The Creative Writing Blog

I’ve never paid attention to the features of my story which might make it more likely to be a bestseller.

But I’m all grown up now, so I thought I'd best take a closer look at the difference between the novels I've long admired and fiction's bestsellers of the last hundred years to understand what makes one book sell millions, and another thousands.

Not all of these three features need to be present in the one story, but of course 'layering' them up in the winter of our publishing discontent, might be smart.

1. The Extreme Situation

• extreme locations or landscapes
• extreme dilemmas
• extreme danger, murder afoot

'Literary' fiction works the other way round, and deposits an extraordinary person in a normal or 'normalized' situation - think Orwellian or Kafkaesque dystopian nightmares. We have a whole range between classics and bestsellers best exemplified by The Bourne Identity on the one hand which has an extreme situation meet its match...