Bestsellers are so yesterday – how to write a phenomenon.

by Patrick Woodrow on July 31, 2010

Ever read one of those “How To Write A Bestseller” books? No? Me neither. Nor do I intend to. I’m after bigger game, you see. I want to write a phenomenon. A freak. A bestseller that pulls down the shorts of other bestsellers and gives their chubby paper bottoms a palm-stinging spank.

It’s like the lottery. I’ve given up playing the national game so that I can concentrate on Euro Millions. Where’s the fun in winning £7m when, with a little application, you could take home £70m? Bestsellers are so yesterday. Phenomena is where it’s at.

There have been two phenomena in the thriller genre in the last ten years. There’s a good chance that you or someone you know has read at least one of them. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, was published in 2003 and has sold an estimated 80 million copies worldwide. More recently, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, first published in 2005, has already sold over 20 million copies.

Let’s be clear: these are not the best selling books of all time. The Bible, for example, is estimated to have sold between 2 and 6 billion copies, while A Tale of Two Cities and Lord of the Rings are estimated to have shifted 200 million and 150 million copies respectively. But The Da Vinci Code and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo are contemporary and they have reached their milestones in record time. That – for an author whose first book only managed six weeks on the bestseller lists in…er…Taiwan – makes them interesting and enviable case studies.

So why have these books sold so many copies? How have they transcended their markets, when the best efforts of Stephen King, Michael Crichton, James Patterson, John Grisham, Wilbur Smith and Clive Cussler have only ever done very, very well?

The answer, of course, is word-of-mouth. Nothing very insightful there but, equally, nothing very contentious either. It is an open secret in the book trade that success (to a certain extent at least) can be bought – but no amount of marketing dollars could achieve these figures. This is the work of dinner parties, book clubs and conversations by the office kettle. The work of Twitter and Facebook, email and text.

It starts like a sneeze: a minor eruption on an editor’s desk. Then a salesman sneezes over his key account. Within days, retailers are sneezing all over their customers. A tipping point is reached, and the virus becomes pandemic.

Suddenly, people who don’t usually read thrillers are inquisitive, drawn towards the paperback edition like moths to a bulb. Even those who don’t usually read books are beginning to feel left out. Then, a new resistant strain – the film – arrives, extending the novel’s currency by at least another year. Records are smashed with the frequency of plates at a Greek wedding. And all because people won’t stop talking about these books. Why?

Assuming we take a more-than-half-decent plot as a given, I believe there are four less obvious factors which go some way to providing an explanation.

Firstly, both novels were written by relatively unknown authors. Dan Brown had enjoyed modest success with his previous three books but wasn’t widely known outside America. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, meanwhile, was the debut novel of a respected but niche journalist.

It would be impossible for Messers King, Grisham, Cussler etc to write a phenomenon now because they are too well-known. Another world-class thriller by a mainstream author would be…well, just that.

These authors are already household names and even those who have never read them have already pigeon-holed them as being ‘not their thing’. Look at Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. Its apparent denial of global warming was both timely and controversial but, at the end of the day, it was just another Michael Crichton. Initial print run? A paltry 1.5 million copies. No. To write a phenomenon, you have to be discovered. You can’t take off, if you’ve already arrived.

Secondly, both books polarise popular opinion, enticing people to join the debate and form an view on their merits. Are the authors very good or just very lucky? As well as spawning a library of copy-cat thrillers, The Da Vinci Code gave rise to an outpouring of global cynicism and envy. Critics queued up to knock everything from Brown’s alleged plagiarism to his poor research and poorer penmanship.

Stephen Fry called Brown’s writing “arse gravy of the worst kind”, while Salman Rushdie labelled The Da Vinci Code “a novel so bad it gives bad novels a bad name.” But – and here’s the point – at least Rushdie has read The Da Vinci Code, and I think it’s a safe bet that Brown has never bothered with Rushdie’s fourth book, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey.

Similarly, many readers complain that the first 300 pages of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo move with the pace of a glacier traversing a speed-bump, leaving a significant number of critics baffled by its success. How can something so turgid, so creakingly arthritic, appeal to so many people? And in raising the question, they invite another million readers to provide an answer. If you want your book to be a phenomenon, pray that at least 20% of your readers think it’s one of the worst they’ve ever read. In order to be that good, it seems, you first have to be more than a little bit bad.

Thirdly, the dilemma over the novels’ merits generates a sense of public urgency. A sense of duty. As sales pick up so the public becomes aware that something extraordinary is happening. History is being made. The responsibility to have an opinion increases.

This is mass-market fiction, and everyone is as qualified as the next man to speak up – even if the next man happens to be Salman Rushdie.

By judging these books, we have the power to build or shatter their myth. To actively participate in defining one of the arts. We believe that our opinion – like a single vote in a closely fought election – really will count in the final reckoning. It’s compulsive; empowering. The debate is no longer about the novels’ plots or characters, it’s about whether they are cultural assets or liabilities. Word-of-mouth spreads. Sales grow exponentially.

Finally – and perhaps most controversially – these books allow their readers to feel intellectually superior. In the case of The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, it is the novel’s inaccessibility that bewitches the reader. It’s bulk and complexity bully us into thinking we’re reading something intellectual.

Chuck in the fact that we’re reading a Swedish novel by an author who’s died, and suddenly we can claim to have art-house tastes while wallowing in mass-market Schadenfreude. ‘Oh yes,’ we think. ‘Swedish crime fiction isn’t beyond me. And the fact that it’s painfully slow? It must mean it’s good for me.’

This may only be happening subconsciously but it’s definitely happening. Trust me. Had the same plot been written by Grisham, King, or one of the other greats of contemporary thriller writing, it wouldn’t have sold a tenth as well because it wouldn’t have had any scarcity value. Forget all the nonsense about Lisbeth Salander being a singular creation. Whether she is or isn’t, we are talking about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because it makes us feel just a little bit smarter, a little bit more special than we did before. Ironically given the sales figures, it makes us feel just a little bit more individual.

And long before the storm broke about its inaccuracies and borrowed ideas, The Da Vinci Code was cajoling readers into thinking that they were reading something quasi-erudite. A highbrow lecture delivered in layman’s terms. It made people feel good about themselves. Art, history and religion were worthwhile subjects, which excused non-thriller readers for reading what they would normally dismiss as pap. “Da Vinci? Oh yes, I’ve long been familiar with Da Vinci.” And even those who subsequently concluded that The Da Vinci Code was, indeed, a load of bombastic tosh, were able to feel superior by undermining it.

Go on. Admit it. Whether you loved or loathed it, praised or knocked it, voicing your opinion of The Da Vinci Code enabled you to feel slightly cleverer than you did before.

The secret of Dan Brown’s success, you see, was to flatter his readers. And flattery, dear friends, will get you everywhere.