The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
But “The” remains the most successful way to begin a title because it is a word that implies agency focused somewhere, be that focus on a place, on an event, on an object, or somewhere else. The title gives us a clue about how to relate to the story that follows.
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
"The" Ohio State. "The" Bestseller Code.
The authors are known for their signature topic, and fans expect them to deliver it. If that trademark gets a third of the book, the book-per-year writer then has two-thirds of his or her space to introduce the tangential topics that make each new book seem a little different. This formula can go on forever, and we will see how cleverly this is don
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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.
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
Note to Andy Weir: You should not have written "The Martian." Have you even been there?
When we get to Rowling’s final pages, the most powerful and adventurous good wizard of modern-day literature appears to have done something like move to suburbia to raise an SUV full of children, eat home cooking, and read the newspaper. The dirt in the system at Hogwarts has been cleansed: without his nemesis in opposition to him Harry appears no
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By this definition, many of us are already winners. Are you not comforted?
Four of the top verbs to describe the mental and emotional expression of bestselling characters are need, want, miss, and love. The possible journeys between just those four verbs have led to many classic and mega-bestsellers on the lists. On average, bestselling characters “need” and “want” twice as often as non-bestsellers, and bestselling charac
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Larsson’s original title was Men Who Hate Women, a phrase that was so disagreeable to the UK publishers that they changed it. It was likely the right decision. There are few fiction readers who would disagree that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is more alluring than Men Who Hate Women, especially given the fact that the majority of fiction readers
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It is almost impossible to fathom how bad that original title is. Changing those several words was critical.
What the godparents are teaching us about bestselling is that there must be a dominant topic to give the glue to a novel, and that topics in the next highest proportions should suggest a direct conflict that might be quite threatening.
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
The model’s favorite manuscript of the past thirty years was The Circle by Dave Eggers.
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
Now that was a bit of a surprise. I really like Eggers and do not place him in the same canon with many of the other best-sellers mentioned herein. That could also be, of course, since I have not read many of these best-sellers...
The title, then, when well chosen, should foreground the agency and, therefore, the action and drama of the entire upcoming narrative—its structure, its focus, its drive, its magnetism.