by Ben Blatt
elves, goblins, wizards
ring, dark, road
Mark Twain
13 Novels
hearted, shucks, satan
got, thing, yes
John Updike
26 Novels
rimmed, prick, fucked
like, her, face
Kurt Vonnegut
14 Novels
limousine, incidentally, foyer
said, war, father
Alice Walker
8 Novels
naw, fucked, lovemaking
black, white, women
Edith Wharton
22 Novels
nearness, daresay, compunction
herself, seemed, her
E. B. White
3 Novels
storekeeper, boatman, gander
replied, asked, heard
Tom Wolfe
4 Novels
fucking, haw, goddamned
black, looked, toward
Virginia Woolf
9 Novels
flushing, blotting, mantelpiece
herself, she, looking
Markus Zusak
5 Novels
fellas, nah, footpath
street, words, girl
* * *
I. Each book’s top ten sentence openers were calculated individually from the rest of their corpus.
I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you’re immortal!
—TOM CLANCY
You know the old cliché by now: You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. That doesn’t mean you can’t though. There are certain things you can glean from just a passing glance at the cover. The author’s stature, for instance.
Consider the case of Stephen King. His first book, Carrie, was published in 1974. It never reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list but it was an instant hit. It sold more than a million copies in its first two yearsI and was adapted into a movie soon after. When people bought Carrie, they were motivated by the word of mouth alone. They had no preconception of Stephen King, the author. Take a look at the first edition cover on the next page.
King’s name is small. It doesn’t take up much of the whole cover, and it’s modest in comparison to the title. In total, the author’s name takes up less than 3 % of the entire cover. (That is, if you were to draw a box around the name as tight as possible and compare that area to the entire cover, it would be less than 3 %.)
“Stephen King” is not what your eyes are drawn to, but this is the last time his name could ever be missed. King’s reputation grew, and so did the size of his name. In all books after Carrie his name was larger and in some cases the growth is huge. For Salem’s Lot, King’s second book, his name reached 7 % of the cover. In 1989, it reached an all-time high with his book The Dark Half, where a full 47 % of the cover was devoted to King’s name. Of the several hundred books I measured for this chapter, The Dark Half had the largest author’s name of all.
The book’s title is almost an afterthought. Readers are encouraged to buy it based on the writer’s reputation alone.
This was exactly the fate King was trying to avoid when he created the pseudonym Richard Bachman. King wrote five books under the Bachman name before being outed as the author in 1984. On the opposite page we can see how differently Bachman’s name was marketed than King’s. Each book is charted by the size of the author’s name on the cover. As you can see, the six books with the smallest name are the five Bachman books and Carrie, which King wrote before he was famous.
While there isn’t a wealth of data points, I think that there is a clear trend to be discerned from the chart above. The fact that King’s first book was the one where his name was the smallest reveals how book marketers think. If you haven’t sold any books, your name is not a selling point, so the publisher keeps it small. If you’ve already had a bestseller and your name would bring those book buyers back around, then they might as well put that name in large print. We see the same thing with Bachman: Only as the Bachman name built into a (smallish) brand did the name size increase.
Keeping the Bachman name small is also in line with how King described his pseudonymous undertaking. In the introduction to The Bachman Books, which was published after his identity was revealed, King wrote: “The Bachman novels were ‘just plain books,’ paperbacks to fill the drugstore and bus-station racks of America. This was at my request; I wanted Bachman to keep a low profile. So, in that sense, the poor guy had the dice loaded against him from the start.”
Since the Bachman-King connection was discovered in the mid-1980s, Bachman’s name has been retired and the size of King’s name has plateaued—perhaps as he’s run up against the limit of good taste in cover design.
The Biggest Names in Books
Going beyond King, I looked at every single first edition cover of the number one New York Times bestsellers in the ten-year period between 2005 and 2014 to see how an author’s profile affects the size of their name. For each book, I drew a tight box around the first, middle (if present), and last name of each author.
