It should be fair to say, then, that the "what" of a book is considered paramount. If you recommend a book to a friend or if you are a writer yourself and you mention your work, the first question you'll be asked is likely going to be, "What is it about?" It is rarely—unless you are a biographer—who is it about, or where is it about, or when is it about.
An interest in subject is what comes first.
Which begs the question, what is the killer topic?#6074•
In On Writing—one of the most popular recent books by a genre author about the craft of writing—Stephen King suggests that aspiring novelists take a subject they know and then blend in "personal knowledge of life, friends, relationships, sex and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why but they do." It's a curious observation about work, telling about#6092•
The linguist John Rupert Firth noted in 1957 that the way to understand a word is by looking at the company it keeps.#6090•
If you're interested in those particular questions, by the way, the NYT list prefers a bank to have money and sex (when it does appear) to suggest intimacy and not aggression.#6134•
A sex scene will make the list if it moves the plot between characters forward. If it is a gratuitous aside, not needed for storytelling, it likely will not chart and does not need writing. Perhaps this explains why the presence of sex topics diminishes when we compare a large sample of the market with just the top sellers.#6132•
According to our model, a book with sex in almost every chapter is less likely to hit the lists. There are exceptions to this, of course—who can ignore Sylvia Day or E. L. James?—but two authors alone cannot overly influence a whole model, which is examining thousands of books.#6121•
And when we asked the trained model which authors of the past thirty years have the best understanding (practiced or instinctive) of getting the right topics in the right proportions, it gave us two names: John Grisham and Danielle Steel.#6136•
We investigated this a little further, and found an interesting pattern across all our bestselling books, beyond just Steel and Grisham. It turns out that successful authors consistently give that sweet spot of 30 percent to just one or two topics, whereas non-bestselling writers try to squeeze in more ideas#6105•
To reach a third of the book, a lesser-selling author uses at least three and often more topics. To get to 40 percent of the average novel, a bestseller uses only four topics. A non-bestseller, on average, uses six. While this may sound like a lot of numbers, the effect on your reading experience and the cohesion of a satisfying narrative is quite significant.#6108•
Both told us that they had, through a series of painful rejections from publishing houses, come to the theory that new writers start out too ambitious. They said such writers tend to favor the approach of telling a complex situation from all angles, which will entail many topics. Writers are observers, and it is natural for them to want to share all that they have observed about the human condition.
While writing such a topic-rich novel can be a very satisfying intellectual endeavor, the market tends to reject it.
It's too much in a 350-page experience#6125•
Grisham and Steel each have only one signature theme, not two, that takes up a whole third (on average) of each of their novels.#6137•
What the godparents are teaching us about bestselling is that there must be a dominant topic to give the glue to a novel, and that topics in the next highest proportions should suggest a direct conflict that might be quite threatening. It#6118•
Bestselling authors pick combinations with guaranteed hooks—how about children and guns, faith and sex, or love and vampires. (Likely all three combinations have hit the lists.)#6123•
At least one of the top few of a novel's topics should be something that lots of different people—of different ages, different genders, different cultures—fear.#6115•
It is a topic that is indicative to scenes of human interaction and relationships, but we need to be more specific than that. It's not as heady as romantic love, or passion, and neither is it the typical relationship between teacher and class or employer and boss. It is more specifically about human closeness and human connection.
Scenes that display this most important indicator of bestselling are all about people communicating in moments of shared intimacy, shared chemistry, and shared bonds.#6124•
In The Associate, Grisham's young lawyer takes an evening off, picks up Chinese takeout and a bottle of wine, and takes it to the house of the woman he is closest to. It's no big "I love you" moment; just more of a casual, easy kind of date where they talk about life and fall asleep on the sofa. In The Firm, a different young lawyer does exactly the same thing, also with Chinese food and perhaps the same red wine.
It is a staple that works.
Characters must have these moments of casual intimacy and closeness, if not explicitly romantic.#6133•
Among the good, the popular, and (for writers) the go-for-its: marriage, death, taxes (yes, really). Also technologies—preferably modern and vaguely threatening technologies—funerals, guns, doctors, work, schools, presidents, newspapers, kids, moms, and the media.#6119•
By contrast, among the bad and unpopular, we already have sex, drugs, and rock and roll. To that add seduction, making love, the body described in any terms other than in pain or at a crime scene. (These latter two bodily experiences, readers seem to quite enjoy.) No also to cigarettes and alcohol, the gods, big emotions like passionate love and desperate grief, revolutions, wheeling and dealing, existential or philosophical sojourns, dinner parties, playing cards, very dressed up women, and dancing.
(Sorry.)5 Firearms and the FBI beat fun and frivolity by a considerable percentage.
The reading public prefers to see the stock market described more so than the human face.
It likes a laboratory over a church, spirituality over religion, and college more than partying.
And, when it comes to that one, big, perennially important question, the readers are clear in their preference for dogs and not cats.#6111•
Chapter 3
"Excuse the hyperbole," wrote author M. Christian, "but there really are moments when everything just … changes: the wheel, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, the personal computer." And one book. That book. "This book," he wrote, "will, no doubt, be remembered as when everything changed." People who hadn't picked up a book in years read this one.
Writers in the same genre suddenly found they could make a career.
Publishing houses added new editors and imprints, all searching to capitalize on the moment.
This was big.
Women all over the world discussed its content in the press, on personal blogs, and no doubt with their husbands.
It was 2011.
