Some features of the top selling novels

Dogs are Smarter Than People There’s an old NPR article about writing bestsellers that quotes critic Ruth Franklin’s overview of American best-sellers as saying "No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top 10 of the fiction best-seller list since its inception." In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall disagrees, talking about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so. We’ve been talking about that a lot. Hall analyzed Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code. And I just wanted to have a moment to regroup because I found an old interview with Hall and Marc Schultz on Publisher’s Weeklywhere he talks about what element he found in those 12 top selling books that surprised him. He says, “One I didn’t expect to find is something we came to call the Golden Country, which is a phrase from Orwell’s 1984. Winston, the protagonist, trapped in this dull empty world, has created in his imagination this edenic, natural, beautiful landscape called the Golden Country. It’s his ideal world. And not just in these 12 books, but in all the bestsellers we looked at, there is always an image of a place or a time that’s this idealized, edenic, natural landscape that serves a reference point for much of the story.” We’ve talked a bit about that in the last week. There’s this idealized want of an idealized world or time that we long for, right? And the characters in our books long for it, too. In that same interview, Hall says, “But the ingredients themselves remain the same, as Americans we’re really reading, and have wanted to read, permutations of the same book for the last 100 years, and probably into the foreseeable future.” And it doesn’t have to necessarily be awesome writing for us Americans to want to read these books. “Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place, once cracked, "If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste.’” Sarah Weinman writes, “What Metalious and her kin in best-sellerdom really possess, as Hall explains so well in Hit Lit, is the power to connect with readers through their hearts and guts as much as, if not more than, their minds.” It’s about your heart, humans. About your heart. DOG TIP FOR LIFE As we learned from the raccoons, don’t be aggressive if you don’t get your food or else they call the sheriff on you. RANDOM THOUGHT LINK ALL ABOUT A WOMAN CORNERED BY 100 RACCOONS. YIKES! The link PLACE TO SUBMIT Guidelines: The winner receives $3,000; online publication; and a consultation with Marin Takikawa, a literary agent with The Friedrich Agency. The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), online publication, and agent feedback. Submitted excerpts must be under 6,000 words. Submitted work must be previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published excerpts will be automatically disqualified. The entry fee is $20. Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee. This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses are welcome to submit unpublished work, as are self-published authors. The contest’s deadline is 11:59pm PST on Sunday, October 27, 2024. For full guidelines, check here. SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.  Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free. WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome. We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here. Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot! Subscribe