One way to always guarantee you will intrigue, attract, interest, and capture the attention of a reader is to become a master of the opening line, or even the opening several lines. Even before you fully write your book or even a blog post getting the opening clarified and clear in your head is essential. In Moneylove , my opening lines in the Introduction were:. Business experts doing a lot of market research and psychologists doing a lot of studies, have both reached the same conclusion, that first minute of contact is vital.
And this is the best time in history to do this, because you can find those openings online without having to go to a library or bookstore. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. Short words and short sentences are pretty much norm now in most writing courses, but when I first started talking about this in the s, the standard was flowery language and complex sentences, except for a few brilliant writers who knew this secret.
That it is no longer a secret is pretty much due to one man, Rudolf Flesch see Secret Seven below for more on him. As you can see by my opening for this article, I do not always follow the popular advice to keep sentences short.
Sometimes long is more expressive. Sometimes a few long sentences interspersed with a lot of short ones can create a pleasing rhythm.
Back and forth. A master of this quality in her writing is Harper Lee. Her opening for, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a brilliant example of mixing short sentences and long flowing ones. Look at how simply Harper Lee conveys the life of a sleepy old Southern town in very few words. As the best books in fiction or nonfiction always do, an author should create a dialogue with the reader that resembles a good friend telling a good story.
In terms of cutting down on wordage, I have had any number of successful nonfiction and fiction writers tell me that one of the most important disciplines any writer can master is to take a paragraph or sentence, or even a page, that you really are in love with, and cut it from your manuscript. I had a whole chapter left out of Moneylove when I got the final galleys prior to it going to the printing presses.
After a while, I was forced to agree with him, but not until I had ranted and raved for a week or two. Writing can be like music. There are high notes. There are low notes. And once in a while, there are no notes, as you pause to let the mind breathe between paragraphs. If most of the writing you have done has been of an academic sort while taking college courses, you will be at a disadvantage in writing for a larger mainstream audience.
Most readers today are most comfortable with a 5th grade level of vocabulary, and anything more may go right over their heads. One of the bestselling authors I had some impact on was Spencer Johnson. Spencer has been kind enough to tell me my two hour seminar on writing a bestseller at the National Speakers Association really made a difference in his approach to writing.
What he was doing with corporate clients was teaching them the value of praising employees, in a very short amount of time. This one minute praise technique led to the huge bestseller he wrote with management expert Kenneth Blanchard, The One-Minute Manager, which has sold over thirteen million copies.
Spencer Johnson is obviously a very creative writer who has lots of ideas for books, but his first effort was so successful because rather than just come up with a book he thought would sell, he focused on what he was already doing.
And once he became a master of that one idea, he and his co-author, Ken Blanchard, came up with the add-ons of One Minute Goals and One Minute Reprimands.
They thus became three-trick ponies and much more. Louise Hay is another multi-million copy bestselling author who started out with one trick, which led to You Can Heal Your Life — over 50 million sold and counting. I remember back in the early s, Louise, her assistant, Julie, and I sitting in a hot tub in the backyard of her rented house in Santa Monica.
A small booklet, it was beloved by the holistic health community. But Louise had delayed turning this material into a full-length book, even though she had a publishing contract to do so. A lot of our conversation focused on trying to motivate Louise to finish the book. I can assure you that, at that moment, Louise did not have a clue, or even a dream, about being a bestselling author.
And she certainly could not have foreseen that she would create a large publishing empire Hay House and influence and help millions of people around the world. And it all grew out of her original idea that certain emotions trigger certain illnesses and symptoms.
For a one trick pony, Louise Hay certainly picked the right trick. I earned a lot more money than any coaching fees would have produced, however, as she mentions Moneylove very favorably in You Can Heal Your Life.
This led to thousands of sales for me. Often, when you want to be focusing on an upcoming book project, no matter how multi-dimensional you are—no matter how many tricks you have up your sleeve—it is best to focus on a single strong subject or theme. For an aspiring bestselling author, multitasking can be a mental vampire, sucking the energy out of the big idea you have.
