Bestsellers vs. the Midlist

Last Monday, our writing group did an interesting exercise. We took two sets of similar books—one a bestseller, the other from the midlist—and compared them.

First we looked at two mystery-thrillers set in Eastern Europe. One—GORKY PARK (GP)—was a huge best seller. The other—we’ll call it ALSO RAN (AR)—was not. We took turns reading aloud the first several pages of each. The differences were immediately apparent and startling. GP instantly captured us with its brilliant, concise imagery, its deftly drawn characters. We were quickly introduced to our main character, in action, and in conflict with another character. Two members of the group who’d never read GORKY PARK announced their intention to read it. Others have been inspired to reread it.

By comparison, the prose of the ALSO RAN was flat. We suffered through huge info dumps. There was no action, no conflict. We couldn’t even decide who was the main character. We were left wondering why the book did as well as it did. Perhaps it improves. No one was inspired to read it and find out.

The next set of books we read were thrillers written by women who used to be romance writers. The first, Lisa Gardner’s THE PERFECT HUSBAND, was her breakout book. At that stage in her writing career she hadn’t yet banished the last vestiges of her romance-writing habits. The beginning was, we thought, over long. But her prose sparkled, her characters were well drawn, the conflict intriguing.

Then we read aloud the first two chapters of the newest thriller by another former romance writer who has yet to hit the NYT list (I mean really hit it; she has made the extended list) despite several huge pushes from her publishers. This is her tenth thriller, so in a sense it really wasn’t fair to compare this book to Lisa Gardner’s first thriller rather than to her latest, yet it made the differences all the more telling.

Our midlist thriller writer presented us with the killer laying out the body of his latest child victim (child victims are always a cheap trick to ratchet up the stakes, IMO). The killer was a cliché and the writing was riddled with clichés. Chapter two presented us with the detective who was also a cliché. Worse, interwoven with crime scene descriptions and melodramatic attempts to tug at readers’ emotions, our writer delivered huge extraneous info dumps that practically screamed “Look at me! I know my forensic stuff! I’ve done RESEARCH!” Except that since the info dumps about insects, etc, had nothing to do with this newly dead corpse, all she did was provoke laughter…not the response the writer had intended.

This exercise dramatically illustrated that some writers do indeed deserve to be on the bestseller lists while others, with equal justice, linger in the midlist. We found it so interesting we intend to do something similar this coming Monday.

Stuck in the Midlist

Everyone knows what the midlist is, right? Every month, publishing houses release one or two books they expect to be bestsellers; these are their “lead titles.” Everything else is midlist. (It would follow logically that some books must be “endlist,” or bottom feeders, but no one ever calls them that.)

My writers’ group has spent years trying to figure out what makes a bestseller. We’ve had some fascinating discussions. Last week one member suggested we flip this and look at what keeps some books in the midlist. We’re not talking quality of writing here. Surely Dan Brown shattered forever anyone’s illusion that quality of writing has anything to do with reaching the bestseller list. For literary fiction, yes; for genre fiction, no. So what elements in a writer’s books could be keeping him or her from grabbing the brass ring?

We bounced around some interesting possibilities. It’s all speculation, of course, because we have no way to prove that our ideas are right. But we came up with the following “rules” that authors ignore at their peril. Like any list of rules, one can always find exceptions, but here’s what we came up with so far:

Respect the appeal of the familiar: Americans like to read about Americans, or at least white Americans like to read about English-speaking Caucasians. So if you set a series in medieval Japan, your hero had better be Caucasian. Make him Japanese and you will probably condemn your series to the midlist. If you’re going to write about an African-American hero, he’d better sound and act like a white man. One member pointed out that he hadn’t realized James Patterson’s Cross character was supposed to be black until some throwaway comment by a secondary character near the end of the book; JP knows what he’s doing. Likewise, Daniel Silva’s Israeli hero would be very out of place in most parts of Israel; basically, he’s an American.

Don’t violate reader expectations. Cozy readers, for example, don’t like angst. Make your cozy heroine the angst-ridden mother of an illegitimate child, and you’ll lose readers. My historical mystery series is set in Regency England. Regency England is associated in many people’s minds with light comedies of manners, but the Regency England of my books is a darker, more dangerous place. Has this hurt me? Perhaps. People looking for a light book might be shocked by some of the things I write. Other readers who like darker, more dangerous books might be put off by the Regency setting, since they associate it with frothy romances.

Don’t violate your readers’ moral codes. Julia Spencer-Flemming is a wonderful mystery writer. She’s won all kinds of awards but her books have still not hit the NYT. Why not? Well, one reason may be because her heroine is a priest. It’s possible that people who want to read about priests don’t want to read about bloody murder. It’s also possible that the kind of people who want to read about priests might object to that priest having an adulterous affair. At the risk of spoiling things for readers not up to date with the series, that aspect seems to have gone away. Our prediction: she’ll probably hit the Times soon.

This is a topic we’re going to be kicking around for a while, so I’d welcome any input from my blogeagues.

I won’t be posting again until the end of the week.