Please see my re-open request below (the question is currently closed). Thanks
You come to realise that you are a fictional character in a story.
EDIT In the light of a couple of answers, I need to emphasise that you are a character in a story that the author is currently writing. You are not an actor in a TV series.
Because you are a minor character, you have more freedom to act behind the scenes than the hero or heroine.
Would you be able to tell who the main characters were, just by their behaviour and what happened to them?
Is it safe to try and communicate with the author or is it better to lie low and hope s/he doesn't kill you off? In any case, how could you attract the attention of the author without behaving in such a way that you would be written out as irrelevant or destructive to the story-line?
While the author is busy with the main characters, would it be possible to convince other minor characters that, like you, they were fictional and perhaps start a riot or somehow interfere with the author's intentions in a significant way?
Main question
Can you suggest long-term strategies to -
Get yourself promoted to be an important character of the book. This means that your life will be much more interesting and you will have access to resources that you otherwise might not. Maybe you can even become the hero. [This has been edited to reduce appearance of referring to a single character.]
NOTES
This is a non-magical, non hi-tech world. It could perhaps be crime fiction, romance or adventure but nothing too way out.
The book has to have a happy ending with you as the good guy/gal. You can do evil things to achieve that but the author mustn't know about it or even suspect.
You can't simply murder the current hero because then you would become a baddy. The author would have to get someone else to track you down and kill you. That person would become the hero instead of you.
You cannot step out of the story and influence the real world directly. Your influence must occur within the action of the story itself.
If you decide to travel, you can only go to places that the author has heard of. Be careful because he/she might only have a vague idea of what the place is like. There might be blank areas. Similarly with the author's knowledge of technology. You might try to repair your car and find a vague, meaningless lump of metal under the hood/bonnet.
Re-open request
As I understand it, this question was closed because it was deemed to be about the adventures of a single character, i.e. 'you'.
That is simply not the case. If, for example, I had prefaced the question with, "Michael Renfrew is a character in a story I'm writing. He is tall, dark, handsome and has a wooden leg and a parrot. His girlfriend is a policewoman ..." then that would be justified.
My use of 'you' is impersonal. It refers to any character who is living in a world that has certain well-defined characteristics. The question is to do with the mechanics of survival and self-betterment in such a world. The use of 'you' was an encouragement to the answerers to immerse themselves in the world in order to provide imaginative answers.