bestsellers
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The Long and Winding Road to a Bestseller
In Warren Adler‘s first-ever video portraying his personal story of becoming an enduring novelist, the acclaimed author of The War of the Roses speaks frankly about the trials and tribulations he faced on the road to pursuing his dream. Check out the…
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Weekly Geekery
Love = addiction. And both hijack the brain’s learning circuit. Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, resurrected on YouTube. The top traits of bestselling books. (Hint: Not sex.) The language you speak affects your morality. Sand avalanche! In your brain!
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The Messy Life of Jonathan Safran Foer
It’s not easy being a literary star. From the existential crises that comes from fame to the struggle to follow up a critically acclaimed first novel, becoming “a writer” for life involves a lot more than publishing a bestseller. Read Lev Grossman’s…
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Data vs. Instincts
In the world of publishing, everything’s a gamble. How do successful editors manage to push out bestsellers? Is it good instincts, or data-driven predictions? Turns out, it’s a mix of both, and the influences are rarely ever clear.
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A No-Hitter
Not even James Patterson or Stephen King have reached a top-twenty spot with a new book on the New York Times‘s Bestseller list this year. Publishers are blaming mediocre sales of adult fiction on lessened media coverage due to recent acts of…
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How to Hack Your Way to Being a “Best Selling” Book on Amazon
Because of the high bar, the term “bestselling author” was [once] a term with some meaning. It was seen as something that was earned through a lot of hard work. But today, that designation has changed—for the worse. It’s like…
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Poetry’s Love Affair with the Internet
We already knew that the Internet is a wild and wonderful place for poets, but the web is also empowering verse offline. The New York Times reports on how the Internet is vaulting poetry onto the bestseller list, and we…
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Literature of Endurance
A shrewd observer of titles that dominate the bestseller list week after week will notice the plethora of books about overcoming harrowing events or difficult trials. Over at the Financial Times, Ed Caesar weighs in on our readerly obsessions on stories…
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Are Books Getting Dumber Because We Want Them To?
Over at Bloomberg View, Stephen L. Carter examines the Amazon of the Victorian era, a book distributor named Charles Edward Mudie, and how readers are really to blame for literary fiction’s struggle to find a readership. Carter writes about Mudie…
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How to Scientifically Predict a Novel’s Success
It’s impossible to predict what will make a book sell well, but scientists at Stony Brook University think they might be on the right track. After conducting statistical analyses of novels from several genres, they were able to predict with…
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More Depressing News about Bestsellers Lists
Previously, we blogged about wealthy authors paying tens of thousands of dollars to make their books bestsellers. But what happens if your book moves all those copies the good old-fashioned way, no cheating involved? Patrick Wensink, whose novel Broken Piano for…
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Bestsellers, Worst Ethics
Reading bestsellers lists can be baffling. You know the whole world isn’t going to spring for literary fiction or erudite essay collections all the time, but sometimes a book seems so bland and unremarkable that you wonder how so many…