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fun and profit

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«The most profitable trajectory for a successful science fiction novel in those days was for an sf book to start life as a magazine serial, move on to hardcover publication, and finally be reprinted as a mass market paperback. If you were writing a novel a year (or, say, three novels every two years, which was then almost what I was averaging), that was the only way to push your annual income up, at the time, from four to five figures—and the low five figures at that.» - Samuel Delany, in "Racism and Science Fiction", 1998.
I think this might be the piece of advice on publication strategies that I mis-remembered as "write the book before you seek an advance."  The above plan is reasonably consistent with that strategy however!

Another more contemporary take -- coming from a quite different perspective:
If you want to understand how to get a 7-figure advance in just a few lines, try this: understand how to explain your uniqueness; develop a compelling pitch around a single break-out concept; build and exhibit your massive network and platform; painstakingly detail your previous successes; present all of these things with an Alpha veneer of knowing that your stuff is awesome.
The pithy summary of this one is: “Your network is your net worth.”

There are a few similarities between these two pre- and post-internet strategies, but also plenty of differences.

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