What Makes a Bestseller?

I’ve written about bestsellers before and I’m not here today to go over the same ground; I’m going over the ground right next to it, so you may have to look closely to see the difference in terrain.

 

I don’t read a lot of bestsellers and I sure as hell have never written one, so sour grapes is the obvious motive for these posts. I also make a concerted effort to continue to learn and today I’m primarily concerned with what makes a bestseller, or doesn’t. (Yes, my name on the cover places it into the “doesn’t” category. I’m talking about more general things.)

 

First, and most important, a bestseller has to have a good story. It doesn’t much matter what the story is about. Could be boy wizards, vampires, hobbits, doctors, war, childhood, parenthood, anything. Whatever the story is, it must make it easy for the average reader to continuously suspend disbelief, allowing them to reside in a place where they can imagine themselves somehow involved in the story. To use John Gardner’s phrase, to create a “vivid and continuous dream.”

 

This is aided greatly by having relatable characters. Not necessarily likeable characters, though those are best for large volumes of sales. The characters need to be people – or animals or aliens – the average reader can relate to in some way so they will care what happens to them. How the author does this is far less important – if important at all – than being successful at it.

 

Another thing most bestsellers have in common is they were written by people who have published other bestsellers. The single most important determining factor as to which book a reader will buy is author name recognition, especially if they have read this author in the past and liked the book.

 

I hate to bring up this next one because publishers try to do everything they can to avoid it, but good marketing certainly helps. Authors are more responsible for this all the time, and those with existing platforms are the most likely to get the big advances, but it’s safe to say a book cannot sell a hundred thousand copies if fewer than a hundred thousand people know about it.

 

Last, and far from least, is luck. Any bestselling author who tells you luck did not play a significant role in her or his success is lying to at least one of you. No less an authority than Dennis Lehane makes no bones about the fact his career took off when a clip of Bill Clinton carrying a copy of Mystic River was shown repeatedly as part of an ad for 60 Minutes.

 

Capturing the zeitgeist is part of this. Some books, and authors, barely miss blowing up because they’re either a year too early, a year too late; or the timing is right but the mix of ingredients is half a bubble off the sweet spot. No one can predict this. Hitting that sweet spot is akin to winning the lottery. Yes, you have to buy the ticket, but a lot of people bought tickets. The author’s unique and unmatched talent is not likely to be the determining factor.

 

What a bestseller does not need is to be particularly well written. We’ve all read bestsellers where the dialog is wooden, the similes are execrable, the description overflows with adjectives and adverbs, and the plot has more holes than St. Andrews. How does this happen?

 

Because the average reader doesn’t care about that shit.

 

Notice how I’ve been talking about the “average reader?” That’s because they are who buys books in sufficient quantities to create a bestseller. I venture a guess that at least 90% of those who read this blog are writers. Make peace with this right now: writers are, by definition, outliers. What we look for and care about in a book makes as much difference to the average reader as the weather in Poland does to a raccoon in North Carolina. These people don’t give a shit what we think of a book; they know what they like.

 

And they’re right to do so.

 

Life is short, and too many things compete to see which can make us the unhappiest. Everyone chooses books based on the qualities they enjoy most when reading. Writers may care more about the writing than the story; that’s okay. It’s also okay for someone who has worked an eight-to-ten-hour day, taken care of urgent household chores, and helped the kids with their homework before getting them off to bed to pick up a book solely to escape for half an hour before falling asleep.

 

I still don’t read many bestsellers for all the reasons I have expressed over the years. I have also learned that I am an outlier and take pains not to ruin anyone else’s enjoyment of any book, no matter what I might think of it. Entertainment is subjective and I can read with no one’s eyes except my own. Whatever you read, enjoy it. Life is too short not to.

The Effects of Bestsellers

There were no takers for today’s Diversity Friday slot, so I’ll fill it myself. If you’re reading this—and I sure hope you are or I’ll feel like a real dumbass asking you to do something—and are a woman, writer of color, LGBTQ, or basically anything other than a cisgender white male, please drop me a line at danakingcrime (at) gmail (dot) com and we’ll find an open spot for you. If you know a writer who fits any of the above descriptions and who might like an opportunity, please invite them to contact me. My goal is to feel guilty because I can’t accommodate everyone in as timely a manner as I would like. Work with me here.

Now to our regularly scheduled program.

