I hate marketing, book tours, and all that. Yet I am interested in a career in writing. I know that the majority of people fail to ever make good money in this field. My question is, is it possible to write a best seller without doing all the book tours, talk shows, etc? Or is that pretty much the only way you can ever hope to sell a lot of copies? Thanks!

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You're getting way ahead of yourself. The vast, vast majority of published authors are not bestselling authors. Most published authors, even relatively successful ones, don't make a living wage from their writing and do other things as well as writing to make ends meet. So, the chances of ever writing anything that becomes a bestseller are so small that you are probably more likely to win the lottery. Secondly, the people that do book tours and talk shows are the people who are *already* famous. They've had their bestsellers already. A talk show doesn't interview an author who isn't already bestselling - in fact, talk shows interview very few authors at all, even bestselling ones. *Of course* your book will need marketing if it's to sell well, but book tours and talk shows are not the kind of marketing you'd be asked to do unless you'd already written several massive-selling novels, and then you would be able to say know if you wanted to. It would be a completely different type of marketing that would help to make your books bestsellers in the first place, and one which wouldn't involve you very much at all. Worry about actually writing something good enough to get published. Any other concerns, at present, are completely moot.

This depends on sooo many factors. Most publishers insist that you take part in marketing and promotion - and that means book tours and all that stuff. The only way you can get around it is to have some deep, mysterious reason why you can't appear in public - as Salaman Rushdie did when his book was first published - and the publishers used that to promote and hype the book. If you dont want to involve yourself in the promotional aspects of book selling, why not look at something other than books? Movie script writers don't go on tour and are largely anonymous. Media and public relations personnel don't go on book tours, but are paid generously and regularily.