What makes a bestseller? That question has tormented authors and the publishing industry for years. The best explanation I’ve heard came from an editor who used to regularly attend the Colorado Gold conference: “God smiles.”
Of course, that isn’t very helpful. Creating a bestseller involves a lot of factors, few of which are under the control of either author or publisher. One of the main factors is “word of mouth”. Usually, it happens first with people in the industry. Word spreads that the publisher has high hopes for this book. But unless the word of mouth factor also takes place at the bookstore and consumer level, no amount of industry hype will make a difference.
A lot of things in the publishing industry have changed over the last ten years. One of the most exciting changes is becoming a bestseller now happens with incredible speed. Since I purchase books for a public library, I peruse the bestseller lists nearly every week. Until recently, almost all the “new” authors who made the list were actually multi-published mid-list authors who, after years of solid work, finally make it. Once in a while a new author would rise to prominence out of the blue, but it didn’t happen often. Now it seems like there is a new name on the list every week. Very often I have already ordered the book because it got a good review in one of the journals. But sometimes I’ve never even heard of the book before. I was clueless it was going to be so popular, and apparently so were most other people in the industry.
The process of “talking up a book” has accelerated lately, until it seems almost instantaneous. The reason is social media. In the past, there were always a few instances where a book—like Fifty Shades of Grey or The Da Vinci Code—became wildly successful and surprised the whole industry. But even those books built over time. Now the process seems to happen in weeks or even days.
Buzz builds in the book industry and then, through social media, is transferred to the reading public, who spread the news even faster. Occasionally—this is obviously true of independent authors who reach huge success with e-books—the reading public on its own is the force that starts the buzz.
The variety of books this is happening with is astonishing. Sometimes the book is in a “hot” genre like a domestic thriller: The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena or Ghosted by Rosie Walsh. But other times it’s a literary novel, like There There by Tommy Orange or Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success. Or a gritty, dark, extremely timely story like Cherry by Nico Walker.
I’m not saying these books wouldn’t have sold fairly well a few years ago, but I don’t believe they would have ended up on the bestseller lists. A lot of my blogs are sort of gloomy, bemoaning the publishing world of the past, but this one is about the rather thrilling side of the new book world. Having your book become a bestseller is still like lightning striking, and the odds of it happening are still fairly low, especially if you consider the thousands of books published each month. But this new trend does mean that not every author has to slowly climb the ranks, publishing good books year after year to eventually get somewhere. Sometimes one great book is all it takes to be a star. So hey, why not go for it? This could be your year.