Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (4 page)

Over the last few decades, however, the practice of book touring has become so widespread that on any given night in any given bookstore across the land, an author can be found pacing up and down the aisles, waiting and hoping for his or her audience to appear. The novelty of actually meeting a living, breathing author face-to-face has long ago worn off.

Then, more often than not, the latest advertising bright idea fails entirely to produce the intended results. Even lavishing hundreds of thousand of dollars on a promotional campaign is no guarantee of a book’s success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. Though they would wish it were otherwise, publishers are less in control of the destiny of individual books than the public (and most authors) often imagine.

My point is that knowing the historical details and the exact method a publisher used to promote a book to bestsellerdom would ultimately tell us very little, since the whole enterprise is fraught with unpredictability. Over the years, I’ve heard dozens of publishers or agents say some version of the following: “How the hell did that book make the List?”

“At least half the books on any given week’s bestseller list are there to the immense surprise and puzzlement of their
publishers,” says Michael Korda, bestselling author and longtime editor. “That’s why publishers find it so hard to repeat their successes—half the time they can’t figure out how they happened in the first place.”

As for Oprah, well, bless her amazing heart. Starting in 1996, her book club brought enormous numbers of new readers into the marketplace and conferred on dozens of otherwise obscure writers a measure of fame and fortune that, while ephemeral in many cases, was surely deserved.

However, for the decade that her book club operated at its peak, her chosen books tended to skew the bestseller list toward a type of novel that might not be so heavily represented otherwise, and thereby her selections squeezed off the list (and out of view) novels that many people might have chosen using guidance from more varied sources such as book reviews, booksellers, and word-of-mouth recommendations.

In any case, I didn’t feel the need to include an Oprah pick on our reading list since at least two of the novels,
To Kill a Mockingbird
and
Peyton Place
, already stand squarely in her demographic promised land.

Finally, the five authors I’ve added to Hackett’s all-time bestselling list are all from the last quarter of the twentieth century, with a strong tilt toward contemporary novels. I’ve done this bit of updating for the simple reason that I wanted to make this study of bestsellers more germane to a modern reader.

W
hen Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner intercepts an impatient guest who’s rushing to a wedding, and grabs hold with his skinny hand and glittering eye, and proceeds to mesmerize the man with his haunting sea story, Coleridge has given us a nifty metaphor for the foremost mission of a bestseller writer. These books grip you and refuse to let you loose until they’ve finished their tale.

For the popular audience, first and foremost a novel must be entertaining. It’s a fact so painfully obvious, I shudder to say it. For a novel to rise to the sales level of these twelve
blockbusters, it must be a page-turner. A book you can’t put down, that you want to read in a gulp. One that keeps you up all night. Gripping. Edge of your seat. Mesmerizing. Fast-paced. Spellbinding. A roller-coaster thrill ride. Unputdownable.

Novelist and historian Les Standiford, a university colleague of mine, is fond of telling roomfuls of aspiring novelists, “The only place people read books they are not interested in is college.”

The focus of this chapter is twofold. First I’ll share what my students and I came to call the “mechanics of speed.” Various ways in which writers initially engage readers, then keep them securely hooked while moving fast through a few hundred pages.

Then we’ll look beyond narrative devices at the other key ingredients that helped these twelve novels seize the attention of so many readers.

Hollywood filmmakers can teach us a thing or two about speed, for moviemakers have turned storytelling into a science, using certain formulaic devices that consistently accelerate the forward movement of the narrative.

It’s true that all twelve of the novels on our reading list were made into major motion pictures, and without a doubt some of their sales success as books was spurred by their filmic version. However, the common belief that a movie of a novel is the main factor in driving a book’s commercial success is not supported by the facts. For instance,
Jaws
sold around a million copies before the film even came out.

In the cases of
Valley of the Dolls
and
The Da Vinci Code
, which are two of the biggest bestsellers of all time, so many copies had already been sold by the time the movie hit the theaters that it was unlikely any movie ticket buyers had not already bought the novel. Indeed, they seemed to be drawn to the film
because
they knew and loved the book.

That said, the effect of a successful film on the novel’s long-term sales can be substantial.
Gone with the Wind
is the top-grossing domestic movie of all time, adjusted for ticket price inflation. Without a doubt, the film’s ongoing popularity keeps the sales of the novel perking along. However, it’s important to note that Margaret Mitchell’s novel sold two million copies within a year of its publication, long before David O. Selznick got his hands on it. In this case, as in many others, the movie obviously helped the book’s long-term sales, but the film was only one of many factors contributing to the book’s overall success.

