Fiction Best Sellers - Can You Reach The Best Selling List?

Anybody who can string together a decent sentence can write a best selling novel. It’s as simple as that. There are three reasons why more of us don’t do it.

The first is that it requires perseverance. It’s becoming something of a cliche to say that the secret of successful writing is simply to apply bum to seat and write, but it’s absolutely true. The potential best selling author can’t afford to wait for the muse to visit before putting pen to paper, and it’s no good offering up excuses about how demanding family life is, or how tired we are at the end of the day, we just have to sit down and write. Sick or well, hungover or buzzing, tired or alert, we’ve got to get those words down.

A novel is by definition a book made up of lots of words, each of them needs to be written down, letter by letter. Many of these thousands of words then have to be erased and replaced in the first edit, then again in the second edit, and so on. A 100,000 word novel can easily require the author to write 400,000 or more words. Not everybody can do it; in fact, most of us can’t.

For every 10,000 people who sit down to write a novel it is estimated that only 800 succeed in finishing it. And of those 800, only 90 are eventually published. And how many of them become best-sellers? Maybe one or two. Maybe none.

So, the first hurdle the author of the best selling novel has to overcome is to actually write the book.

The second reason more of us don’t write a fiction best seller is that the book we eventually write is simply the wrong kind of book. Not every novel is destined to sell millions of copies and, sadly, literary merit is often a hindrance to sales, rather than a help. Take a look at the fiction best seller lists for the past 20 years. Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer, Ken Follett and Stephen King have all sold zillions of copies but no one would ever accuse any of those guys of being literary geniuses. What they do and what they do well is tell stories and stories are what you see piled up at the front of bookshops. ‘So-and-so-author is a great story teller’ is another way of saying that so-and-so can barely write his own name, but never mind, he’s great at creating plots.

Plots and not fancy turns of phrase or a brilliant ear for dialogue are what really sells books.

And the third thing the would-be best selling author needs? Luck. Or rather, they need to make their own luck. How often do successful authors, publishers and agents hear the words, ‘He was lucky, he found a publisher just like that and I’ve been submitting my manuscripts for years without success’? Let me tell you: they hear it all the time.

I ran a book publishing company up until three years ago. On the top of the front page of the The Do-Not Press website it now says (in big bold letters): ‘We are currently NOT looking for submissions from authors (so please DO NOT send us anything - it will not be read)’. And yet even now 5-10 manuscripts somehow land on my doormat in the average week. Is it because their authors are so very unlucky that their submissions end up, unread, in my recycling bin? I think not. And by the same token, is the author who spends a couple of days researching his market before sending anything out the luckiest guy alive? Obviously not.

Remember, just about everybody has it within them to write a best selling work of fiction. All they need is someone to tell them how to do it.

Jim Driver is an author and former publisher who lives with his wife and son in London, UK. He splits his life promoting rock & roll, lecturing on creative writing and reviewing fiction.

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