The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel

by Jodie Archer

Similarly, while we spent a lot of time teaching our machines how to detect that The Devil Wears Prada is set in New York City while Gone Girl begins in New York but ends up in Missouri, it turns out that (with a few exceptions) the geopolitical setting of a book is not all that important in terms of whether or not it sells well.

These are some of the big expectations, and you’ve seen the vitriol or heartache of the Goodreads reviews when writers don’t fulfill them.

Better to stick to the average home. Writers, don’t take your reader further than you personally have ever been, and if you have been further than most of us, then keep it for your memoir.

John Grisham’s The Runaway Journey,

I think this is supposed to be Runaway Jury

This is the stuff a good stylist needs to recognize: that the first sentence is the hook

This whole section felt like an unwanted writer's lesson on opening lines

We’ll admit that there is a certain fascination to word people like us, with all this data for data’s sake. To imagine us staring at a huge spreadsheet together, coffee in hand, mind blown that the word “thing” occurs six times more often in bestsellers than in non-bestsellers, would not be too far off.

What this means is that bestsellers are about shorter, cleaner sentences, without unneeded words.

Look at what happened in 2001 when Oprah Winfrey recommended Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. He infamously called her other selections “schmaltzy” and said his work was too highbrow to appear in her book club.

Wow