Dani asked David Wong:

Did you think jdate would become successful?

David Wong I never thought it would be a financial success or make me a lot of money, no. But I did think it was good and that a lot of people would read it (if you don't know, originally it was just posted to my blog, one section at a time, over the course of several years). But I thought it would be successful for something given away for free, I didn't think it was the kind of thing a lot of people would pay money for. And that was actually true, until the movie came along and then everything went nuts.

But just to be extra clear - in my crazy mind, the reason it wouldn't make money was the audience, I didn't think they'd get it, thought they'd find it too weird, or too gruesome, or wouldn't keep up with the rapidly shifting tones. It wasn't because I thought the story was bad or half-assed or anything else. I never lacked confidence in that part; I was sure it was good, I had rewritten every sentence five times to make sure it was, and was getting rabid fan messages from the first hour the first pages were posted.

It feels important to mention that, because I'm not otherwise a confident person, mainly because I have absolutely no other skills but this. I cannot sing or play an instrument, I am not charming or good with people, I am not athletic or handsome, I'm not good at math or memorizing facts and before I started making money from writing, I couldn't get any job outside of low-level office jobs typing things. I failed at the career I went to college for, I got unimpressive performance ratings most places I worked. Nobody was like, "Wow, this dude is destined for something bigger!" I was applying to jobs like UPS and not even getting a call back. I'm not naturally good at things, I'm not fun to be around.

But I knew I could do this, I've been doing this since I was a kid, I picked up bestsellers and believed I could have executed their story better than they did. This one single thing I can do, I'm not going to downplay it, as it's one of the very few valuable things I can offer the world.

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