How to Avoid Becoming a Published Author

1. Do not write anything too extensive. Keep spreading your thoughts and ideas across many projects, keep expanding and developing into new directions.
2. Do not stick to the same project every day or every week. It is much more fun and relaxing to alternate between stories as your mood suits you. If in a bright mood, write about fun things without substance. If in a dark mood, write a poem about the end of civilization as we know it.
3. Show your work to the world before it is ready to be published. Get some friends to tell you how great you are, then you can relax and do not have to go the extra mile.
4. Burn some bridges. When you make professional contacts, do not show them courtesy beyond what suits your immediate needs. If they disappoint you in any way, shape or form, show them the door and move on to create some new contacts, there are plenty where they came from.
5. Join writers’ groups and share your stories of misery and betrayal with them. This will give you a soothing feeling, and spare you from confronting your own shortcomings. More important, it will give you some valuable time off from writing.
6. Contemplate, don’t write. Theories, concepts, and ideas are much more appealing in the long run than sitting down to write sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph, page upon page. Remember, no book ever wrote itself, and words do not come cheap to most people. But you, being a grand philosopher, deserve to free up your energy to think clearly, unhindered by the laborious task of writing through a heavy project.
7. Do not edit your own work. You are entitled to your typos, grammatical errors, logical inconsistencies, flawed plots, and more.
8. Do not transform critique into action. If someone tells you to do things differently, thank them warmly and move on to other projects.
9. Do not submit your work. Literary agents and publishers are elitist snobs that exist merely for the purpose of rejecting people such as you, instead favoring others who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, connected, or otherwise unreasonably gifted. If you have submitted and were rejected, lick your wounds and repeat the same mistake no more.
   
10. Do not take "yes" for an answer. If someone in the publishing world praises you, they are probably after your copyright or your money.

You will be safe and dry, wholesome, and pleasantly obscure.