I'm delighted that you like "Huck Finn". In my opinion, it's not his best work, nor was it his "big break", by any means.
Mr Twain had a wonderfully interesting life, filled with triumph and more tragedy than he deserved. I've read many of his letters, published in book form, which were a very interesting window into who he really was. I believe I own everything he's written. By the way, he was a bit of an atheist at a time when being such was serious. His best work, in my opinion, is religious satire, not the stuff that he's famous for.
The point I was trying to make was it's unfair to place a higher standard of success on an industry just b/c it has a finished product it has to ship.
Twain wrote many novels b/f his breakout success, whichever book it was. Why? Because when he started he wasn't as good as he was in his 40s/50s... just like when you launch a webapp it's not as good as it will be after you've iterated on it for 2 years.
Anyway, I'll try and stick to a subject matter I know a little better next time ;)
That lesson may be the correct one to draw here. However, I could just as easily say that the lesson here is to abandon your web app, and write 10 more, until you "make it". No amount of lipstick will make a book with a boring plot shine, or a web app that doesn't fill a need, popular. I've abandoned three of them (web apps), and am working on a fourth, while you've been presumably, iterating and making yours more beautiful. Hopefully, we'll both win.
As an aside, I was reminded, when I read the chronology, of all the money he lost as a wanna-be venture capitalist. He lost his fortune, dumping it into printing press designs that the engineers could never get the bugs out of. Too bad he didn't abandon that at some point...
Mr Twain had a wonderfully interesting life, filled with triumph and more tragedy than he deserved. I've read many of his letters, published in book form, which were a very interesting window into who he really was. I believe I own everything he's written. By the way, he was a bit of an atheist at a time when being such was serious. His best work, in my opinion, is religious satire, not the stuff that he's famous for.
Anyway, this chronology will tell you a bit of all the things he accomplished prior to the book that you enjoyed. http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html