What Makes a Bad Book Popular? Pacing.

This is a perennial question, isn’t it? Of course it is! Generally it’s pronounced in a tone that is envious, angry, or both, but let us try to restrain that sort of unhelpful emotional reaction and rephrase the question in a way that is both more helpful and more positive:

What do bad books do well, so that they appeal to readers even though they are not well-written?

I do think that’s a much more helpful way to ask the question.

Badly written: The Last Druid by Terry Brooks, where Brooks shoves the reader away by using a ton of “She was reminded of how precarious her situation was” and “She forced herself to concentrate, to stop the rambling flow of her thoughts,” types of phrases, plus a lot of unnecessary place and character names, plus a lot of thoughts about the backstory.

Here is Amazon’s currently top review for this book:

The Last Druid was a fitting … end to the Shannara Series as a whole. … It was fast paced and picked up right where The Skaar Invasion ended. Everything about the book was great, and really the only thing I can say is that this was yet another great ending to a Shannara Series.

It was fast paced. And the top review is (sorry!) boringly written, vague, and repetitive , which implies that this reader may not tend to be bothered by those qualities in fiction. I realize that is an inference that could be wrong, but it sort of struck me. You can click through and read the whole review; that’s why I linked it.

Badly written: The Da Vinci Code, where the writing inspired this parody for, one presumes, a reason. I haven’t read the book, only the parody and various reviews, such as this one, which is especially helpful here. This is most of the review, but click through to read the rest of it.

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: the writing…is terrible. Astonishingly terrible. Make ESL students stitch 120,000 words together on their first day of class kind of terrible. I recommend wielding a pen while reading this novel, because you’ll constantly stop and underline sentences that are loaded with badness. My personal favorite: “The fond memory caused Sophie a pang of sadness as the harsh reality of the murder gripped her again.” Cliché sandwich with a side of corny triteness anyone? But, as you may have noticed, this is a four star review. Why? Well, because it’s ridiculously entertaining. … Twist after twist, revelation after revelation, the plot becomes a tangled net of intrigue as the characters race toward a showdown where truths and identities are shockingly uncovered. The book’s strongest quality is its ability to introduce esoteric history and facts without ever slowing down the pacing.

I will just note that “The fond memory caused Sophie a pang of sadness as the harsh reality of the murder gripped her again” is bad both because it’s using the same distancing report about Sophie that we saw in the book by Terry Brooks and because it’s just a silly sentence.

Badly Written: When the Moon Hatched, and here the badness is in the silly, overwrought pseudo-poetic sentences, such as Rayne fell upon the ground in a billion yearning teardrops of unrequited love, puddling in Bulder’s dips, filling his gorges with her gushing affections, although it’s hard to pick out one sentence because they’re all like that.

Here is the unbearably overwraught title, in full, as listed on Amazon: When the Moon Hatched: A Fast-Paced Romantasy with Undeniable Chemistry in a Stunning Immersive World

AND PLEASE STOP. This tendency to stuff the entire tagline, opinions and all, into the TITLE, should thankfully be on its way out. This is done in an attempt to screw with Amazon’s algorithms. According to posts like this one, stuffing allllll the keywords you can think of into the title should now be penalized by the algorithms, and I wish to heaven that change had been made before When the Moon Hatched was published (May 2024), because now they’re stuck with that title, and so are the rest of us. We will have to look at that title for the rest of time. THAT TITLE ALONE SHOULD DRIVE READERS AWAY, but last year, stuffing keywords into the title was rewarded by the algorithms, apparently.

So that may be part of why this book became popular — I mean, pure algorithm manipulation. However, I have seen references to a few influencers on social media platforms pushing this book upward. I don’t know for sure that this happened, but it seems likely. Or at least plausible.

Interestingly, looking at the 10% of the reviews of When the Moon Hatched that mention pacing, just about exactly half say the pacing is great and the other half say the pacing drags, especially in the first part (this is a summary from the AI overview at the top of the reviews). I guess we can’t declare that pacing was the single characteristic that bounced this book up to the top. Some reviews indicate it’s fairly steamy, but it doesn’t seem to be full-on smut like Fifty Shades, so that’s not it.

