That's what we call in French “recherche et développement”. We just have to note that.
I will continue in French, if you don't mind.
No writing career develops overnight. We don't start writing, just as we don't start living—actually, few people do so—with tremendous success.
It's sort of like climbing Mount Everest. If you try to climb Mount Everest all of a sudden, you will lack air and come back down very quickly. There are steps to building a career. We need the air necessary to enable us to climb from one step to the next, thereby building a career.
You are completely right in saying that this is done over the long term. It is not an immediate or a miraculous development. It happens through work and with the support of a community of readers, government and policies, which enable us to climb that Mount Everest and to mean something to a people, a nation and a country. Authors are there to provide meaning. Few people have that function in society.
Am I answering the question well?