Last week on “The Economist,” a lively and documented report appeared, “How to write a bestseller”, of which the Florentine publisher goWare has prepared an excellent adaptation. With the usual style of the magazine, which has invented a genre of journalism in its own right, we discuss a theme that runs throughout thepublishing industry as the more broadly cultural one.
The theme is this: there is a recognizable and applicable formula or model for packaging a successful book, that is, a product that can become a bestseller and repay with a stratospheric multiple the effort of the author and his publisher who invested time and resources in the undertaking?
Reading the article you understand that for this formula you should turn to the laboratory of the Wizard Merlin. Simply there is no formula.
In the last year, however, something unexpected happened. An innovation à la Schumpeter has arrived, that is, one that leaves a beautiful scar, which begins to shape an answer to our question. It is thegenerative artificial intelligence general.
I do
This technology not only shows the ability to analyze and refine unstructured data to uncover trends in public taste and behavior, but also reveals a ability surprising in writing, in developing plots, characters, settings also in the different styles of the Western canon.
With the naturalness of a skilled craftsman he also manages to understand and apply those few tricks that, in the general darkness, we consider necessary in the construction of a bestseller.
It's no wonder that three successful writers like John Grisham, Jonathan Franken e George GG Martin have banded together to take OpenAI to court on charges of violating copyright in their training ChatGPT to write in their style after having domesticated it with their writings protected by copying and usage rights.
Now, however, we leave you to the considerations of the "Economist" which naturally refer to the Anglo-Saxon scenario. One can safely think that the situation of the book industry and of writers in Italy and also in Europe, on the appropriate scale, is not very different from that described in the following text.
One billion copies sold
The books of Danielle steel they deal with “Family. Courage. Loyalty”, as illustrated by the cover of one of them. They also deal with “Wealth. Fear. Vendetta. Love”, as the cover of another states.
Steel herself said she writes about “things that happen to all of us.” She agrees but she focuses a little too much on the kind of things that involve Wealth, Palaces, Emotions in capital letters. A little less on matters involving tax returns, or cutting one's toenails or going to the supermarket.
But this doesn't matter: his books sell an impressive number of copies. Steel has written over 200 books: the latest, “Happiness,” came out in August and the next, “Second Act,” comes out in October.
With its billion copies sold she is one of the most commercially successful living authors. Her novels are a sort of literary sediment that settles on the shelves of tourist villages and clubs all over the world. She didn't just create books, but a brand: everyone, whether they've read them or not (and most will say they haven't), knows what a “Danielle Steel” she is. Obviously, the literary world ignores her.
The editorial activity
Publishing is a strange business. In the UK and America it is worth around 37 billion dollars, but this value does not come from literature how we study it at university. Rather, it comes from an activity designed for the market.
An authoritative history of English literature has sixty quotations of “Shakespeare”; ten of the term “sublime”; eight times it is spoken of as blank verse, but it does not contain any concept or occurrence relating to "market" or "turnover".
In another history of literature, i popular novels – that is, “jam tarts for the mind”, as William Thackeray, the English novelist and author of Vanity Fair, called them – find an opening under the title: “Themes of popular culture”. Gore Vidal opens an article on bestsellers with the scathing observation that “shit has an integrity,” and from then on becomes increasingly disdainful to assert that there is zero of that “quality” in bestsellers.
However, the book publishing industry depends on these despised bestsellers. Typically in the month of September publishing houses they publish the titles they focus on the most in terms of sales. However, it happens that most books will not bring a profit, but a loss.
The mirage of 5.000 copies
Producing, printing and advertising a book costs money between the 15.000 and 20.000 dollars, estimates Mark Richards of Swift Press, an independent publisher (naturally for the American or British market, for other countries a scale criterion must be applied).
According to Richards they are necessary at least 5.000 copies to reach the draw with Costs direct and general.
Most books never get there: according to Nielsen BookData. For example, in the United Kingdom, one of the world's largest book markets, only 2022% of titles sold more than 0,4 copies in 5.000.
This year's books Danielle steelinstead, they have sold 268.000 copies. They may be jam tarts, but that's the reason why people devour them.
The fact is that publishers show an almost total inability to predict which books will sell and which will not. They try.
The randomness of the bestseller
As Markus Dohle, then at the helm of Penguin Random House, the world's largest book publisher, said last year, “Success is accidental. Bestsellers are random. That's why we're called Random House."
Publishers choose i potential bestsellers as you bought lottery tickets, that is, with the hope that it goes well. Taking credit for a bestseller is, according to an expression by Jonathan Karp (CEO of Simon & Schuster), “like taking credit for time”.
The word “best-seller” appeared for the first time in 1890 and since then the first sales charts began to appear.
A bestseller can also be a very well-made, literary work. The novels of the English writer HG Wells have climbed to the top of the top charts of best-selling books.
