You write a book and it gets published and then . . . nothing. No reviews, no calls from Oprah, and even your friends don't show up at your booksigning event. You return to your lair to lick your wounds and wonder if it was worth all the time and the energy. But then a weird thing happens. Somehow, a person gets to know about your book and they become inspired.

This is what happened with Keith Akers, whose book The Lost Religion of Jesus actually got several very good reviews and has been read by quite a few people, including his friends. One of those people was Kamran Pasha, the author of Mother of the Believers (a novel about the birth of Islam), who is now writing another novel about the birth of Christianity. Keith tells me: "According to his blog, he's read The Lost Religion of Jesus and has been deeply influenced by it. He is apparently very well connected—he's writing and producing a TV series on King David for NBC, among other things. You can read the blog here."

It's not quite your own big Hollywood production, and the satisfaction of having influenced someone is necessarily a vicarious reward. But it's a reward nonetheless: the sense of having moved someone so much that you stirred their creative process. The moral? The rewards of writing may be deferred—sometimes, it may feel, to infinity—but they will come. Eventually.