The permutations are endless: Bestsellers that flop at the box office (
The Lovely Bones
). Novels that have marginal sales but become spectacular hits as films (
Forrest Gump
). Novels that were moderate bestsellers but become movie legends. (Larry McMurtry has done it often.)

But such considerations are ultimately beside the point; at least, they’re beside
my
point—which is that popular novelists have undeniably absorbed many lessons from the craft of filmmakers, and either intentionally or unintentionally, they have made their stories more “movie-friendly.” These are the books that Hollywood folks
want
to make into movies. And moviemakers, in turn, have sharpened their storytelling craft by employing techniques of successful novelists. This crosspollination of the two storytelling art forms is natural and mutually beneficial.

Steven Spielberg puts it this way: “I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie.”

Being able to compress a novel’s complex plot into a single sentence is both a useful exercise for a novelist struggling to understand the dramatic forces driving his or her own work and a helpful marketing tool in the publishing industry and the film world. There are numerous commercial benefits to being able to frame a story in intriguing shorthand. For one thing, if a novel can’t be summarized succinctly and engagingly, then word-of-mouth buzz isn’t as easy to generate, and a marketing campaign is less likely to succeed; sales reps simply have a harder time selling the book to their bookstore accounts if they can’t give a concise and appealing description. That’s three strikes against any story so murky or complex that it can’t be simplified to a tasty kernel.

For example:

When a rogue Russian sub commander who’s piloting a vessel so technologically advanced that it could upset the balance of world power engages in a cat-and-mouse game with a brilliant CIA analyst who has the entire U.S. Navy at his disposal, World War III is only one small mistake away.

A resourceful young girl’s innocent childhood is shattered and her family members threatened when she is thrust into the center of the racial turmoil that erupts in her small southern town.

Just for fun, check out this one-liner for
The Wizard of Oz
(often credited to Richard Polito, a journalist in California), which makes Dorothy’s story sound like a hallucinatory episode from the life of Charlie Manson:

The literary version of “high concept” is what’s known as “the dramatic question,” which is another way of capturing in a single catchy phrase the dramatic energy coiled within a novel.

Generally speaking, each genre has its own standard question. In mysteries: Will the detective catch the killer? Romance: Will the woman hook up with the man of her dreams? Horror: How will our hero manage to survive or defeat these terrifying events? Or in coming-of-age-novels: How will the character’s adult life be shaped by the events of his or her youth?

Our twelve bestsellers are anything but coy about showing their hands from the beginning. Will the shark come back for a second bite? Will Scarlett ever marry Ashley? What will success do to Mitch and Abby McDeere? Will Anne Welles and her two girl pals find love and happiness in the big city? Will that faithless priest be able to save the little girl from the clutches of Satan?

Good questions, sure. Most readers’ interest would be piqued. But are these questions sufficient to attract and compel large numbers of readers? No. More is required.

One way our twelve bestsellers stand apart is that each of them enhanced these dramatic questions by using unique and creative mash-ups of traditional genres. For instance, at its heart
The Hunt for Red October
is a detective story, and its dramatic question is straightforward. Will the detective, Jack Ryan, locate the rogue Russian sub commander and thwart his mission?

But if that were all this story was about, it’s doubtful it would have risen above the other popular novels of its time. Its grip on so many readers springs in part from Clancy’s mingling the dramatic structure of the detective story with the familiar tropes of the novel of international intrigue, then combining that with elements of the sea adventure, and finally tossing in one inventive new ingredient, a feature that has become a staple of the techno-thriller: the use of cutting-edge hardware and technology, which plays a role as central as the characters themselves (not unlike science fiction). So in
The Hunt for Red October
, the potency of the standard dramatic question that fuels the detective story is increased exponentially when these additional elements begin to slosh together.

An average reader may not observe any of this consciously, but even the most jaded among us can’t help but be intrigued when we confront a never-seen-before species that somehow echoes other stories we’ve read and loved. We love the familiar and are excited by the new. A combination of both is irresistible.

While it may not seem as fresh and original to us now, in its day
The Hunt for Red October
was almost experimental in its novelty. A large part of its success as both fiction and film was due to this crafty mixing and matching of genres and its use of a movie-friendly principle called “high concept” that helps seize our attention from the very first pages.

Once the reader has been snagged by a novel’s high-concept premise, on one level we are drawn forward by the momentum
of the unfolding story as one complication after another challenges the central character and the original dramatic question mutates into another question and another.