Writing Bestsellers

Found this from NPR books: On Writing a Best-Seller

I'd love to write a longer commentary, but this appears to be background material for a piece on an author (James W. Hall, author of Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers, which is, itself, as of the time of this writing, at exactly #1000 in book sales on Amazon).

Couple of reasons listed for books being bestsellers:

• dealing with social issues (race, sex, etc.)
• dealing with institutions and suspicion of institutions
• outsiders as protagonists

Although this article has a subtitle "Shhh, there's a formula," I don't know if that's the way to look at it.  (Granted, I haven't read the book, although I might.  Might be fun to examine in the context of fantasy bestsellers.)  At any rate, if no social issues are at stake, and everyone is happy and well-adjusted, there's not much of a story that's likely to happen.  Only when you perturb the normal flow of life do you create something which will keep people's interest.

I cringe at the idea of formulaic fiction.  It does seem to be successful (Terry Brooks and L.E. Modesitt, Jr., in the fantasy genre, have both written the same book over and over again and both are "New York Times bestselling authors.")  And people often make the argument that there's nothing in fantasy that's original (I'm wishy-washy on that one, probably because I don't want it to be true).  Of course, when someone does write something original, half the Amazon reviewers complain that it's too weird.  Argh, I give up.