Weir found himself being courted by literary agents, and the rest is history. His audience loved it, and became an army of unpaid evangelists online.Īlthough Weir initially distributed The Martian for free, he ultimately was pressured to release it on Amazon as a complete ebook, which he sold for just 99 cents. Weir was receptive to the feedback, changing previous chapters to correct the accuracy. Not only did they enjoy the story, but they enjoyed pointing out his occasional shortcomings in the science of the story. Weir says that his initial audience ran the gamut from biologists to physicists. Weir was a self-described orbital mechanics enthusiast (yes, that’s a thing) and amateur scientist.Īfter several months of releasing what would become The Martian, a funny thing started to happen: Weir attracted a readership of people who were just as into the hard science of space as he was. His story had an almost obsessive focus on details and scientific accuracy. He released each chapter sporadically, writing when he felt like writing.

With no aspirations of appealing to a wide audience, or even being published at all, Weir wrote the story as a series of blog posts on a bare-bones website. Weir wrote about all of the challenges Watney would face, as well as how a rescue could be mounted. He began to draft a simple plot about astronaut Mark Watney, left alone to fend for himself on Mars for many months. Resigned to his fate, Weir decided that he would write about what truly excited him: a serialized story about a man stranded on Mars. Weir ultimately accepted that he just wasn’t cut out to be a mainstream writer. Despite quitting his job for three years to focus on writing, he couldn’t get calls returned from literary agents, publishers, or book distributors.

After a serious run at being a professional author, Andy Weir couldn’t get any traction on his writing from audiences.

Author of the martian new book