Top-selling authors

Top selling authors belong to a rare club and I suppose we all, secretly, in our heart of hearts, want to join! Jeff Bercovici of Forbes has some interesting thoughts to share in his articles on the topic. So what lessons can the rest of us pick up? The most sound seems to be - Write in a genre that has mass commercial appeal.

(FORBES bases its estimates on sales data, published figures and information from industry sources between June 2012 and June 2013.) 

Top of the list in 2012 is E L James (aka Erika Leonard, nee Mitchell) who has reputedly earned $95 million (£60 million) for her bondage trilogy. As everyone probably knows, she originally wrote it as fan fiction in the style of Twilight author Stephanie Meyer. The books leapt straight into every bestseller list, which throws an interesting side light on modern culture purely because of the theme running through all three books. However, that is not what interests us in this instance. Instead we should speculate if s the books would have had such success if the electronic reading device – which gave every reader a discreet way to imbibe such spicy stuff - had not been invented. 70 million copies sold between Jan-Aug in the USA.  As my good friend Jeffrey once said when he heard I'd taken up writing - “Remember – shagging sells!”

In second place that year was James Patterson, who publishes five or more titles a year with $91 million (£58 million) earned between June 2012 and June 2013. 

It seems fantasy fiction for young adults is a good market, especially if it attracts adult readers. No 3 on the list is Suzanne Collins, who published The Hunger Games trilogy. And earned $55 million. If you can manage a hit film of the story, that will really push book sales. You may have heard of Nora Roberts, too. Well, she stands at 8 on the list, having earned $23 million in 2012. You would think, wouldn't you, that they had all earned enough and they would stop writing and let some other author have a chance at the top prizes.

Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette Book Group thinks it’s the surprise and originality of some stories that leads to the giant sales. That’s why there are all these delicious stories of the book that was rejected by 96 publishers – because people are looking at what worked in the past. Then suddenly one brave publisher decides to take a risk, and finds a success on his/her hands.

Unhappily, there is no science behind forecasting the next bestseller, but there is a lot of luck.

Read some of the original articles at the links below:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fifty-shades-eljames-forbes-highest-paid-authors-499478

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/08/09/women-on-the-rise-among-the-worlds-top-earnings-authors/

Looking back

I loaded a post on Historical Fiction excerpts this morning and it made me realise how much time I've been on this writing game. I began in a very tentative way back in the seventies, when a typewriter and a bottle of sno-pak were the tools of the writers trade. Progress was slow, because I was working full-time, and leading a good social life most of the time. The pile of pages grew so very slowly!

Now, a writer's life is comparatively easy, thanks to computers. It is very easy to produce a page of immaculate typing, perfectly formatted on the page/screen, run it through the spell-and-grammar checker and be assured that it as correct as it is ever going to be. Even better, the internet makes finding facts easy if you are prepared to accept the first you find without cross-checking for accuracy.

But no matter how impressive a perfectly formatted and typed page seems, it is the content that is so vitally important. "Rubbish writing" can look equally as good as the most literary writing! Like most other skills, writing a story has to be learned skill. I doubt there's one writer in a thousand successful writers who made it with their first attempt. I know I look back on my earliest attempts and itch to get the red pen out and delete the repetitions, remove the unnecessary sentences. Maybe one day I will, if only for my own satisfaction. But looking back has made me realise how far I have come, and gives me an inkling of how far I have still to go. I suppose writing is a skill that just goes on growing until brain fade occurs.