How to write a bestseller
literary world ignores her. Publishing is an odd business. It is worth around $37bn in Britain and America alone, but you would never know this from the literature that it produces, which focuses on books in the brainy vein rather than anything so vulgar as volumes that actually sell.
One authoritative history of English literature contains 60-odd mentions of “Shakespeare"; ten on “the sublime"; eight on “blank verse"—but a blank silence for concepts such as “business" and “turnover". In another literary history, popular novels—those “jam tarts for the mind" as William Thackeray, the British novelist, called them—are mentioned, but with a wince, under the heading: “Problems of popular culture". When Gore Vidal wrote an article on bestsellers it opened with the observation that “shit has its own integrity"—and became more dismissive from there.
The book business, however, depends on those despised bestsellers. September is when publishers release the titles that they hope will be their money-spinners. Yet most books will be loss-making.
To produce, print and publicise a book costs about £12,000-15,000 ($15,000-19,000), says Mark Richards of Swift Press, an independent publisher. He reckons that it takes around 5,000 copies to break even. Most books never come close: only 0.4% of titles in Britain last year sold more than that, according to Nielsen BookData.
Ms Steel’s books, by contrast, have sold 268,000 in Britain this year. Jam tarts they may be, but that is why people gobble them up. And yet publishers seem to have an almost total inability to predict which books will sell.
As Markus Dohle, then the boss of Penguin Random House, a large publisher, said last year, “Success is random. Bestsellers are random. So that’s
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