The Martian Was a Free Blog Serial
Quick answer: Andy Weir posted The Martian free on his website after years of rejection. Readers, a 99 cent Kindle file and word of mouth made it a bestseller and a film.
Before The Martian was a bestseller or a Ridley Scott film, it was a hobby posted in instalments on a personal website, free, for an audience of a few thousand people who had wandered in from its author's webcomics and short stories. Andy Weir was a software engineer in California who had already tried the conventional route and been burned by it. He has described taking three years in his twenties to write full time, failing to sell anything, collecting form rejections from agents, and going back to programming with the reasonable conclusion that publishing did not want him.
So when he started a new novel in 2009, about an astronaut stranded alone on Mars, he did not query a single agent. He posted chapters on his site as he finished them, for free, because free was the only distribution channel that had ever said yes to him. What happened next is one of the cleanest documented cases of readers, not gatekeepers, deciding what the culture gets: within five years the rejected hobbyist was a number one bestselling author with a film starring Matt Damon.
The writer the industry had already turned down
Weir's failure phase deserves attention, because it was long and it was real. He had written since childhood and worked as a programmer since his teens, including years at AOL. After a layoff, he gave himself a proper shot at the dream: roughly three years of full-time writing, a completed novel, the whole submission ritual. Nothing sold. The rejections were not even personalised. He returned to software and kept writing on the side, publishing short pieces and a long-running webcomic to a small but loyal online audience.
That small audience turns out to be the hidden asset in this story. A few thousand people who chose to follow his work, on a mailing list and a website, with no publisher in the loop. When he began serialising The Martian, he was not shouting into the void; he was writing for readers he could name. Very few rejection stories mention this layer, and it matters: he had lost the industry but kept an audience, and only one of those is essential.
A serial with fact-checkers
The Martian is a survival problem told through chemistry, botany and orbital mechanics, and Weir, a lifelong space obsessive, did the maths for real. His readers, many of them engineers and scientists of exactly the type who follow a programmer's webcomic, checked it. They emailed corrections about chemical reactions and trajectory calculations, and he revised the chapters accordingly. He has been open and cheerful about this: the book's famous technical accuracy was a collaboration between one stubborn author and an unpaid swarm of experts.
For writers raised on the idea that a manuscript must be hidden until it is perfect, this is the part worth sitting with. Serialising in public did not spoil the book; it stress-tested it. Every instalment was a small publication with a real deadline and real readers, and the feedback arrived while it could still be used. The finished novel was better because it had been read badly, early, by people allowed to talk back.
The 99 cent accident
When the serial was complete, readers asked for a version they could load onto e-readers, because copying chapters from a website was clumsy. Weir put the book on Amazon's Kindle store and priced it at 99 cents, which he has often noted was the lowest price the platform allowed; he would have preferred to keep it free. The book he could not give away to agents now cost slightly less than a chocolate bar.
It took off. Word of mouth carried it up the science fiction charts, and it has been widely reported that it sold tens of thousands of copies within a few months, reaching the top of Amazon's science fiction bestseller lists. There was no marketing, no publicist and no publisher, only a reader base recommending a cheap, gripping, technically honest book to people like themselves. The gatekeepers had not changed their minds. They had simply been routed around.
The turn: publishing chases the readers
The industry reads sales charts the way the rest of us read weather. In 2013, an audiobook publisher bought audio rights, and Crown, an imprint of one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, bought print rights in a deal reported to be six figures. Film interest arrived in the same season; Weir has often described the book deal and the movie deal landing within days of each other, a collision of good news that would have sounded like fantasy during his query-letter years.
Crown published The Martian in hardcover in February 2014 and it became a New York Times bestseller. Ridley Scott's film adaptation, released in 2015 with Matt Damon as stranded astronaut Mark Watney, became a global hit and an Oscar nominee for Best Picture. In 2016, Weir won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, a pleasant irony for a man the industry had declined to debut a decade earlier. His follow-ups, including Project Hail Mary, were bought and published the ordinary way, at extraordinary prices.
What a working writer can take from it
First: rejection measured the manuscript's fit with a market guess, not its appeal to actual readers, and the two can diverge completely. Weir's earlier work was rejected and stayed rejected; The Martian was never rejected because it was never submitted. He changed the question from will an agent like this to will readers pass this on, and the second question turned out to be the one that mattered. Any writer with an internet connection can now ask the second question directly.
Second: audiences are built in years and spent in moments. The webcomic readers, the mailing list, the free short stories, all of it looked like a hobby going nowhere, and all of it was infrastructure. A poet posting work where readers gather, or entering contests where every poem is actually read and scored the way Writory reads its monthly entries, is doing the same slow work: accumulating readers one at a time until, someday, there are enough of them to carry something.
The work itself, for a writer's eye
Read The Martian for structure. It is built almost entirely from a repeating unit: problem, attempt, complication, partial solution, new problem. That loop, plus a narrator who jokes under pressure, sustains an entire novel with one character alone in a red desert. Poets can steal the principle at miniature scale: a poem that keeps solving and re-breaking its own situation stays alive in a way that a poem making one long statement rarely does.
Notice too how the humour works. Watney's wisecracks are not decoration; they are characterisation under load, the sound of a mind refusing despair. Weir found that voice while writing for a live audience week by week, which is a good argument for letting real readers hear your drafts before you decide what your voice is.
What poets can take from this
- Build a small, direct audience you can reach without permission; it is the one asset no rejection can take away.
- Consider serialising a project in public; deadlines with real readers improve drafts faster than private polishing.
- Treat expert corrections as free collaboration rather than criticism, the way Weir folded reader science into his revisions.
- When gatekeepers say no, change the question: put the work where readers can answer instead.
- Price and package for spread in the early years; being easy to try is worth more than being expensive.
- Keep the day job without shame; Weir wrote his breakthrough around full-time programming work.
Try it yourself
Write a poem as a series of five log entries by someone stranded somewhere ordinary, a flooded flat, a snowed-in bus stop, a dead phone in a strange city. Each entry must solve one problem and create the next, and the voice must joke at least once without breaking the tension.
Questions
Was The Martian rejected by publishers?
Not directly, because Weir never submitted it; earlier novels of his had been rejected by agents, and he had given up on traditional publishing. He posted The Martian free on his website, then sold it on Kindle for 99 cents, and publishers came to him in 2013 after it topped Amazon's science fiction charts.
How much did The Martian cost when it was first published?
Nothing at first. Weir serialised the whole novel free on his personal website starting in 2009. When readers asked for an e-reader version, he listed it on Amazon at 99 cents, which he has said was the minimum price the platform allowed at the time.
Did Andy Weir have a day job while writing The Martian?
Yes, he worked as a software engineer and wrote the novel in his spare time, publishing chapters as he finished them. He only became a full-time author after Crown bought the book and the 2014 edition became a bestseller.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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