While many writers talk and write about how difficult and lonely writing is, Ray thought writing was more fun than anything else. While still in her twenties, she wrote Rubyfruit Jungle, a novel about growing up as a lesbian in the South. Rita Mae is also one of my all-time favorite authors, and listening to her erudite lectures at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference was a delight and powerful learning experience. Bonus Recommendation: Discover and learn from some of the worlds best writers in this Writing MasterClass.
You may choose your own favorite books about writing, there certainly are hundreds, perhaps thousands, to select from, and maybe a friend or teacher or writer you know has recommended one or more. For me, these seven books contain the essential information I want and need to practice my craft, though I have read and collected many others over the years.
If you are serious about writing a bestseller, it is a must-read. With hundreds of pages every week, actually reading the whole thing would be overwhelming.
Publishers Weekly will help you keep up with what books are coming out, which authors just got a big advance, how social media is promoting book sales, and whether an editor you were thinking of is available. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape. I have long asserted that fiction is important to read, especially for those who have limited themselves to nonfiction.
Fiction is important because novelists are some of the great thinkers and philosophers about the human condition. I have learned more about life and people from novels than from any nonfiction books on the subject. There are parts of the brain that are stimulated and enriched by reading fiction that no other method seems to duplicate.
The Elements of Style…by Strunk and White. This is the classic on writing style that almost every writer of note has a copy of. It is an enduring masterpiece whether you are writing a nonfiction book, a novel, an article or blog post. A book not just about writing but an instruction manual on training your mind to be more creatively productive. On Writing Well—by William Zinsser —This addresses directly the problem most beginning writers have with too many words, sentences and paragraphs that are just too long.
And Zinsser demonstrates how it should be done by his own crisp,clear, simple writing style. This was the very first book I read on writing, as a high school student. It may just be the single book that most influenced my writing style. Bird by Bird—by Anne Lamott. She is one of my very favorite writers, and unusual in that she has had bestsellers both on the fiction and nonfiction lists. Here we bring a big data approach to book success by investigating the properties and sales trajectories of bestsellers.
We find that there are seasonal patterns to book sales with more books being sold during holidays, and even among bestsellers, fiction books sell more copies than nonfiction books. Looking at patterns characterizing authors, we find that fiction writers are more productive than nonfiction writers, commonly achieving bestseller status with multiple books. Additionally, there is no gender disparity among bestselling fiction authors but nonfiction, most bestsellers are written by male authors.
Finally we find that there is a universal pattern to book sales. Using this universality we introduce a statistical model to explain the time evolution of sales. This model not only reproduces the entire sales trajectory of a book but also predicts the total number of copies it will sell in its lifetime, based on its early sales numbers. The analysis of the bestseller characteristics and the discovery of the universal nature of sales patterns with its driving forces are crucial for our understanding of the book industry, and more generally, of how we as a society interact with cultural products.
Books remain an important part of our lives, reading being the favorite leisure activity for many individuals. Indeed, the average American reads 12 to 13 books per year, and how people select the reading has been of much interest for researchers for decades. Consequently, book publishing is a huge industry in the U. In , about 2. Of the over 3 million books in print in the U. Yet, only a tiny fraction attract considerable readership.
For example, less than books make it to the New York Times bestseller lists and only a handful of authors stay on the list for ten or more weeks. Consequently, the success drivers of books remains of interest to many researchers [ 2 ].
The writing style of the author [ 12 , 13 ], the amount of publicity [ 14 ], the timing of the book release [ 15 ], award-winning [ 16 ] or already bestseller [ 17 ] status of the book, the genre of the book and even the gender of the author [ 18 , 19 ] are among the factors considered in past research. Yet, which books become successful and how they reach this status remains a mystery. Aiming to address this mystery, here we explore the sales patterns of bestsellers and the authors who write them.