That book would sell 125 million copies in its first four years.#6130•
In terms of thematics, she had got many things right in line with the market's taste. Two topics taking 30 percent of the novel? Check. A third topic taking us to 40 percent? Check. Closeness as one of those topics? Check. These are the tricks, conscious or unconscious, of hundreds of NYT bestselling authors, in all different genres.#6113•
Janice Radway, who has spent many years researching why people read popular books, explains her own experience with fiction wonderfully:
There are moments for me now when books become something other than mere objects, when they transport me elsewhere, to a trancelike state I find difficult to describe. On these occasions reading, or what Marcel Proust has called "that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude," manages to override my rational, trained approach to books as crafted objects.
When this occurs, the book, the text, and even my reading self dissolve in a peculiar act of transubstantiation whereby "I" become something other than what I have been and inhabit thoughts other than those I have been able to conceive before.
This tactile, sensuous, profoundly emotional experience of being captured by a book is what those reading memories summoned for me—in the manner of Proust's madeleine—an experience that for all its ethereality clearly is extraordinarily physical as well#6545•
While we were writing this book, we asked our undergraduates to experiment with observing, almost meditatively, all the responses they were having while reading a new book. Their mind would be thinking, interpreting of course, but what were the emotions doing? More than that, what was the physical body doing in response to the words on the page? We asked them: "When does your heartbeat increase?" "When do you feel anxiety in your gut?" "When do you feel the contraction of fear, or the stirring of arousal?" "When does the back of your neck prickle?" "When do you smile?" "When do you shout aloud a comment to a character or throw the book against the wall?"
This is a different kind of reading to pay attention to. In silence, we took several novels and asked students to raise their hand when they felt their body viscerally respond in any way to what they were reading. At first, they thought we were crazy. But after some classes, we noted that with NYT bestsellers their hands had all gone up within the first ten pages.
With non-bestsellers, this was not so often the case.#6120•
Chapter 4
We believe that the first line of a novel can tell you a lot about a writer's command of style. Here are three pretty famous opening ones:
Virginia Woolf opens Mrs. Dalloway elegantly: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
Leo Tolstoy starts Anna Karenina astutely: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Jane Austen starts Pride and Prejudice archly: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."#6535•
Amis's novel opens: "Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say nothing." How could we have predicted, just from the first sentence, that this was not a million-copy novel? We will give you one perspective. There is no action here, no interaction, no suggestion of the propulsions of bestselling opening sentences.
The line is full of words of emptiness: "night," "sleep," "nothing," with men not able even to witness their own tears.
Who is this "I" who is speaking to us? Does his presence command us? Do we feel his authority and authenticity?#6533•
In The Da Vinci Code, for example, Dan Brown averages seven instances of the word "the" for every hundred words. John Grisham averages just under six instances per hundred in The Firm. If we were given an anonymous book written by either one of these two authors, we would be able to make a pretty good guess at who wrote it based on how often the anonymous book uses the word "the."#6534•
The word "do" is twice as likely to appear in a bestseller than in a book that never hit the list. The word "very"—a qualifying word that Strunk and White describe in their classic primer The Elements of Style as a "leech" that "infests the pond of prose"—is only about half as common in bestselling style as it is in books that don't make it.#6540•
The contraction "n't" appears four times more often in books that master the sweet spot of bestselling style than those that don't.
Like the more informal contracted form of "not" as "n't," contractions in general repeatedly show up more in bestsellers.#6539•
The narrator's voice, be it third or first person, has to strike readers as real and appropriate if they are going to stay with it. The contraction "-'d" is twelve times more common in bestsellers, while "-'re" is five times more common, along with "'m."#6538•
Other less formal expressions are popular too. Consider the word "okay." "Okay" appears three times more often in bestsellers. The expression "ugh," a word unlikely to be found in the classics, is also more common.#6544•
Characters in the bestseller like to ask more questions—we find more question marks in books that hit the list. We do not, however, find more exclamation points; exclamation marks are a negative indicator for bestselling.#6543•
Readers will typically fill the thought in. "He was wearing that tuxedo again and a six o'clock shadow. Holy crap…" Most readers know without further punctuation or words that the "holy crap" here is not a complaint. One of the enjoyments of reading is the feeling a reader has of being very close to the narrator at this moment of ellipsis.#6541•
Imagine a scene in which a man is in a bar. He has been unlucky with women. He tells his friend beside him that as a new tactic, he is going to try dating five women at once. The friend chokes on his beer, then responds. Here are two potential comments:
"I would be very surprised if you are still alive after that!"
—or:
"Oh, I'd be really surprised if you're still alive after that."
Which is more natural to the ear, and more effective? Exactly. The latter.#6542•
The choice to write "I'd" rather than "I would" or "you're" rather than "you are" turns out to be more important than you might think. In bestsellers, adjectives and adverbs are less common, particularly adjectives. What this means is that bestsellers are about shorter, cleaner sentences, without unneeded words.
Sentences do not need decorating with additional clauses.
Their nouns don't need modifying three times.
Verbs, which are a little more common in bestsellers, prefer not to be followed with a string of really very pretty lovely little words ending in -ly.#6546•
Even though our collection of bestsellers has one hundred more novels by men than women, when it came to mastering the style that is most typical to the bestseller list, women were the clear leaders. Even more arresting, these books that the model ranked best for style were not just by established writers.
Many of these women were hitting the list with their first novel.
Ten debut books at the top of our ranked style list became instant bestsellers, and nine of them were written by women.#6550•