Last Saturday was the tenth annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, a gem of an event that takes over downtown Gaithersburg MD and invites authors from all over the world. It’s become a must-go-to event for The Beloved Spouse™ and me the past few years and I recommend it without reservation for any readers.

Friend of the blog Ed Aymar was part of a thought-provoking panel that included John Copenhaver, Julie Maloney, and moderator Hannah Oliver Depp. Each author has a book out that handles some dark element of life we all wish didn’t exist, but does. As thought-provoking panels are wont to do, this one got me to thinking, though not necessarily in the way the panelists might have expected.

What makes a best-seller, and what do bestsellers say about us? Even more, how do the books affect us?

Bestsellers are, by and large, about events bigger than life. Donald Maas may not have invented the phrase “raising the stakes” in his Writing the Breakout Novel, but if he didn’t, he cemented it in the public consciousness. Maas is still the gold standard—he’s presenting his Breakout Novel spiel at a pre-Bouchercon event in Dallas—and books still break out because the situations become more dire; now things even start there and manage to get worse.

Human trafficking. Kidnapping. Remorseless and amoral drug cartels. Sociopathic spouses. Serial killers. These are the grist for the mill of mystery and thriller sales. When asked why these topics are so popular, the standard answer is that they provide safe havens for readers to explore the worst the world has to offer, but from a distance (our homes, where we feel safest), and with the knowledge that things will turn out at least relatively well.

What no one talks about is what effect such reading has on the life the art claims to imitate. I will not dispute the horror of human trafficking or drug abuse or serial killers or learning how vile the person is who sleeps next to you. All of these happen. What people seem to have lost is the perspective to remind themselves they don’t happen very often. With a modicum of care, one is more likely to be killed by a cow than kidnapped or tortured to death. (Don’t feel too safe. Cows kill more people than do sharks. That’s why I still eat steak, before the brutal bovine bastards decide it’s my turn.) It’s just that the kidnappings and torture killings are what makes the news and the bestseller lists, creating the impression the world is a far more dangerous place than it is.

Do I exaggerate? The “CSI Effect” is well documented, where juries demand DNA and trace evidence and hair samples and shoeprint matches because they see all that on the modern crime shows and think things really work that way. We have a surgical image of war in part because of what I call the Tom Clancy Effect, where all this marvelous hardware works exactly as it’s intended, every time. I saw a knowledgeable speaker asked once if our weapons actually worked that well. “In theory,” he said. “In practice something always goes wrong.” A complex military endeavor is as likely to turn into the abortive rescue of the Iran hostages in 1980 as the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

It’s fun to watch movies or read books where intricate conspiracies spin out. Just don’t start thinking things work that well in the real world. The writers always have the godlike power for the conspirators to catch a convenient break, or for something to go wrong enough to raise the stakes. The child kidnapped for sale as a sex slave just happens to have a father with a unique and relevant set of skills and a stepfather rich enough to place Dad wherever he needs to be in a matter of minutes.

This is all well and good so long as everyone remembers that life isn’t like that. Do all these things happen? Sure they do. Are they horrible? Goddamn right. The question folks seem more likely to forget to ask anymore is “How likely is it?” what are the odds your child will be whisked away by a stranger in the United States? About 1 in 300,000.

Too many of us live fear-based lives; it’s more apparent in political campaigns all the time. The Beloved Spouse™ knows an intelligent man who comes heavy to the movies because he’s afraid to be caught there unarmed when the shooting starts. How many people are killed by gunman in theaters each year? One is too many, so too many. What are the odds one of them will be you? Infinitesimal. Be safe. Be vigilant. Do not be paranoid.

Nothing is guaranteed in life. A security system will not prevent someone from stealing your car or breaking into your house if they want to badly enough. The best we can hope for is to dissuade those who aren’t dead solid serious about it. The best we can do is not to let the fears we allow to be induced in ourselves, whatever their origin, to get the better of us.

Bestseller Style

Advertising an author as “bestselling” doesn’t do anything in the way of getting me to buy his or her books. I’m not a snob about it (“if it’s a bestseller the hoi polloi must read it”); there are things about best sellers I generally don’t like. Now that I’ve teed it up, I might as well tell you what they are.

Most bestsellers are not renowned for their inventive use of language. Masses of people must read for the story alone and don’t care about the author’s wordsmithing talents. I can’t remember the last time I stopped while reading a bestseller to say to myself, “Damn. I wish I’d written that.” I may, and often do, admire how the story was crafted, but the craft of the writing isn’t memorable.