We used a big data approach to understand the type of books that made it to the New York Times bestseller list as hardcovers, and quantified the sales patterns necessary to reach the lists and the characteristics of the bestselling authors.
Additionally, we explore the weekly sale numbers [ 11 , 20 ], allowing us to uncover the dynamic patterns of how a book becomes successful. This allows us to propose a statistical model that captures how collective interest in a book peaks and drops over time.
The model accurately predicts the total number of copies an edition will sell, using the early sales numbers after the first release. For each book the list offers some basic identifying information like the ISBN number, title, author, publisher, amazon.
The NYTBL ranks books by the number of individual copies sold that week, using sales numbers reported by an undisclosed list of retailers across the United States, statistically weighted to represent all outlets nationwide [ 21 ]. The rankings are calculated each week, hence a book that continues to sell well stays on the same bestseller list for multiple weeks. In this study we consider all books featured on the New York Times hardcover fiction and hardcover nonfiction bestseller lists between August 6th, and March 10th, weeks , altogether unique fiction and nonfiction titles.
To capture the time resolved sales patterns of books, we use NPD BookScan formerly Nielsen BookScan , the largest sales data provider for the book publishing industry. Their database contains information about all print books that are being sold in the United States since For every book, this information includes the ISBN number, author name, title, category, BISAC number, publisher, price, total weekly sales across US and weekly sales in different geographical districts.
Books come in a variety of formats and editions, from the more expensive hardcovers to the cheaper trade and mass market paperbacks, digital e-books and audiobooks. Indeed, of the 2. As new titles are usually released in hardcover first, here we focus on the sales patterns of books that made it to the New York Times bestseller list as hardcovers in fiction and nonfiction categories, each encompassing a variety of genres.
Not all of these genres are equally popular among the readers, some being more present on the bestseller list than others. Additionally, the dynamics of being featured on the list is different for each book: Some enter with low ranks and drop immediately off the list while others reach high ranks and stay on the list for a long time. In this section we focus on these dynamic patterns, along with the corresponding sale numbers and their seasonal patterns and we briefly discuss when and how different editions of the same title are released.
According to a survey [ 1 ], mystery, thriller and crime are the preferred book genres in the U. To check if these preferences are reflected in the New York Times bestseller list, in Fig. These are the books frequently discussed by literary critics, featured in prominent venues and taught in schools, factors contributing to their popularity.
Recent research and media discussions [ 18 , 22 , 23 ] noted that the popularity of genre fiction has been increasing over the years, thanks to the equal opportunities provided by online venues and rating systems, and the stagnant popularity of the traditional literary venues that remain focused on general fiction. We indeed observe a slight increase in the percentage of genre fiction among the bestsellers during the past decade Fig. Genre popularities.
The breakdown of bestsellers into genre categories of A fiction and B nonfiction. C The percentage of genre fiction all fiction that can be classified as a specific genre, shown in dark green and general fiction all else, shown in light green on the bestseller list over the years. The popularity of genre fiction has been increasing steadily since Their dominance on the nonfiction market demonstrates a continuous interest in the life stories of well known individuals.
The next most popular genre in nonfiction is history, in line with the survey results. Biographies and memoirs are the most preferred genre within nonfiction, making up half of the nonfiction bestsellers.
Yet, there are major differences between bestsellers: some pop up on the list for a singe week while others retain their bestselling status for months and even years. To illustrate this, we measured the length of stay on the list for all New York Times bestsellers Figs. Longevity of bestsellers. Distribution of A fiction and B nonfiction bestsellers based on the number of weeks they stayed on the list.
The number of weeks is shown in logarithmic scale to account for both the large number of short stays and the few exceptionally longer presence. We marked on the first columns the corresponding linear scale numbers for clarity. The size of the dots indicates the number of books with the same attributes. In fact, only 10 of the fiction bestsellers stayed on the list for more than a year. The longest presence during our observation period is The Help , the book by Kathryn Stockett, which has been featured on the bestseller list for subsequent weeks.
