Author Seth McDuffee will never forget when his novel briefly surpassed The Martian as the top-selling book on Amazon's humorous science fiction category in mid-December. This was no small feat considering Andy Weir's novel has lingered around countless bestseller lists since his book was adapted into the hit film of the same name in 2015. McDuffee owes much of his literary success to Reddit, where he cultivated and marketed the story that would become Good Boy, the tale of a loud-mouthed, quick-witted so-and-so who dies during a zombie apocalypse.
McDuffee's journey out of obscurity began on Oct. 15, 2015. He had seen a post on Reddit's r/WritingPrompts inspiring people to turn the following snippet into something meaningful: "A ghost and a zombie come from the same person during a zombie uprising. The ghost wants to help survivors. The zombie is hungry." McDuffee worked himself into a creative stupor.
"I posted the first portion, and received such a powerful response from the community that I wrote another chapter immediately within a day. Soon I was doing weekly releases, posting them to my personal subreddit r/serhm where I noticed I was getting upwards of 250 unique visitors a week. I was getting dozens of private messages a day asking me for the next chapter," McDuffee told Forbes over email.
While many r/WritingPrompts visitors fail to see a story through to completion, McDuffee became one of the few exceptions. He wrote the first nine chapters in as many weeks. McDuffee worked with a friend to help edit and design the cover. All in all, the book took a year to finish, McDuffee said.
Good Boy was released for free on Amazon in Nov. 2017 for kindleunlimited subscribers and $2.99 for everyone else. The book was promoted on r/WritingPrompts where redditors helped propel it to the third spot on Amazon's free science fiction novels section for the better part of a week. That was as high as the book would get before dropping in popularity.
McDuffee hadn't written anything about his book on Reddit until Dec. 10, 2018, when he answered the following question posed on r/AskReddit: "What's your greatest accomplishment that you can't bring up in normal conversation?" He casually mentioned his book's initial popularity and how "one of my former coworkers acted as though it wasn't much worth bragging about," he said. McDuffee went to bed and the next morning he woke to hundreds of messages and thousands of upvotes praising Good Boy.
"My hands were literally shaking and I could barely operate my fingers as I opened my browser to check the stats on my Good Boy royalties page. I had already gotten over 100 sales that morning," McDuffee said. "Suddenly, after zero sales for over six months, I was raking in hundreds of sales daily. At one point I sold 190 copies in Japan in less than an hour. I'm not really sure what happened there."
One of McDuffee's proudest moments was when his hometown newspaper, The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier in Iowa, did an article on him last month. The story was shared more than 40 times by my friends and family.
"My coworkers were walking up to me and slapping me on the back and calling me 'famous,'" McDuffee said.
McDuffee is currently working on a follow-up to Good Boy. In the meantime, he's been enjoying all the adoration from Reddit.
"I really think the majority of Reddit likes to see each other succeed, especially when they have had a part in it. I've gotten hundreds of positive messages and congratulations and surprisingly few ill-wishers and death threats," he said. "The consensus seems to mostly be that it is very funny and really creative, which is all I can really ask for. I'm super grateful for all the feedback I've received."
