Best Selling Fiction

[Arkie]

Source: New York Times. From my Sunday paper, 5-3-09.

1. JUST TAKE MY HEART, by Mary Higgins Clark. A detective who has had a heart transplant discovers that her life is at risk when she tries a murder case.
2. LOOK AGAIN, by Lisa Scottoline. A reporter learns that her adoped son may have been abducted from his birth mother.
3. TURN COAT, by Jim Butcher. Book 11 of the Dresden Files series about a wizard detective in Chicago.
4. LONG LOST, by Harlan Coben. As Myron Bolitar helps an ex-lover who has become a suspect in her husband's death, they search for her daughter.
5. THE HOST, by Stephenie Meyer. Aliens have taken control of the minds and bodies of most humans, but one woman won't surrender.
6. THE ASSOCIATE, by John Grisham. An idealistic law school graduate is forced to take a job at a large brutalizing law firm.
7. HANDLE WITH CARE, by Jodi Picoult. A woman whose daughter has a dangerous birth defect must decide whether to sue her obstetrician, an old friend.
8. FATALLY FLAKY, by Diane Mott Davidson. The caterer Goldy Schultz tries to outwit a killer on the grounds of an Aspen spa.
9. THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. A journalist meets the island's old Nazi resisters.
10. BONEMAN'S DAUGHTERS, by Ted Dekker. The hunt for a serial killer of young women.

[seun]

Fair enough although I'm not sure of your point. Care to elaborate?

[Arkie]

Fair enough although I'm not sure of your point. Care to elaborate?

I thought the list might provide information about questions often appearing in this thread. Title, subject matter, authors, and with a little googling: publishers and agents. And too, how a concise blurb can tell what the book is about.

[IdiotsRUs]

Well those are the titles. ( Where you are at least, my bestseller list is slightly different)

The rest still needs to be researched. Which is easy enough at your local bookshop anyway.

Now if it was 'what makes a bestseller'

Actually I'm still not sure of your point.

[Gillhoughly]

Now if it was 'what makes a bestseller' No one knows. Especially not the publishers or else every single release from all of them would be a bestseller.

Publishers shotgun and hope for the best.

Writers--if they're smart--write what they love most and hope for the best, ignoring trends.

I'm not familiar with all the names on that current list, but I'm betting they all have a long track record of other books, that none are an overnight success. They put in the effort and paid their dues.

[backslashbaby]

Well, I notice mine isn't like any of these. Oh, well. 'Bestseller' doesn't have to be the goal.

I am irked that in grocery stores, airports, etc., everything is so similar! Throw us a bone and offer one different kind of story on those stands, please publishers (stores?)?

[Garpy]

A vaguely useful guide in that attempting to duplicate the voice or stories of these writers it absolutely what NOT to do. You've already missed the boat on Picoult styled misery-mems, or Meyer-esque touchy-feely soft scifi, courtroom-based Grisham styled thrillers, or Coben-esque mysteries.

Far better in fact to go trawl a bestseller list from 15-25 years ago and get your inspiration from there.

[unicornjam]

Far better in fact to go trawl a bestseller list from 15-25 years ago and get your inspiration from there.

LOL. I actually looked that up. It's a list of the number-one NYT best sellers from 1942 to 2009.

http://www.hawes.com/no1_f_d.htm

[IdiotsRUs]

No one knows. Especially not the publishers or else every single release from all of them would be a bestseller.

Publishers shotgun and hope for the best.

Writers--if they're smart--write what they love most and hope for the best, ignoring trends.

I'm not familiar with all the names on that current list, but I'm betting they all have a long track record of other books, that none are an overnight success. They put in the effort and paid their dues.

Yeah I know, you can't pin down the bestseller, and especially not from a list of titles and names. It's a list of them what got lucky, due to a lot of hard work :D ( All right, mostly that ) And if course you can deduce weird things from that list. From the UK one I might deduce I'd do well if I'm a Yank writing crime. So, as I said, wasn't sure of the point of posting it.

[blacbird]

No one knows.

Nonsense. I know perfectly well what makes a best-seller:

A lot of people buy it.

Nothing more complicated than that.

For the established name writer, often the name is all it takes. Look at the cover of any book, and if the author's name is in a bigger font than the title is, you know exactly what the marketing strategy is. Stephanie Meyer right now could sell a collection of her grocery lists.

The more pertinent question regarding "best-sellers" is what makes the first best-seller for any writer?

caw

[ChristineR]

Math geek here. A lot of research has gone into what makes a bestseller. They look at things like number of murders, number of sex scenes, relative placement of the above, number of words in the title, size of the vocabulary and so on.

Obviously no one has figured it out, at least not beyond the point when you stop comparing apples to oranges and start comparing, say, midlist writer spy thrillers to midlist writer spy thrillers. The consensus seems to be that what makes a bestseller in its genre is simply people telling their friends to read it. Problem is that a certain number of people have to read it in the first place for the friends to have someone advising them. It really just appears that due to a combination of mostly meaningless and seemingly random factors, a certain book will reach a critical number of readers, which generates more readers and more recommendations, and then almost everybody who reads that sort of book will have that book recommended by a like-minded friend and the book becomes a bestseller.

So if you want a bestseller, the only real recomendations are write a good book, and write in a genre that will be the next big thing.

[BooksAndChocolate]

Get 5 minutes on Oprah with your first book and you will climb to best seller status when she tells the world to go out and buy. :)

If getting Oprah is not possible, then I think it's like others have said it's managing to get a LOT of readers to buy the book and RECOMMEND it to stores who don't carry it, Libraries who don't carry it already and a TON of book clubs.

For writers like Meyer, Picoult, etc. their name is a guarantee for best seller.

I don't think there is a formula to writing a best seller, but I do think that creating a "new genre" that will be all the buzz or writing an outstanding, "You have got to read this book" in an existing genre would be a good start.

[SPMiller]

The consensus seems to be that what makes a bestseller in its genre is simply people telling their friends to read it.That's a question I ask myself during revision: what can I do to make this novel so awesome that most people who read it will recommend it to friends?

For my personal writing style, that means ensuring that tension and conflict appear in every scene, the characters are interesting, the plot makes sense, the narrative flows, the writing is straightforward, and so forth. In short, I try to write the best damn book I can.

[scribbler1382]

The day after your book comes out, murder your agent. No sniper rifles. Be flamboyant...a thousand cuts with your galley sheets, suffocated with your advance statement or killed, dismembered and a separate piece placed in every location that appears in your book.

Boom! Bestseller.