Its continuous presence was helped by a movie adaptation nominated for the Academy Award in Highly anticipated books in ongoing popular series tend to stay longer in the list, like the fifth book A Dance With Dragons in George R.
Finally, literary awards can also sustain bestseller status: All the Lights We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, having won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, was on the list for 99 weeks at the time of data collection. In comparison, the nonfiction bestseller list shows slightly less variation from week to week, indicating that it is more common for nonfiction books to sustain their bestseller status.
This is why we have fewer nonfiction books in our dataset than fiction books nonfiction bestsellers compared to in fiction. Still there are a few exceptions, books that were ranked low on the list yet remained there for a long time. In summary, most books stay on the NYTBL for only a week, and books lasting more than a year are extremely rare.
That said, books reaching better ranks on the list stay on for longer periods compared to books ranked lower, many of the top ten books staying for several months at least. The number of copies a hardcover sells in its first year is an important measure of its commercial success. As after one year a cheaper paperback edition of the same title is likely to be released, the hardcover will no longer be the only print option.
Therefore, in this section we focus on the first year sales of bestsellers, allowing us to explore their variability and the factors that determine their popularity.
The one year sales distribution of all bestsellers indicates that the majority of bestsellers sell between 10, and , copies in their first year Figs. The distribution of the number of copies sold in a year for all hardcover bestsellers in A fiction and B nonfiction.
Most hardcover bestsellers sell between 10, and , copies in their first year for both fiction and nonfiction, and the higher they get in the list and the longer they stay on, the more copies they sell in a year. These two books were anticipated for different reasons, the former being the third book in an ongoing successful series and the latter being the long-awaited second book of Harper Lee, published 55 years after her classic To Kill A Mockingbird There are also several books that even though made it to the NYTBL with high first week sales, could not sustain those numbers over the course of a year, such as The Famous And The Dead , being the conclusion to T.
In nonfiction, the autobiography of former president George W. Bush, Decision Points sold the most copies in a single year, followed by the biography Steve Jobs by journalist Walter Isaacson, the basis for the movie of the same title.
Occasionally nonfiction authors explore their themes throughout several books, resembling serialized novels of fiction, also resulting in high sales.
To understand the dynamics of sustained sales, we looked into the relationship between the number of copies sold within a year and best ranking the book achieved on the list Figs. Obviously, the more copies a book sells in a single week, the better is its ranking in the bestseller list.
For most books we also observe a direct correlation between the best ranking and the number of copies sold within a year. The most remarkable are The Lost Symbol and Decision Points , books ranked number one on the NYTBL in their category fiction and nonfiction respectively selling more than a million copies in their first year after publication.
Grain Brain by neurologist David Perlmutter is also an interesting case showcasing the seasonality of the bestseller lists. The book first came out in September and hit the NYTBL soon after, reaching its highest sales in December when book sales are typically the highest see the following section. Hence, despite the impressive sales numbers, in those weeks it did not qualify for better rankings in the NYTBL, even dropping entirely from the list. Not surprisingly, we also observe a direct correlation between the length of stay on the bestseller list and the number of copies sold in a year Figs.
The only two exceptional cases are in the nonfiction category. Yet the sales accumulated in the 16 weeks the book was on the list were sufficiently high to make the book an outlier among bestsellers.
In summary, the number of copies a NYTBL book sells in its first year spans over two orders of magnitude. Overall, the best rank a book achieves on the list is a good predictor of its yearly sales: the better the rank, the higher the total sales.
The length of stay of a book on the list is another good indicator of the number of copies sold, as longer stays mean larger number of copies sold every week.
Since , books on the hardcover NYTBL have sold anywhere between a thousand to a million copies in a single week. We show the distribution of the weekly sales that have gotten these books to the list in Fig. Of course a book ranked first must sell far more copies than a book ranked 20 or Accordingly, the high end outliers in Fig.
The low outliers are included on the list either by mistake, or BookScan has a different record of their sales from New York Times. They are all books with much higher sales on other weeks, but on those particular weeks, their sale numbers recorded by BookScan were much lower than what is typically needed to hit the NYTBL.
