Jodie Archer - The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel

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For Andrew, a father, and Angela, a wife

We are the types to call someone up and take them for a glass of wine to say thanks, or even stop by their place with a bottle. But writing this book has taught us that there are many unspoken duties of any respectable author, and not fulfilling them is just not a good idea. The formal acknowledgments page is likely one of them. So, to Don Fehr and his support team at Trident Media Group, thank you. Daniela Rapp and the team at St. Martins Press in New York, thank you. Laura Stickney and the team at Penguin Press in London, thank you. Thanks to Aaron Dominguez and Emelie Harstad at the University of Nebraska. Thanks to Andrea Lunsford, Ramon Saldivar, and Sianne Ngai at Stanford University. Thanks to Gabi Kirilloff, Yeojin Kim, and Mark Bessen. Thanks to Bridget Flynn, Janet Warham, Matthew A. and Audrey Jockers. Rob McDonald, thank you. Stephen and Jenny Whitehead, thank you. Elizabeth Wood and Dan Powers, thank you. Bodi Mack, thank you, too.

You can all claim your glass of wine from us anytime (except for the kids).

Back in the spring of 2010, Stieg Larssons agent was having a good day. On June 13, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest third in the series from a previously unknown authordebuted at number one in hardback in the New York Times. You can imagine the lists would have been a pleasing sight over morning coffee. Hornets Nest straight in at the top, Dragon Tattoo at number one in two paperback formats, and The Girl Who Played with Fire a roundly satisfying number two. This had been going on for forty-nine weeks in the U.S., and for three solid years in Europe. It would have been hard not to be smug.

The following month Amazon would announce Larsson was the first author ever to sell a million copies on the Kindle, and over the next two years sales in all editions would top seventy-five million. Not bad for an unknown political activistturned-novelist from a little Scandinavian country, especially one who had chosen a rather uncharming title in Swedish and had written some brutal scenes of rape and torture. Men Who Hate Women or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as it was renamed in Englishwas the sensation book of the year in more than thirty countries.

The press didnt understand the success. Major newspapers commissioned opinion pieces on what on earth was going on in the book world. Why this book? Why the frenzy? What was the secret? Who could have known?

Answers were lackluster. Reviewers scratched their heads about it. They found fault with the novels structure, style, plotting, and character. They groaned over the translations. They complained about the stupidity of the reading public. But still copies sold as fast as they were printedwhether you were in the UK, the U.S., in Japan, or in Germany; whether you were male, female, old, young, black, white, straight, or gay. Whoever you were, practically anywhere, you knew people who were reading those books.

That doesnt happen very often in the book world. The industry might enjoy a phenomenon breakout like Larsson once a year, if that. E. L. James has been the biggest breakout since, with Fifty Shades of Grey, and unlike Larsson she was available for a big publicity tour. Larsson had died before publication. The level of sales his trilogy achieved without even the backing of its author was supposedly just unfathomable. Freakish. Unpredictable.

Lets consider some numbers. A company in Delaware called Bowker is the global leader in bibliographic information and the exclusive provider for unique identification numbers (ISBN) for books in the U.S. Their annual report states that approximately fifty to fifty-five thousand new works of fiction are published every year. Given the increasing number of self-published ebooks that carry no ISBN, this is a conservative number. In the U.S., about two hundred to two hundred twenty novels make the New York Times bestseller lists every year. Even with conservative numbers, thats less than half a percent of works of fiction published. Of that half a percent, even fewer hit the bestseller lists and stay there week after week to become what the industry calls a double-digit book. Only handfuls of authors manage those ten or more weeks on the list, and of those maybe just three or four will sell a million copies of a single title in the U.S. in one year. Why those books?

Traditionally, it is believed that there are certain skills a novelist needs to master in order to win readers: a sense of plot, compelling characters, more than basic competence with grammar. Writers with big fan bases have mastered more: an eye for the human condition, the twists and turns of plausibility, that rare but appropriate use of the semicolon. These are good writers, and with time and dedication almost all genuinely good writers will find their audience. But when it comes to the kind of success involved in hundreds of thousands of people reading the same book at the same time this thriller and not that thriller, this potential Pulitzer and not that potential Pulitzerwell, unless Oprah is involved, that signals the presence of a fine stardust thats apparently just too difficult to detect. The sudden and seemingly blessed success of books like the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Help, Gone Girl, and The Da Vinci Code is considered very lucky, but as random as winning the lottery.

The word bestseller, by the way, has always been a book world term, and as a word it is relatively young. It first entered the dictionary in the late nineteenth century, about the time of the first list of books ranked by consumer sales. While it should be a neutral term, it has developed some connotations that are likely misleading. The literary magazine The Bookman started to print Sales of Books during the Month in 1891 in London and in 1895 in New York after the International Copyright Act of 1891 slowed down the distribution of cheap pirated copies of British novels. Until then, no sales statistics had really been possible. From the beginning, the listswhich were printed in each major city and typically reported the top six sellers of the monthwere about two things that were new to the book world. The bestseller lists were about sales as the only criterion for inclusion, and a proxy recommendation system for what to read next. These recommendations were based not on the choices of a select few reviewers or publishers, but on the choices of everyday fellow readers. The readers choice was and still is the only vote. The term bestseller, then, should carry no intrinsic comment on quality or type of book, and is not a synonym for either genre or popular fiction. While the word has often been used pejoratively by some members of the literary establishment, who have felt that the collective taste of the reading market signals bad literature, the data itself suggests a less subjective and more balanced truth. Bestsellers include Pulitzer Prize winners and Great American Novels as well as books by famous mass-market writers. The list can house Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood alongside Michael Connelly and Debbie Macomber. This is why the bestseller list is such a rich cultural construct and so dynamic to study.