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Jack London on How to Become a Bestselling Author
7 Strategies that helped London Skyrocket to Fame
In 1903, Jack London skyrocketed to fame with the publication of The Call of the Wild. Three years later, readers greeted the publication of White Fang with similar enthusiasm, helping to establish London as one of the most popular American writers and the highest paid of the 1900s.
An article in The New Yorker notes, “By 1913, he was making more than ten thousand dollars a month, nearly a quarter of a million in today’s money.” But London’s success did not happen overnight. In order to write The Call of the Wild and White Fang, he drew on his experiences in the Yukon in the 1890s when he was living in poverty.
In an article in Literary Hub about London’s Alaskan cabin, Joy Lazendorfer writes:
In 1898, Jack London was trapped in an Alaskan cabin while, outside, winter froze everything to icy stillness. ‘Nothing stirred,’ he wrote later. ‘The Yukon slept under a coat of ice three feet thick.’ London, then 22, had come to Alaska to make his fortune in the gold rush, but all he’d found was a small amount of…