Aside from the extremes and differences between ranks, there may be several causes for the general high variability, as we discuss next. C The number of copies bestselling books have sold in a single week in mid August week number 33 that got them to the list over different years.
D Explanation of the box plot technique used in C. The median number of copies the bestselling books sold to hit the NYTBL during different weeks throughout a year, for E fiction and F nonfiction.
In general, books need to sell between and , copies in a single week to hit the NYTBL, a range that has been fairly stable over the years. Fiction book sales are higher in summer and all sale numbers are significantly elevated from December to early January.
Fiction sells more than nonfiction throughout the year but the gap is smallest in early January. First, we looked into the sales needed to make it to the bestseller list since In Fig. We see that fiction books sell more copies than nonfiction books, in other words, fewer copies are needed to qualify a book for the nonfiction list than the fiction one. Also the stability of the year-by-year sales pattern is remarkable: today a book needs to sell between a to 10, copies to make it to the bestseller list, a range that stayed roughly the same during the past eight years.
Next, we looked into the seasonal fluctuations in the sales patterns during a year. To explore how these fluctuations affect the bestseller list, we measured the median number of sales that got the books on the list at different times of the year Figs. The dots correspond to the median sales of all books on the NYTBL at any given week each year, the line indicating the median over all years.
We focus on the median instead of the average given the high variability amplified by record-breaking sales highlighted in Figs. Overall, we find that median sales mostly fluctuate between — in fiction and — in nonfiction. Yet, there is a significant increase in sales late-December during holiday shopping, a pattern persisting into early January, likely due to delays in sales reporting. In early January, the lowest median sales over the years is close to 15, copies a week, a number higher than the highest median sales of any other time of the year except late December.
For fiction, a similar but less pronounced peak is observed during the summer months with median sales surpassing 10,, likely due to book purchases in preparation for the summer vacation. In nonfiction, there is no such summer peak. During these periods of elevated sales a book needs to sell more copies to make it to the New York Times bestseller list than during other months. We also note that in general, fiction books sell more copies than nonfiction, a gap which is largest during summer and decreases considerably during the holiday season, where the sales of both fiction and nonfiction are significantly elevated.
In summary, we find that books featured in the NYTBL over the years hit the list by selling anywhere between thousands and tens of thousands copies, a range that has been stable since Seasonal fluctuations within a year matter much more, books needing higher sales during the holidays to stand out, even though more books are purchased in that period.
Additionally, a book on the fiction list needs to sell more copies on average compared to the nonfiction bestseller list, due to the fact that on average, fiction sales are higher than nonfiction sales. Yet, not all bestselling authors are alike. There are those with a single high selling book in their career, like Kathryn Stockett The Help , and there are authors with over fifty books with varying sale numbers under their belt, like James Patterson or Stephen King.
Additionally, some authors build their readership over time, achieving bestseller status with their later work while others enter the NYTBL with their first book. The success of a book is deeply linked to the previous success and the name recognition of its author, prompting us to explore in this section the dynamics of success for authors, quantifying the differences between authors in terms of productivity, repeat success and gender among authors within different bestseller categories.
To understand the patterns of productivity among bestselling authors, we collected all unique titles published by them in hardcover since , regardless of whether they made the bestseller list or not.
After eliminating new editions of older titles, we ended up with books of them bestsellers by authors with bestsellers in fiction and books of them bestsellers by authors with bestsellers in nonfiction categories. These numbers already indicate that fiction authors are more prolific than nonfiction ones, with half the number of fiction authors having written 1. As indicated by Figs. The vast majority of them have at least two books, but having close to 10 books is also common.
Some authors are significantly more productive than others, with James Patterson being an outlier: he published 94 hardcovers since , often with coauthors and in a variety of genres such as mystery, suspense, romance and even nonfiction. With stars indicating bestseller status, we see that more than half 51 of his books were bestsellers. Fiction authors who also write graphic novels, like Neil Gaiman 48 books and Warren Ellis 42 , are also productive due to the usual high volume of publications in the graphic novel category.
