The best way to make it is to write a breakout book.
False.
In the '80s and '90s, and possibly still today, the term "breakout book" was heard wherever editors met with authors. The conversations usually went like this.
Author: Why aren't you promoting my book?
Editor: We'd be wasting our money. Write us a big book, a book with sales hooks, a breakout book, and we'll buy you that full-age ad in the Times.
I was never able to come up with a breakout book a publisher was willing to bet on. Nor were any of the novelists in this group--with once exception. Nancy Zaroulis' 1991 Massachusetts, of which Library Journal said that in it she did for the Bay State what Michener had done for Hawaii, Poland, etc., was a perfect example of a breakout book. Zaroulis did not, alas, break out. After a hiatus, she returned to her former publisher to write a mystery series.
The breakout book was, I suspect, a chimera.