Lindsay Buroker

A couple of days ago, I saw a video review of The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World on The Creative Penn. I needed something to listen to on a road trip anyway, so I picked up the audio version of the book. Joanna already did a nice review of it, so I won’t summarize it here, but one of the ideas was that talent and hard work only get you so far in business (including art, music, and writing). You need a serendipitous moment here or there (AKA a lucky break) in order to succeed in our rapidly evolving world.

For authors, the ultimate sign of success is often considered hitting the bestseller lists and hanging out there long enough to sell a million (or more) copies. This doesn’t mean you can’t make a perfectly nice living as a mid-list author (something that is more possible than ever in the world of independent e-publishing right now), but that’s not quite the same as rocketing up the charts to fame and fortune. True, that’s not something to which every author aspires, but, especially in today’s economy, one can certainly understand the desire to not simply make a living but to be “set for life.”

But can a bestselling book be manufactured? Is there a formula that, with enough practice and talent, an author might follow? Or do the stars need to align in just the right way for one to reach such lofty heights?

The Click Moment author, Frans Johansson, suggests it’s the latter.

Among other examples, Twilight gets a mention in the book. As we all know, the series took off without precedent. Stephanie Meyer wasn’t an experienced author with years of practice penning novels; in fact, she hadn’t been writing much at all before getting an idea for her story and going from there. She wasn’t well-versed in vampire lore and made things up as she went. Johansson even points out that much of the series’ success might be attributed to Meyer’s lack of knowledge, which allowed her to tackle things from a fresh angle. Had she been better versed in vampire lore and gone with the accepted norms, she couldn’t have written the same story, the one that resonated with so many teenage readers and rocketed her up the charts.

Stephen King is also used as an example in the book. He had some early success, then was able to build on it until he reached a point where his name alone could place a new release on the bestseller lists. But, Richard Bachman, a pen name King used early on (because his publisher wouldn’t allow him to publish more than one book a year) failed to have that early break-out moment. The Bachman books, despite being written by the same author with the same storytelling talents, failed to gain traction until it was revealed that King was Bachman.

In these cases, as well as many others, it seems that some serendipitous moment caused a tipping point in the authors’ careers, and it is that moment, rather than simple hard work and talent, that allowed them to achieve bestseller status.

So, what does that mean for the rest of us? All we can do is hope to get lucky?

Well, yes, and no. Johansson argues that randomness and luck do play a part in success but that we can set our selves up to be in a position where luck will be more likely to strike for us.

How we can improve our odds of becoming a bestselling author

1. “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” – Herb Kelleher (AKA Write a Lot!)

Johansson uses that quotation in the book, and I caught myself nodding. The more books you write, the more chances you have of hitting it big with one.

As some of you know, I used to build content-based websites and monetize them with affiliate programs and Google Adsense (that was the old day job). I must have made about twenty sites over the six or seven years I was making a living doing this. I read up on SEO and learned about the various keyword research tools that let me see exactly how many people were searching for which terms on Google. I also knew how to find out how much advertisers were bidding for clicks on ads in the various fields (so I could estimate how much I would earn for each ad click originating on my site).

All that science should have meant that I could pick a winning website topic every time and turn each one into a cash cow. It’s true that none of them failed utterly, and they all ended up making at least a dollar or two a day, but perhaps one in five would make much more than that, and one in ten might make more than a hundred dollars a day. The thing is… I couldn’t, despite all that research, accurately predict which sites wold take off. A random link from a popular blog (which often resulted in links from many more blogs) could make a site overnight. Or one particular topic might resonate with people, and word-of-mouth marketing would come into play. In other words, some sites got lucky and others didn’t.

When it comes to novels, I think the lesson is that most of us aren’t going to hit it big with one book. But if we write ten or twenty books, the odds are much better of one become a hit. One thing I pointed out in a post on JA Konrath’s $140,000 earnings month is that one or two of his 30- or 40-odd titles were responsible for the majority of his income. (There’s a chart on that post, showing his sales numbers.)

