What makes something a best seller, novel wise? Obviously there is no one answer as there is a variety of factors that go into making something a best seller. A variety of factors that no one knows completely. However there are clues and there are things that pop again and again when top level agents and best selling authors say what puts them apart from others. Before we go further I want to point out a small distinction that’ll help with understanding what sells and what doesn’t when it comes to selling novels.
Novels are generally put into two “camps”, though there is overlap, there’s the literary camp and the “genre” or commercial fiction camp. Literary novels are generally written to impress the “literary class” or at least a few choice people in New York, while commercial fiction is written for the enjoyment of the average person. Literary is often considered “superior” to commercial fiction but that’s not really true.
But I’m sure it helps the literary authors sleep at night. All jokes aside one is written to impress a select group of “artistic” people while another is written for enjoyment. Both have merits and both have their challenges and rewards. But we’re going to be talking about commercial fiction here. Never think commercial means “lesser” if anything commercial writers have to write better to appeal to a wider audience and has just as much merit as literary fiction. But with that being said let’s move on.
The Secret Of Bestselling Novels
So what is it that distinguishes a best seller from another good novel, even great novel, but that doesn’t sell as much. Is it theme? Style? Voice? Plot? Characters? Pure luck? While all of those play a part and are important there’s one single thing that distinguishes best sellers from almost theres, and that is pacing. Natural best sellers, will explain this term in a moment, are best sellers because they have fast pacing. What do I mean by natural best sellers?
A natural best seller is put out by a publisher and picks up steam and is bought by tons of people. The Harry Potter series, James Patterson novels, Stephen Kings novels, and so on and so forth. I’m not talking about novels like The Great Gatsby, Crime & Punishment, Ulysses, or things like that. Things that the only reason they’re still talked about is because they’re considered “literary” or because schools require it. Very few people who pick up Ulysses do so to actually read it or enjoy it when they do. They do it to appear smart and literary for the most part.
Whereas when someone picks up a Dean Koontz book they’re much more likely to finish it. And they enjoy reading it, they don’t slog through it because they think they’re supposed to. And since no one is going to require schools to force your book on kids and literary snobs your best bet is to take your cues from natural best sellers. Speaking another way you’ll learn infinitely more from Dan Brown or E. L. James than you will from James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, that’s the truth. But anyways how does one create a fast paced novel? What do you have to do?
Frying Pan, Fire, Why Bother?
Well written fiction is made up of units called scenes or sequels, or whatever synonym you want to use. Scenes are made of goal, conflict, and setback whereas sequels are made up of emotional reaction, dilemma, and decision. Don’t worry about all of that right now. Generally you have one scene followed by a sequel and do that to the end of the book. This results in a well structured and evenly paced novel. One that doesn’t go to fast but doesn’t bog down either. However with best sellers there are times you want to ramp that up.
You want to increase the pacing, at least a little bit. And to do that you’ll what I call frying pan, fire, why bother? sequences. Essentially they’re two scenes back to back followed by a sequel. As scenes speed up pacing and sequels slow them down. However a novel of pure scenes wouldn’t make much sense. So anyways you start out with a scene where your protagonist runs into trouble, they’re in the frying pan, they have a goal and they end up worse trying to accomplish that goal.
Then the next scene they go into an even worse place, the fire, they have another goal but end up even worse then when they started. Then you tag on the emotional reaction, the sequel and have them think about this. Think about why they’re even bothering with all this if it’s going to cause all this trouble. So two scenes, with the second with a worse setback than the first, followed by a sequel. Not rocket science by any means but enough to up the pacing a bit and push it towards that best seller form.
Does This Guarantee A Best Seller?
Hell no, of course not. It just increases the pacing. If it guaranteed a best seller I wouldn’t be writing this, I’d be living on a yacht somewhere, or something like that. Nothing guarantees a best seller and there’s a lot more you have to do to get to that level. This is just a tip on pacing and how to increase it, without going so fast no one knows what the hell is going on. Play with it, it gives your novels that little extra bump to speed things along.
If anything I said here interests you I’d highly recommend you check out The Ultimate Alpha Collection which is a compilation of 16 of my books for the price of 5. It covers everything from being a man to making money to getting the right mindset to getting girls to fighting and more and is a resource no man should be without. Pick up your copy today!
-Charles Sledge
