WHAT EVERY BOOK NEEDS TO BECOME A BESTSELLER:
Journalist and book author, Martin Goodman, recently came up with some secrets of bestsellers. Number one, he says, they all involve wealth. The thinking is that people buy into what they want to have. Number two, at least 60% of fiction bestsellers include a villain as a principal character, and the villain survives. Why? So that one day, he will rise to terrorize again. Number three, the chase scene. The need to survive and escape from evil. Number four, include a strong female character. The greatest proportion of readers are female; do you need any better explanation than that? And number five. Always write in the past tense. In Martin Goodman's analysis of bestselling novels, 100% of them were written in the past tense.
That is one writer's analysis; there are many others. To gain some insight into how bestsellers are perceived by the reader, I looked at some comments from Barnes and Noble reviewers:
About Danielle Steel, they say: "...will make you laugh, weep and lose yourself in a rivetting saga. Heart-touching. Drawn in a trance, can't put it down."
About Michael Crichton: "...knack for distilling complex issues into page turning plots.
About Stephen King: "...haunting and suspenseful. Reigning master of dark fiction."
Clearly, bestsellers are gut-wrenching stories that grab us where we hurt. They deal with immediate, relevant issues, often pulled straight out of the news headlines. They are page-turners with engaging characters. As we read the story, these characters become real people to us, and they draw us into their lives and bring us out of the reading experience having learned a new truth.
In a CNN interview with Sidney Sheldon, he said:
"Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write my books so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she must turn one more page... When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded."