So, if we hope to become bestsellers, we must not only write well, but we must write and publish lots to increase our odds for success. Johansson calls this making a lot of bets and suggests we should also minimize the size of those bets. If you’re not the fastest writer, this might mean trying some novellas and shorter works (Joanna from the Creative Penn link above is planning to try this). It might also mean publishing a number of potential series Book 1s before committing to a six-book storyline, thus to see which series has the most potential to take off. There are doubtlessly numerous ways authors can pursue this philosophy.

2. Don’t try to follow a formula or use current trends as an indicator of what to write

Hollywood, for all its money and power and experience, can’t predict which scripts will turn into blockbuster hits and which will flop. That’s why they buy so darned many; they’re also hoping to “get lucky.”

New York publishing houses can’t predict which books will become hits either. They try their darnedest to manufacture them, but again and again they’re surprised by what actually takes off. When they’re regurgitating popular formulas, it’s not necessarily in hopes of creating a bestseller, but rather in putting out a middle-of-the-road style of product that’s proven over and over again that it can be profitable enough. These folks are usually as dumbfounded as you and me when something like 50 Shades of Greys takes the world by storm.

As we discussed, one of the reasons Twilight may have been such a hit is because Meyer made up her own versions of vampires through sheer ignorance of the precedents in the genre. She was essentially an outsider, and, in being so, brought fresh ideas to the table. This is actually a fairly tried and true concept. Sometimes the most brilliant ideas come from people outside of a field, because they haven’t been trained to think in a certain way. There are sites out there (and I forget the name or where I read about this, so someone please post more details if this rings a bell) where huge companies with staffs of brilliant engineers, scientists, etc. post problems on the web with rewards for those who can solve them. And the most random, sometimes utterly unskilled, people solve problems that eluded teams of specialists in the field.

So, what does this mean for us as writers? Johansson suggests we go places and do things that have nothing to do with our core work, thus to open ourselves up to moments and experiences that will give us unique ideas. He mentions talking to random people, traveling and experiencing different cultures, and going to conventions and conferences in fields outside of our niches.

For authors, I think, too, it’s important to read widely in areas that have nothing to do with the genre in which you write. When I was in my teens, I read nothing but medieval fantasy for a few years. And the stories that I wrote at the time were medieval fantasies that sounded a heck of a lot like all the other stories I was reading. I won’t claim that I create the most original worlds these days either, but I do find a lot of fun plot ideas from reading real-world history and listening to podcasts on a variety of non-fiction topics. I’ve found that travel can indeed inspire ideas, and you don’t necessarily need to cross the world (something we authors aren’t always rich enough to afford!); an hour drive and a tour of a small town with an interesting history can also stir the imagination.

3. When something seems to be working, exploit it!

Once one of your bets pays off, and you have a winner, take advantage of that. Write more books in a similar vein.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to wait for a book to become a bestseller. If one of your titles sparks better reviews and more fan mail than the others, it may make sense to launch a series based on that book. This may be Step 1 in creating a bestselling series.

Each of Stephen King’s books becomes a bestseller because he’s built up a fan base of readers who know they will get what they expect when they buy a new King book. If he’d decided to bounce around between genres and write something different each time, he might have been, at best, a one-hit wonder. But, by writing the same types of novels each time, novels that have proven popular for him, he’s created, as Johansson calls it, a self-reinforcing loop.

Final thoughts

Though I can see many of the points in the book, and often found myself nodding, it’s hard for me to give up the belief that a savvy author could gradually work one’s way up to bestseller status without some random bit of luck suddenly turning a book into a phenomenon. If one can put out good stories and build on small successes along the way, gradually gathering more fans with each successive release, it seems that one would eventually hit a tipping point (caused by X number of fans buying a new release on Day 1, and thus propelling it into visibility on bestseller lists) regardless of lucky breaks. But perhaps that would only result in one becoming a popular author and not a bestselling one.

Your thoughts?