Masterclass: Write a Bestseller

How to plan, write and publish a bestselling work of fiction

Jacq Burns

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781473600034
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473600058
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

LEARN HOW TO WRITE A BOOK WHICH STANDS OUT FROM THE CROWD. There is no precise formula for writing a bestseller, but there are secrets, skills and techniques that will dramatically improve your odds of publishing a bestselling novel.Whatever your motivation - whether sick of rejections, getting ready to approach a publisher, or with an idea you think is unbeatable - you need to read this book before you do anything else. It gives you the key insights into what makes a bestseller and explains the trends and conventions of different genres, before helping you get a real handle on the writing (and revising) process. A third of the book is devoted to pitching and selling your novel both to traditional agents and as a self-published author, with incisive and cutting-edge insights into writing for Amazon and becoming an 'authorpreneur'. ABOUT THE SERIES
The Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children's books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.

PART ONE

Plan

1

The best-laid plans …

Many a publisher, agent and author would kill for a crystal ball that could foretell a bestseller. Choosing what to publish is not an exact science and agents and publishers invest in books based on their strong belief in the project, a sense of what the market wants, past experience of what sells, and possibly a little gut feeling.

If it were possible to reduce a bestseller to a recipe or formula it might look something like this:

Good idea + great story + Zeitgeisty or timeless + fits genre conventions + good-enough writing + plausible and interesting characters + interesting setting + series of books + promotable author + luck + marketing strategy + author engagement + discoverability = strong word of mouth and high visibility = bestseller.

Not every bestseller has all these things, but they do share many of the elements that make a bestseller.

What is a bestseller and how do I write one?

It should help your understanding of what it takes to write and publish a bestseller if you spend some time looking at the books that readers are buying in any given period. Study the weekly bestseller charts in the newspapers over a number of weeks, or the charts in publishing industry magazines such as the UK’s The Bookseller.

The Bookseller Official UK Bestsellers Chart is constructed from a weekly list of the top 5,000 bestselling books in the UK. Gathered by Nielsens BookScan, it captures 90–95 per cent of book sales in the UK from a huge range of outlets, including Amazon, Asda, B&Q, the BBC, Blackwells, ELC, The Eden Project, HMV, The Independent, the Imperial War Museum, Mothercare, art galleries. PC World, Play.com, the Saatchi Gallery, Sainsburys. Tesco, Tesco online, Waterstones and WHSmith. The figures don’t include independent bookshops or digital sales.

Since 1998 the charts have reflected actual sales: point-of-sale data is gathered via the barcode on the back of a book. Before 1998, it was a matter of calling up a selection of ‘representative’ booksellers and asking them for their figures. And of course this was open to guestimates, mistakes and favouritism.

You can also check the biggest online platform, Amazon’s top 100 chart (which, they say, is updated hourly based on sales) and you’ll see that you can go into separate charts for hardback, paperback and Kindle, where you’ll find a mix of trade-published and self-published books. From that page, you can then go into different genres to look at the list toppers for each genre.

Analyse a bestseller

If you find studying the charts useful, once you have decided on your idea and the genre you will write in, find a book in a similar genre to yours and unpick it to find out what it gets right, as well as analysing the marketing campaign that got it into the charts.

1 How is the book described?

2 What distinguishes the cover from others in the same genre?

3 What is the author’s backstory?

4 Is it clear from the cover and blurb what genre the book is in?

5 Can you work out the book’s target readership by looking at reviews and recommendation sites such as Goodreads?

Can we predict what will sell?

Generally, it is thought that it is not possible to write a bestseller to order, although, as we have seen, bestsellers often share many of the same elements.

The publisher most associated with writing to a formula is arguably Mills & Boon. So many people attempt to write a novel for that imprint that the publisher produces guidance for authors, where they advise: ‘Innovate, don’t imitate!’ Writers who think that just knocking out 50,000 words can create a Mills & Boon bestseller are in for a shock. Of the thousands of submissions each year only 0.5 per cent are published. There is no formula – only a format, as with all genre fiction, which allows room for creative expression, unique writing and memorable characters. So throw those clichés out of the window!’

While a formula remains elusive, the ingredients – or words – that give you the greatest chance of achieving a bestseller have been calculated. Computer scientists at Stony Brook University studied 800 books over eight subgenres. Using an algorithm, they were able to predict the success of each title. These predictions were then compared with the actual success of each title. They found that:

• successful books tended to feature more nouns and adjectives, as well as a disproportionate use of the words ‘and’ and ‘but’, when compared with less successful titles

• the most popular books also featured more verbs relating to ‘thought-processing’ such as ‘recognized’ and ‘remembered’

• less successful books featured topical, cliché words and phrases such as ‘love’, as well as negative and extreme words including ‘breathless’ and ‘risk’

• books that sold poorly also favoured the use of ‘explicitly descriptive verbs of actions and emotions’ such as ‘wanted’, ‘took’, ‘promised’ ‘cried’ and ‘cheered’. Books that made explicit reference to body parts also scored poorly. (That last point seems a little at odds with the popularity of erotic fiction, say, but we’ll leave you to look at the full study for yourself.)

Key idea

Read more about this study at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2538517/Want-write-bestseller-Avoid-talking-body-parts-emotions-negativity-include-plenty-quotes.html#ixzz32jG3F5zW

Perhaps there is a formulaic route to a bestseller: could it be done by figuring out what people are buying, and combining this knowledge with the bestselling words spat out by Stony Brook’s algorithm? Just when it seems within our grasp, however, there’s another obstacle to overcome: it takes time to write a book, so unless you are speedy or assemble a writing team, by the time you write to your formula, the market may have moved on.

Publishing is a subjective business and it is also a victim of fashion, meaning that genres can go in and out of vogue. It is hard to pinpoint exactly why and when audience tastes change, but it is clear that they do. In terms of what is published, shifts can occur because there is (or is not) an editor to champion a particular genre. At other times, a genre can enjoy a renaissance, whether driven by one successful title that is swiftly followed by copycat titles riding on its coat tails, or by an editor with a passion and the imagination to publish something new. And, of course, the likes of the Harry Potter and Fifty Shades of Grey series have led, respectively, to the emergence of a whole new young adult genre and the resurgence of erotic fiction. When a genre does particularly well in the charts, agents see a surge of manuscripts submitted in those genres. And whatever they may say about the flood of submissions, for a time agents and editors will be looking for new authors in that genre in order to cut in on the bestselling action. When readers are wild about a book, they want to read more of the same, and publishers are happy to feed that appetite.

In publishin...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents 
• About the author
• Introduction
• Part One: Plan
• Part Two: Write
• Part Three: Pitch
• Part Four: Publish
• Part Five: Sell
• Appendices
• Resources
• Further help
• Copyright