Bestsellers aren't always like Wells' books, in fact they don't really need to be. Sex sells well, but celebrities sell better. “Spare, the minor” by Prince Harry, published in January 2023, broke the record for the fastest nonfiction book to become a bestseller.
Some general models
In 2018, a team of researchers at Northeastern University analyzed nearly eight years of New York Times bestseller list rankings and came up with some general patterns. Some ingredients that make a book a bestseller are identifiable according to Burcu Yucesoy, the coordinator of the group.
First of all, aspiring writers who are not aiming for the Nobel Prize should consider that the narrative sells better than non-fiction; thrillers and love stories sell best; Name recognition matters a lot. If you want to write about non-fiction, which doesn't sell, then it's a good idea to move towards the genre of biography, which instead meets readers' tastes more.
Writers themselves often don't know how to explain their success in a way that they can communicate it.
In 1956 Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, published an essay on how to write a successful book. And he comes to this conclusion: “There is only one recipe for a bestseller, and it's very simple. As long as they have one quality: encouraging the reader to turn page after page without closing it”.
This is true, but it completely eludes the vexed question.
The parallel with food
Jo nesbo, a successful Norwegian thriller writer, thinks page-turning prose resembles good food: “You can't tell what the ingredients are… but you discover them by tasting it.”
Lionel shriver, an American author, is equally skeptical about the modeling of the bestseller. He thinks that if everything were reduced to a procedure… then everyone would write a bestseller. “No one – he says – sits down and starts creating a story that only five people will read”.
But if you examine the New York Times bestseller, the trends become a little clearer. In the last week, three of the top ten bestsellers were romance novels; one a thriller; four were by a single author, Colleen hoover, a writer of romance novels. Hoover had to self-publish her first book, “Slammed,” further proving the unpredictability of success.
Only one of the ten titles on the list, “The Covenant of Water”, is a text that can be called literary. For the prevailing taste it is too dark, there are too many similarities as in Proust, and the vocabulary is very high.
The sun is coming
Le settings of the bestsellers are sunny, exotic, prestigious. Fleming, for example, says that in his books “the sun always shines”.
Danielle Steel's books have titles like "Five Days in Paris" or "Sunset in St. Tropez", not "Two Weeks in Glasgow". Female characters tend to call themselves persuasive names like “Lily” and say things like “I only want you”; the male ones utter sentences like “We have rifles and grenades. They have 50 caliber. There are few women who work in real jobs and always in subordinate positions.
Some stylistic features also appear: le phrases they tend to be brevi. Very short. And repetitive. Very repetitive. Think Hemingway. On holiday.
Almost all bestsellers make the most of the research carried out on Google about the places or types of characters in the story.
A recent book by Danielle Steel opens with the heroine looking at Rome and mentions "St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican City, the dome of the Basilica of San Carlo al Corso and, to the north, Villa Medici and the Borghese Gardens." This is a way to increase the number of words without cerebral effort by evoking enchanting places.
“The Da Vinci Code” also offers very detailed tours of Paris with the effect of pushing the reader not so much to read the book, but take out your iPhone and open Google Maps to get a personal tour of the city.
The prolificacy
Perhaps the most striking quality of bestselling authors is their prolificacy. James Patterson, American thriller writer, has produced more than 340 books (some in collaboration with other writers or public subjects, including Bill Clinton).
Such speed in churning out books, as Truman Capote once said, is not so much about writing as it is about typing (Just Type. Not Write).
“Don't worry about writing well, just write” is a refrain among bestselling authors. Ms. Steel says she taps until her nails bleed.
Fleming recommended writing 2.000 words a day and not “smearing” them with “too much introspection and self-criticism.”
Some periods of these books could have used a little more introspection, or at least a second reading.
For example, one character finds her lover in bed with another woman and observes “the only thing that struck me was that her face was as expressionless as her buttocks, staring at me from the bed.” We might say, as readers, are all his feelings here? Perhaps the psychological state of the character could have been articulated a little better.
Children's books
However, if you really want to write a bestseller, we must ignore Danielle Steel and the other novelists of her forge.
In reality, the book that has sold the most copies in America in the last ten years is not by any member of that circle. It's about “Oh, the things you will see! (Oh, the Places You'll Go!)” by Dr. Seuss, published in Italy by Mondadori.
In third place is another classic of literature for boys and girls, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carl, published in Italy again by Mondadori. THE libri per bambini not only do they sell well, but they continue to sell, year after year, creating fans across generations.
And, among other things, they perfectly obey the bestseller formula: short Hemingway-style sentences, pleasant settings and, of course, excellent weather. Or, as Eric Carle writes: “One Sunday morning the warm sun came out and… pop!”. The book became a worldwide success, a bestseller.
From: How to write a bestseller, “The Economist”, 25 August 2023
