Why Fractured Families Drive Bestseller Success and He Sniffs Shoes!

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar. In his book Hit Lit, which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall talks 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. And one of those features? It’s a fractured family. Yep. That’s a big feature of what Hall found in the 12 books he 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). “Families under economic stress, families at emotional war, families splitting apart, families with a missing parent, families dealing with disease, death, infidelity, job stress, or out-right life-threatening danger. You name it. Badly destabilized families are featured in each of our twelve bestsellers,” Hall writes. Why? That’s the question, I think. Why do we as readers buy and books that have fractured families in them. OR is it that books with a lot of these elements and features (there are 12 that Hall lists) make books that feel like a lived and recognizable experience. Most of us know what a fractured family feels like. Most of us know what it is to feel like an outsider, to live in a time of crisis, are intrigued by secret societies. These novels hit at commonalities in human experience. And families (even a lack of one) are things that resonates throughout our culture. RANDOM THOUGHT A man was arrested for sneaking into his neighbors’ homes and sniffing their shoes. the AP article about this is here. DOG TIP FOR LIFE If you have to, go ahead and sniff shoes, just don’t eat them. Humans get mad about that. 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