Though, as far as that goes, Fifty Shades demonstrates that pure smut can also make a book popular. (Very, very popular.) That’s not even unusual, as for example Laurel K Hamilton’s books shifted from novels to hard-core-plus-torture-with-a-thin-coating-of-story years and years ago (I’m not kidding) (or exaggerating). And they’re still going strong, thousands of ratings for each of the recent ones in this series. But setting that sort of exaggerated steaminess aside, how about OTHER books?

And I think the single quality that links those other books is pacing. That’s what I think does it, more than any other feature.

Or, okay, pacing and luck. Those two qualities. Luck, if the right social media influencer picks up a book and raves about it, and because social media influencers, like the rest of us, probably run this gamut —

And therefore plenty are on the left side of that curve and there you go, When the Moon Hatched, boom, popular. But without that kind of luck, then maybe it’s mostly down to pacing.

What do you think? Do you all have lots of counter examples springing to mind?

***

What contributes to the perception that the pace is fast? Some of the elements that contribute are stylistic and some are in the storytelling. Let me see how many I can hit in a rapid list:

1) Short paragraphs.

2) Short chapters.

3) Easy-to-read language.

4) Chapters that end with a mild (or serious) cliffhanger.

5) Chapters that begin with strong foreshadowing of approaching danger.

6) A good balance of interwoven exposition, description, internal thought and reactions, and external action, with the external action tending to come toward the end or beginning of each chapter. This is sort of a restatement of the two points above, I guess.

7) And, the part that I think is what people may think of first, every time the reader’s attention starts to drift away, something exciting happens. This isn’t the same thing as “lots of action,” but sure —

8) Lots of action, with the caveat that action can be direly boring and often is. Meaningful action involving characters we care about, plus the writing is good enough that we don’t just get lost, but can keep track of what’s going on.

I’m getting close to ten, so let’s see if I can’t make this a Ten Things That Make a Book Feel Fast list. How about:

9) Shallow rather than deep worldbuilding and sense of place. I mean, how much do you linger along the way? Does the author give you a chance to stroll at a leisurely pace and sniff the flowers? Or does the world barely exist as you zip through the story?

10) Rhythm. Does the story bounce along at a perky clip, or does it unfold more gradually? Does the tension rise and fall steeply, or gently?

Creating this list made me think of a book I read a long time ago — listened to, actually — and hated. This was a time when I had books on CDs, not on my phone (I don’t think I had a smartphone yet), so I couldn’t just stop and listen to a different audiobook, plus I was mildly curious to see how certain things would resolve. Anyway, what came to mind right now was that one of this book’s many weaknesses was horrible action scenes that dragged on and on. The action scene I’m thinking of in particular was a fight that took place on a bus.

The scene wasn’t hard to follow, that wasn’t the problem. It was slooooooow. The author described this fight in such a way that I kept thinking, “How can this fight STILL be going on? ???” I don’t mean this thought occurred to me once near the end. I mean for a very large percentage of the fight scene, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t over yet. How long does it TAKE for the bad guy to stalk the length of a bus? They aren’t that big! This may count as the worst-written fight scene I have ever read, only to be matched by many other problems with the writing, all of which were exacerbated by the audio format. Should I mention this book by name? I’m sure you’re curious. Fine, okay, it was Hero by Perry Moore.

A much better-written example for a lot of this fast-pace stuff is Wild Night by Patrick Lee. The link goes to my post where I took the novella apart as thoroughly as I could. I know I mentioned a lot of the features in this list.

Another book that comes to mind for me here, that I doubt very much you’ve read, is Truth Lies Bleeding by Chris Dolley, which I beta read … last year, I guess. Looks like it just came out a couple weeks ago. Anyway, my point here is, there are various things about this story that would not ordinarily have worked for me, BUT, every single time my attention started to drift, BOOM!

The Hunger Games is a good choice for #6. Also, I did not pay attention to this when I read the Scholomance trilogy, but since that trilogy had it all, and I read it fast, it probably had basically all the above lined up.

Other examples where a fast pace seems to me to lead to popularity: James Patterson for sure. Stephen King, even, maybe. Perhaps horror usually entails a lot of cliffhangery moments. I’ve never specifically noticed whether those tend to come at the ending of chapters, but perhaps they do.

What do you all think about the hypothesis that fast pace –> popularity? Or, I guess, it’s really that

[fast pace + luck + smut] –> popularity of not-great books

because that’s actually where I started. I bet there are counterexamples, though. Anybody got one?

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