WANT TO KNOW HOW TO WRITE A BESTSELLER?

{Victor's Mother courtesy of the fabulous Leonora Roy}

 

Struggling authors will be the most rabid readers of James Hall’s new book, “Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the 20th Century’s Biggest Bestsellers,” and they may well learn from it.

I know I am struggling to understand it and the yearning that inspired it.

Hall, a creative-writing professor and crime novelist,

teaches a course on “megabestsellers,” books that have sold in the “multiple millions”

and that have gone on selling for decades after they were originally published.

Would you call Dan Brown a “good writer?”

 Yet many very successful novelists are not: Stieg Larsson some would say is not.

 A book doesn’t have to be especially well-written, plausible or original to be a bestseller.

The characters don’t have to be particularly interesting, as John Grisham proves again and again. In fact, if there is one trait that all of the bestsellers Hall considers absolutely share:

 A lot of people like them.

Duh!

Yet, advertising and begging cannot make someone like you.  I know.  Cate Blanchett remains immune to my charm!

At least half the books on any given week’s bestseller list are there to the immense surprise and puzzlement of their publishers.

So why does the public fall in love with some crappy books but not others?

Most bestsellers combine familiar elements in less familiar ways —

the recipe for successful genre fiction.

“Gone With the Wind” transported the career-woman melodramas of its time into a historical romance.

“The Godfather” is a family saga grafted onto a gangster story.

The sensational historical-religious conspiracy theory at the center of “The Da Vinci Code” had already appeared in a nonfiction bestseller:

Brown’s brainstorm was to change the delivery mechanism to a fast-paced thriller.

Lesson:
YOU HAVE TO BE THE FIRST TO TWIST THE FAMILIAR IN AN UNFAMILIAR WAY.

50 SHADES OF GREY has spawned a tidal wave of erotica, none of whose titles have caught on in a wild-fire way.  THERE IS ONLY ONE FIRST.

E. L. James emerged from the word-of-mouth factory that is Twilight fandom,

and as a result her books introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to a genre they didn’t know existed,

much as Stephenie Meyers had introduced them to the vampire romance novel a few years before.

Lesson:
YOU CANNOT CONTROL WORD OF MOUTH;

YOU CAN ONLY BE PREPARED TO RIDE THE WAVE

SHOULD YOU FIND YOURSELF ATOP IT.

(Have several books already written before you publish the first.)

The one predictive factor that readers consistently rely on is brand loyalty:

an author who has done it once, they assume, is likely to do it again.

That’s why the most consistent aspect of the bestseller lists is the reappearance of the same names, over and over.

Last Lesson:
WRITE THE BOOK YOU WOULD ENJOY READING.

Your heart will be in it, and it will show. 

Your time will have been spent with a smile on your face.  And is that such a bad thing?