The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel PDF
Preview The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Authors Copyright Page Thank you for buying this St. Martin’s Press ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on Jodie Archer, click here. For email updates on Matthew L. Jockers, click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. For Andrew, a father, and Angela, a wife ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 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. Martin’s 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). 1 THE BESTSELLER-OMETER, OR, HOW TEXT MINING MIGHT CHANGE PUBLISHING Back in the spring of 2010, Stieg Larsson’s agent was having a good day. On June 13, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest—third in the series from a previously unknown author—debuted 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 activist–turned-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 English—was the sensation book of the year in more than thirty countries. The press didn’t 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 novel’s 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 printed—whether 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 doesn’t 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. Let’s 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, that’s 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
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