Genre fiction is sometimes condemned for adhering to convention; it’s the bestsellers that tar us all with that brush. Doesn’t matter if it’s a mystery or a thriller, there’s a romantic angle somewhere. Or at least a sexual one. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but too often they’re shoehorned in there like forcing the fiftieth egg down Luke Jackson’s gullet. A favorite is the couple, thrust together early in the book, who can’t resist a frantic coupling when they know their pursuers could kick down the door at any minute.

I prefer fiction of the “keep up or catch up” school. I don’t want to have potentially important events telegraphed to me. Spare me the needless exposition, and I can live without too many definitions. The Wire never did tell us what a PEN register was, but the term’s use in context allowed anyone who was paying attention to figure out it had to do with phones, and could tell who you were talking to. That was all you needed to know to follow the story. I don’t need to know how a my television picks up signals from a cable and forms them into pixels and sound waves I can see and hear in order to enjoy a television program. I’m not saying the author should confuse the reader, but give him some credit.

Last, but maybe most frustrating, there’s explaining things. Not like the previous paragraph, where the author is making sure I don’t miss anything that might confuse me or make me lose the thread and put down the book. I mean explaining things that, for me not to get, I might be too dumb to read the book in the first place. I’ll cite two examples, both from bestselling authors whose books I enjoy and read regularly.

From The Drop, by Michael Connolly. Harry Bosch has just arrived at the scene of an apparent suicide, a man jumping from a seventh-floor balcony:

“We have two scenes,” [Rampone} said. “We’ve got the splat around back here on the side. And then the room the guy was using. That’s the top floor, Room 79.”

It was the routine way of police officers to dehumanize the daily horrors that came with the job. Jumpers were called splats.

Thanks, Mike. You’re in the pantheon, and deservedly so, but I worry about anyone who couldn’t figure what a “splat” was in this context.

There’s this, from one of my heroes (and The Beloved Spouse’s secret lust object) Robert Crais. Early in The Sentry, Joe Pike is seated with a woman at a sidewalk café and notices something across the street:

The man sauntered out from behind the statue and fell in with a group of passing tourists. He wore an unbuttoned pale orange short-sleeved shirt over a white T-shirt, dark jeans, and sunglasses. The shirt and the bald head keyed a memory, and Pike realized the man had passed them before. Pike had not seen him double back, which made Pike suspicious because Pike had outstanding situational awareness, which meant he noticed everything in his environment.

“Meant” and “because” may be the two words I fear most in any fiction narrative. (Dialog is okay. People explain things to each other all the time.) Those two words are the shot across the reader’s bow: “We’re afraid you might be too stupid to understand this advanced concept, so we’re going to explain it to your dumb ass.” Me, personally? I’m insulted.

(“Blepharospasm” is another word that will set me off, for different reasons. I came across it in a Robin Cook bestseller, where he did the opposite of what I deride above, dropping excessive medical terminology on the reader to impress them. In Cook’s books, people don’t bleed to death; they exsanguinate. What’s a blepharospasm, you ask? I had to look it up, too. It’s an eye tic. Swear to God. Here’s a new rule for Bill Maher if he really wants to be helpful: No verb can take longer to say than the action it describes.)

I should make one thing clear: I am not criticizing bestseller authors or their readers, and there’s no sour graping here. God bless them all. First the writers, who deserve every cent they make for having found a way to get and keep people reading. And the readers for their critical role in this symbiotic relationship. If no one wanted to read, there would be no need for writers. Readers always come first. All I’m saying here is why I don’t scour the bestseller lists for my next read. Me, personally.

Epilogue:

“But wait!” I hear some cry out. (Don’t worry. I hear people cry out in my head all the time.) “How can you hope to write a bestseller if you don’t read them to learn how they’re put together?” I don’t. Writing a bestseller is the last thing on my mind. (Okay, the next to last. Listening to Ben Stein read The da Vinci Code on an endless loop is the last thing.) The most practical reason why authors should write “the book you want to read” is because you’re going to have to read your book so damn often. I write because I like to tell the stories I tell. If other people like to read them, that’s great. If people are willing to pay to read them, even better. If enough people are willing to pay to read them that I can make an appreciable sum of money from them, that’s like stealing. I don’t begrudge any bestseller or its author, but just because I respect their primacy in the field doesn’t mean I can’t be successful if I never write one.