That’d be a bummer. Tom’s gonna come back, via an improbable plot twist, and infiltrate my compound with a team of commandos, no matter how much liquid nitrogen I use on him.
You know, you could have said that in the first place.
Publishers normally wait until after the public has unexpectedly made a book or an author into something buzzworthy. Clancy and King and Gresham and Crichton all took very odd pathways to the top. Clancy published with the Naval Institute Press. Grisham self-published. Crichton wrote mysteries and thrillers under pseudonyms. King took about four books just to get noticed. In each case, something sparked and the public found them. The publishers came into play afterward.
99.9% of all books are flung onto the shelves with no backing. A book that a publisher has put an enormous investment in goes a different route.
Instead of 50 or even 500 advance review copies, 5000 are printed and sent out to every possible media outlet. The author is carefully vetted to see if he or she is mediagenic. [I’m not and I didn’t even realize I had flunked the test until after it was over. That was 15 years ago before I learned all this important stuff I 'm giving to you for free. 
] A good-looking, easy-talking author is booked on the circuit - talk shows, chat shows, early morning news shows. Interviews with every newspaper in every city traveled to. Web sites. Ads are taken out in the New York Times Book Review, a few other major papers, Entertainment Weekly, Book, other appropriate magazines. Amazon is paid off to feature the book on its front page.
And bookstores. Books don’t just magically appear in the front of the store. Those spots are sold by the big chains. Front placement can cost $10,000. A spot on those new book tables goes for about $3,000. “Dumps” - those cardboard displays all of one books - are another expense. Authors are expected to do signings and charm people.
There are also the big book expos, here and in Frankfort; the American Library Association convention and the American Booksellers convention.
Print runs are carefully calculated so that a hit doesn’t sell out. Why not? Because it takes several weeks to gear up for a reprinting, which leaves bookstores empty just when the hype is at its peak.
And despite all this, it’s still hit or miss. Newt Gingrich’s 1945, despite his name and willingness to push the book, is a legendary bomb. The Jayson Blair mea culpa about his faking out the NYTimes was hyped from every front porch and sold about 2000 copies.
Once you become a brand name, people will buy anything with that brand, especially if it has been turned into a movie, which is how Clancy gets away with not writing all those books. But I say again, he got that way because people liked his books. The publishers were there only to grease the way for them to get to the bookstore. Publishing is the worst business in the world for developing product. If it doesn’t walk through the door, they cannot function.
As I said in my first post, lightning hits. It’s that random. Talent helps. Sincerity helps. Prolificness definitely helps. Likability helps. But the if roulette ball doesn’t fall in your slot, there’s not a thing you can do about it besides resigning yourself to be a cult author.
No movie where Steven Seagal dies – particularly one where he dies before the halfway mark – can truly be considered shitty.
I kinda did:
See, now THAT is the kind of thing I was curious about, Exapno. Good stuff.
I dunno. According to this thread, Jack Ryan can get pretty kinky.
Some suggestions that may assist you in writing a Tom Clancy style novel would involve the following:
HERO
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Must be a male in his late thirties or early forties.
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Must be a dedicated, patriotic career diplomat/intelligence worker/spy who works for a Federal Government agency deeply involved in national security. He works from pre-dawn to well after midnight, in an office within view of the White House, occupied by a highly intelligent President (this is a work of fiction, remember) and the Washington monument. He catches occasional glimpses of his sleeping wife just before going to work.
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Must have a neglected and long suffering wife and an equally neglected and long suffering pair of charming blonde haired children, a boy and a girl, aged 10 and 12 (or vice versa).
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Must love his wife and his two gorgeous children dearly but feels profoundly troubled that, for the past five years, he has had difficulty in communicating with her and the children. Despite his high-powered intelligence and analytical mind, he cannot work out why this is happening (see 2 above).
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Must have a mistress who loves him so much she wants him to divorce his wife (how he ever managed to squeeze in the time to get a mistress, bearing in mind (2) above, need not be explained to the reader). She is a dedicated, highly intelligent and unimpeachable lawyer who works in the civil rights section of the Justice Department. She can be expected to utter idealistic and humanitarian comments from time to time.
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Must attend meetings to progress the plot involving between three to six equally dedicated and highly intelligent civil servants attached to alphabet soup of Washington based intelligence agencies. At these meetings, which usually last no more than 5 minutes: (i) nobody speaks out turn; (ii) everyone says something sensible and relevant, including use of the term “chain of command” several times; (iii) a consensus is reached and everyone leaves the meeting knowing that progress has been made and something has been achieved.
VILLAINS
In this day and age they can only be a neo-nazi group. We all know how terrifying a threat to world peace they are. But then, The Boys From Brazil movie was not originally made to inspire mocking laughter either.
That should take you about halfway through an imitation Tom Clancy book.
Unfortunately, I cannot help you any further as I have never managed to get past the halfway mark in any of his books.
Let me just make one minor correction to Exapno’s superb advice: Grisham did not self-publish (that report has been spread by vanity presses to get victims). Grisham’s first novel was published by a small press with about 2000 copies. After it sold slowly, he bought up about 1000 of them and sold them himself. Meanwhile, his second book gained interest from a major publisher and a movie studio, and he made it big.
Bash bash bash.
For the record, I very much enjoyed Clancy’s first several books, in particular The Hunt For Red October and The Sum of All Fears
Sure, but the problem there was that the publisher mistakenly thought having Newt’s name was an asset. 
And what kind of a name is “Newt,” anyway? It’s a damn lizard, for cryin’ out loud!