long enough to endure the torture — ahem, enhanced interrogation techniques — that would follow. The publishing house would be laughed at. Critics would pan them for the next several years, which of course would not hurt sales very much anyway, unless these critics were YouTube video bloggers. But just think about all the money wasted.

So, chances are that if you get your first novel published, it’s going to be good. It’s going to be better than good; in fact, it’ll be gooder than good. It’ll be great, fantastic, a triumph of the imagination.

And it will be your doom.

Because, and congratulations, you’ve just set the bar terribly high. Now you’ll see the true grim percentages in the writing world, what separates the good from the great. If you get a novel published (exluding vanity publishers), you’re a good writer. Let’s allow that. But your second effort, your “sophomore novel” to follow the debut, will have to be just as good if not better in order to be considered relatively good in comparison to the debut. Because everyone’s looking for improvement. If your second novel is only as good as the first, that says you’re not going anywhere. You’ve already peaked. Straight to the paperbacks section for you.

So, do yourself a favor and write a better-than-most-but-terrible-in-comparison sophomore novel. Get a Lifetime movie deal for it too, if you can. (You’ll really need to counteract the negative reviews with sympathy — you can blame this all on your literary agent.) This way, you can actually relax for your third novel (no special title here, unless it is 1,000+ pages and you only write one or two more novels, in which case this will be your “magnum opus;” or, make this one even worse than the second, then your fourth will be a “triumphant return to form…this generation’s best ______ [insert nationality here] writer reclaims his title of literature’s superstar”).

From there, just hope you’ve developed a rabid fan base. Oh, you’re not a genre writer? Good luck.