How to Become a Bestseller

The Atlantic currently has one of the best articles about the business of writing, and the difference between the world of genre fiction and the world of literary fiction. The essay, written from the perspective of a literary fiction writer Eric Konigsberg, examines the hugely successful career of Harlan Coben.

It's a fascinating piece for a number of reasons. Coben's understanding of the minutia of the industry of publishing is rather amazing, epitomized by his knowledge of even Sam's Club's book stocking methodology. In Coben we see how a writer becomes a mutli-million dollar bestseller, and what he gains and losses in the process. The profile, written by Eric Konigsberg, is fair and honest, and the same can be said of Coben himself. Take this excellent analysis, which points out something I don't think I've ever heard someone say aloud before:

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average—or only slightly above average—detective story does … And the strange thing is that this average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is really not very different from what are called the masterpieces of the art. It drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a shade grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvious. But it is the same kind of book. Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

This is particularly fascinating considering our debates in African American lit about what is genre writing and what is literature. In Coben we find an author who is completely conscious of what his position in the publishing universe is, and embraces it. Instead of seeing his massive commercial success as proof of his work's artistic genius, he maintains a realistic grounded understanding of his career. His job is to write gripping thrillers that play on our fears for ourselves and our families in a way that is both engaging, gripping, and comfortably repetitive. His job is not to give a social message, or waist time with character beyond the archetypes. It's to create books that are fun and familiar, just like his last book his audience loved but just new enough that they can buy it and repeat the thrill.

“It’s not like I’m an artist,” he said. “If this book doesn’t do well, and I say to my publisher, ‘I want the freedom to do what I want,’ well, they might say, ‘We want the freedom to take back some of this money.’”

Coben understands that his career is built on creating a very specific product for a specific audience; this realization is one of the key's to his success. Unlike some Black commercial fiction authors of late who have cried racism in response to the refusal of their publishers to accept manuscripts outside the author's existing genre and audience, Coben does not confuse corporate reality for anything other than what it is. If you sell oranges, and you have regular clients who come just for your oranges, you can't just start selling beets and think that won't effect business.

It is this understanding of his audience, and his belief that creatively his work showed conform to his readers rather than his readers make the effort to interpret his work, that also separates Coben from the majority of literary writers:

At another bookstore talk, Coben made fun of “the kind of writer who says”—here, he adopted a mopey zombie’s voice—“‘I only write for myself; I don’t care who reads it.’ That’s like saying, ‘I only talk to myself; I don’t care who’s listening.’”

(Biggups to Submariner for the link)