Jeff Gerke - Hack Your Reader’s Brain: Bring the power of brain chemistry to bear on your fiction

Chapter 1

Anatomy of a Bestseller

Youve got to read this novel I just finishedI couldnt put it down!

Sound good? Would you like readers to say that about the fiction your write? Im guessing yes.

All of us dream to hear readers say they found our book irresistible, that they consumed it in a single sitting, or that they looked up and realized it was three in the morning and had no idea where eight hours had gone.

We want them reading the last page and then immediately going to Amazon to see if weve written anything else.

Most of all, we want them becoming evangelists for our book, making it their mission to get everyone in their circle to stop what theyre doing, hurry to a bookstore, and snag themselves a copy of their own.

Because when lots of people buy lots of copies, that makes a bestseller.

Yes, But How?

Of course we want that, but how do we do it?

Creating a bestseller is a great big ol mysteryor else everyone would be doing it.

What if I told you I could guarantee that you could keep your reader reading your book from beginning to end, even staying up well past bedtime to finish the book?

Can I guarantee a bestseller? Fraid not. I wish. But I can guarantee that, if you use the skills Im going to give you in this little book, you will keep your reader hooked from start to finish. Whether shell become an evangelist for your book, and whether her evangelism will prove abundantly fruitful, is out of my hands and yours.

But the first part, the crucial partkeeping her glued to the story until The End is in our hands.

And Im going to show you how.

What It Isnt

Not only am I a published novelist and former publisher of a fiction-only publishing house, I also teach writers how to write great fiction.

For the first 20 years of my writing, editing, publishing, and teaching career, up until 2014 or so, I believed that a novel had a chance to become a bestseller if the fiction craftsmanship used in writing it was at a high level. Become a great craftsman, I believed and taught, and your book can take off.

So I spent those 20 years traveling the country and the world teaching the craft of fiction. It was time well spent, and I dont regret a moment of it.

But over the years, I couldnt ignore a certain phenomenon. Time after time, blockbuster novels would light the world on fire, and when I read them, I would find, almost universally, this awful, sickening truth.

The books stunk.

They were terribly written. Awful. Heinous. Atrocious. Scandalously bad.

Not in the stories or themes or characters or whatever, but in the craft. Chapters full of telling. Horrible vocabulary and stupid wordings. Insipid dialogue and archaic speech attributions. The author didnt seem able to keep a consistent POV to save his or her life. Dont get me started about the ly adverbs, gerunds, and passive voice.

And yet

And yet, they were blockbuster bestsellers.

When I finished teaching any given class at a writers conference, inevitably someone would come up to me and say, You just told us to show and not tell [or whatever Id just spoken on], but [insert name of bestselling novel] is full of telling on every page. How do you explain that?

My answer was usually something like, That book isnt a bestseller because of all the telling but in spite of it. But even as I said it, I knew it was lame. And after saying it again and again for years, it finally got to me.

What, I asked myself, is going on here? Why do books with horrible craftsmanship become bestsellers? Why do these craft issues seem so important to me but seem to have no impact on a books success?

Is there an inverse relationship, I wondered. Do all novels with bad craftsmanship become bestsellers? Is that the secret? Are novels with good craftsmanship somehow turning readers off?

No, that theory didnt work, because some books with high craft actually do become bestsellers, and many books with low craft do sink into oblivion.

So what was going on?

It wasnt that novels with high craft did well or poorly, or that novels with low craft did poorly or well. The awful truth that loomed before me was that craft, high or low, seemed to have no bearing whatsoever on a books success.

Think about that. I found it deeply soberingand sad.

But it seemed to fit the observed facts.

Amazon Comments

How many times have you read a 5-star Amazon review that read like this, I loved this book because there were no to-be verbs!?

Yeah, I havent seen that one either.

I gave this book only three stars because the writer stuck with said and asked instead of using alternatives like opined and queried, and also she used the word that a lot.

Havent spotted many like that? I dont mean reviews written by the frustrated novelists panning a book for craft issues, but real people, the average reader, the Wal-Mart reader. Those folks like or dislike a book for reasons other than craft.

They dont complain about the sentences that begin with participial phrasesthey say they couldnt stop thinking about the story even when they werent reading.

They dont laud a novel because it doesnt include buried dialoguethey laud it because they couldnt stop turning pages.

They dont bemoan the many characters whose names began with the same letterthey say they felt like they knew the characters and held them almost as friends or family.

Whatever mysterious thing makes a novel a bestseller isnt its use (or non-use) of a prologue or the immediate (or delayed) occurrence of the inciting event. It apparently, to judge by Amazon reviews, has almost nothing to do with the things we concern ourselves with at writers conferences and in books and articles on improving fiction craftsmanship.

It has less to do with the how, it seems, and more to do with the what. The how is craftsmanship, but the what is engagement. Utter, unshakeable, overpowering enthrallment.

So What Have I Been Doing All This Time?

The realization that the fiction craftsmanship Id spent so long teachingand upon which Id built a careerseemed to have little or no effect on whether a book became a bestseller or not was a hard blow to absorb. It took me to the mat, if you want to know the truth.

I felt like the medieval physician who has been bleeding patients and using leechcraft for his entire career, who then comes to believe that everything hes been doing has not been helpful at all. If the patient got better, he realizes, it was in spite of his ministrations, not because of them. And how many patients did he lose (i.e., kill) because hed been operating under the wrong philosophy of medicine?

The issue wasnt so much that his care harmed or helped. The issue was that all his study of humours and balancing phlegm with bile in the choleric patient had no bearing whatsoever. His leeches had as much to do with a patients recovery as a tuna fish has to do with the shape of a snowflake.

I can imagine him throwing his hands up in despair and crying, What have I been doing all this time? I need to stop getting in the way of the patients health and see if I can figure out what I should be doing instead. But if the balance of humours isnt the key to health, what is?

Thats What I Did

When I realized that my own teaching about fiction craftsmanship, while solid, wasnt giving my students or clients much improvement in their books chances to become bestsellers, I found myself in a crisis. I needed to start teaching things that would help a novels chances, or I needed to find another line of work.

So I asked myself, if high craft isnt what makes a novel a bestseller, what is?

I went back to that anomaly Id had to contend with every time anyone had asked me about some bestseller that broke all the rules of craft. Thats where the secret seemed to lie. If I could figure out why a book could succeed despite low fiction quality, I would be on to something big.