Can you get a book deal — or become a famous writer — based on ONE piece? It’s happened.

Five unknown writers who got deals based on one story, essay, or humor piece

Before my first novel was published (it’s currently a movie on Netflix), I found it useful to pay attention to how other authors got their book deals.

It’s what unpublished writers dream of — that one essay, short story, blog post, humor piece or even a Tweet that goes viral, drawing attention from agents and leading to a book or film deal. But does it really happen to an unknown author, and how do you know if your piece will be The One?

I graduated from college in the mid-1990s and dreamed of finally selling one of my young-adult novels. I took temp assignments and pounded the pavement in New York to land a publishing job, but spent each night in the window in my walkup apartment, revising my pre-teen and teen books to submit to agents. Invariably, they responded positively, but called my stories “too quiet,” “too slow” or “too quiet and too slow.” (Plot-wise, they were tame; one of them, The Run of the Hills, was about a boy growing up in Vermont at his parents’ motel.) I finished three young-adult books during my twenties, all sweet, but just not good enough for an agent or publisher to spend their time and money on. Agents did say they’d be willing to look at my next project, which was helpful. (It was the pre-internet era and I was sending things through U.S. mail, so the process was “too slow” and “too quiet” too. At least there was less competition.)

I got a bit jealous when I saw fellow writers in their twenties landing book deals, when all I got was rejection. But I knew I had no guarantee of being published, no matter how passionate I was about telling stories. When I was 25, I came home from my job at the local paper, opened my copy of Newsweek, and saw that a dude I’d gone to high school with had sold his short story collection to Random House, based on a story he’d published in STORY Magazine. STORY was known to publish down-to-earth fiction, sometimes from unknown writers. At least I was on the right track, as I’d submitted to STORY too. I read my classmate’s piece and was blown away by the writing. Still, I couldn’t help feeling envious. Hadn’t it been just ten years earlier that Junot Diaz was sitting behind me in a dysfunctional high school writing class in Central Jersey? He was two grades ahead of me, but still. (I later read that his first submission to STORY was rejected, but…