Other exceptionally prolific authors are mystery, thriller and fantasy author Ted Dekker 42 , romance author Danielle Steel 37 and thriller author Clive Cussler Productivity and repeat success. The number of unique hardcovers published by A fiction and B nonfiction authors since , including their bestsellers.
Keller, the line height indicating one year sales and stars marking bestseller status. The number of E fiction and F nonfiction bestsellers per author. While most authors in both fiction and nonfiction have only one bestseller, repeat success is more common for fiction authors than for nonfiction ones.
Additionally, having one or two hardcovers published since is the norm for most authors, yet bestselling fiction authors publish significantly more compared to nonfiction authors. In nonfiction, high productivity is rare Fig. It can have some effect. Almost all of the impact of hitting a bestseller list is personal and social impact. The people we see who are most obsessed with bestseller lists are the authors who view it as a status marker that they can reach that will make people see them differently, and thus feel differently about themselves.
For these authors, striving for a bestseller list is about making them feel important. There is no real business reason. Obviously I am guilty of this desire. My ego is fragile and needs recognition and validation, just like everyone else. But understand this: a bestselling book might make you feel good for awhile, but it will not get you any real respect or fill any holes in your soul. And even if you recognize that status as the reason you care about being a bestselling author, the best thing you can do is admit this to yourself.
If you admit it, you can focus fully on that goal, make a realistic plan, and give yourself a realistic shot at actually hitting it. Now—if you have decided to ignore my advice—I will describe the rules of every bestseller list and how to get your book on them.
Before I get into the major bestseller lists and their particular rules, there are two principles that apply to all of them; 1 velocity of sales, and 2 reporting. The timeframe changes depending on this list, but the more velocity of sales you create—meaning, the more sales you pack into the shorter period of time—the better.
It is hard to sell 5, books in a year. To sell 5, in a week is ridiculously difficult, as evidenced that only a very small percentage of all books published each year do it. Simply put: creating an audience of buyers for your book prior to your release is the best way to get the velocity of sales needed to hit a bestseller list.
This is why setting a release date and concentrating your marketing around it is so important to hitting a bestseller list. Setting a release date creates a manageable, self-contained window to concentrate your marketing efforts on, and use them as a mechanism to create this velocity of sales.
Each list has their own method of counting sales, and each list only counts a fraction of places that books are sold. Amazon only counts books sold on Amazon. The New York Times only counts the physical bookstores that it tracks and a few online sellers, but weigh them differently. Know the rules to bestseller lists, because breaking them can keep your book off the list, even if it deserves to be there.
This is considered the most important bestseller list, and the only one that people tend to talk about by name. Methodology: The weekly bestsellers are calculated from Monday to Monday. Here is how they describe their methodology on their own site:. The sales venues for print books include independent book retailers; national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; supermarkets, university, gift and discount department stores; and newsstands.
E-book rankings reflect sales from leading online vendors of e-books in a variety of popular e-reader formats. Titles are included regardless of whether they are published in both print and electronic formats or just one format.
E-books available exclusively from a single vendor will be tracked at a future date. Let me explain this. The Times list is a survey list, not a tabulation of total sales. This means that they poll a curated selection of booksellers to estimate sales. They also heavily weight independent bookstore sales. They also focus on individual sales and try to not include bulk sales in their calculations.
They do this to prevent people from buying their way onto the list which we discuss below. This is a direct shot at Amazon.
Make no mistake about it: this is all just as elitist and snobbish as it sounds. They only recently started including eBooks in their lists, and they still heavily discount eBooks that have no print edition.
This list is not as prestigious as the New York Times list, but for business books at least, carries almost as much social capital. Print-book data providers include all major booksellers now inclusive of Wal-Mart and Web retailers, and food stores.
E-book data providers include all major e-book retailers Apple excepted.
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