Steve Hely, a US writer who has written for The Office, 30 Rock and American Dad, has a novel out called How I Became A Famous Novelist. In her review of the book Dani from our Calton shop says Hely is 'the Dexter Morgan of the publishing world'. Steve, who will be out here for the Melbourne Writers Festival later this month, writes a guest blog post for us about the story behind his satirical novel, dressed-up as a tell-all memoir.

I love bookstores. They’re beautiful, for sure – all those pretty covers, lined up against each other.

But bookstores are also completely crazy, if you think about it. Each one of those books represents someone’s massive investment of passion and work and strain. Someone’s dream that they could put down words on paper that would move or inspire or entertain a stranger who just happened upon them.

The tragic fact is that most of those books will end up pulped. That’s how the dream will end for all those writers. But that fact doesn’t seem to stop anybody. Last year in the United States there were over 288,000 books published. So Wikipedia tells me, anyway.

To me there’s something very human – absurd, funny, sad, endearing – in all this. You can hold on to a dream of getting famous for writing a book for a lot longer than you can hold on to a dream of getting famous for, say, being beautiful or being a great athlete. You can be sitting alone in a dingy basement in some forgotten town, anywhere in the world, friendless, unloved. And still you can believe you’re a literary genius. And you know what? You might be right! The history of literature is full of stories just like that.

And you may not even need to hold out for posthumous glory. It can happen right now. One night a Mormon housewife has a dream about vampires. She wakes up and starts writing it down. A few years later Twilight has sold over twenty million copies.

It seemed like there was a good story to tell in all of this. I wasn’t immune to it myself. Over the years I’d had lots of ideas for novels. Some of them were absolutely shameless, commercial ideas that I’d think up when I’d see, with fury and jealousy, how rich some weasely author of pop romances was getting. Others were ideas I truly thought worthwhile, if I had the patience and the talent and the time to express them just the way they occurred to me in my head.

All these thoughts were stewing in a little idea-pot on a back stove somewhere in my mind when I decided to sit down and see if I could get myself a spot on those crazy, beautiful, bookstore shelves.

How I Became A Famous Novelist is out now in paperback ($19.95) and ebook ($9.95).