King’s name grew after he had his first hit. For the typical author who’s making the number one spot for the first time, their name takes up 12 % of the cover. The typical author who has risen to become a bestseller machine, say with five-plus number one bestsellers, takes up 20 % of the cover. By the time an author’s name is well established, their name has almost doubled in size.
Opposite is a graph showing the typical size of the author’s name. The center line is the median, and each box represents the middle 50 %. (For instance, of all authors who had one previous bestseller the median name size was 18 % of the cover and the middle 50 % of all author names were between 12 % and 23 %.)
The pattern is there, even if far from absolute. The size of the name increases with more bestsellers, but only up to a point. At a certain level of fame, your name plateaus instead of growing and growing until it wraps around the cover from front to back.
By looking at the start of a bestselling author’s career, it’s easy to see the name increase by the time the authors transitions from nobody to star. There’s an explosive growth from first book to repeat bestseller. Take Patricia Cornwell’s first novel, in 1990, and her most recent number one bestseller (her ninth) below. Her name goes from 2 % to 30 %.
Or Lee Child, who has written eight number one bestsellers. His first novel and his most recent number one bestseller are below. A quick glance shows the growth in name size, and a precise measuring reveals a growth from 5 % to 22 %.
Cover design has changed over the years, but that’s not the driving factor in the explosion of Cornwell’s or Child’s name. King’s The Dark Half, in which his name took up almost half the cover, was published in the 1980s, before Cornwell or Child started writing. One thing that has remained constant, even as cover styles change, is that the size of the author’s name will grow with the author’s sales.
Big-name authors are big-name brands, but at the extreme ends the biggest name does not necessarily lead to the biggest name. Following are all 26 authors with at least three bestsellers in the last ten years ranked by the size of their names. They are ranked by the typical (median) percent of the cover their name takes up.
The Biggest Names in Books
AUTHOR
#1 NYT BESTSELLERS
MEDIAN SIZE OF NAME
Nora Roberts
7
37%
Harlan Coben
7
34%
J. D. Robb
8
34%
Mary Higgins Clark
9
32%
Patricia Cornwell
5
28%
Daniel Silva
6
27%
John Sandford
5
26%
Michael Connelly
7
26%
Janet Ev
anovich
15
24%
Vince Flynn
5
22%
Laurell Hamilton
4
22%
David Baldacci
13
22%
John Grisham
10
17%
J. R. Ward
3
17%
Lee Child
8
17%
Ken Follett
4
16%
Danielle Steel
3
16%
Stephen King
9
16%
Charlaine Harris
5
16%
Dean Koontz
5
14%
Jodi Picoult
7
13%
Sue Grafton
4
12%
James Patterson
10
12%
Jim Butcher
4
9%
Nicholas Sparks
8
5%
Mitch Albom
3
3%
James Patterson has sold more books in the last ten years than any other author. However, he comes in toward the bottom of the chart. He lets his titles, often named to be a clear part of a series (I, Alex Cross or Kill Alex Cross) take a larger role than his own name. Stephen King has more fans than any other of the above authors on the book networking site Goodreads, but also has a reasonable-sized name on most of his covers. (Perhaps he’s decided to dial things down after the 1980s.)
The top three authors are Nora Roberts, Harlan Coben, and J. D. Robb. And it’s important to note that J. D. Robb is Nora Roberts. Like King, Roberts created the pseudonym so she could publish more books without diluting her own brand, though this was never kept a secret like Bachman was. So if you want to know the true biggest name in books, there you have it—the Robb/Roberts goliath.
Close Quarters
If you ever take a few moments to look at the covers of new releases in popular fiction an interesting trend will stick out right away: Many books today are written by two authors. But if you haven’t noticed, it might not be your fault. The size of the second author is often so small it might as well be invisible.
Even in the last couple of decades the practice of co-writing has become more common among blockbuster authors. In 1994 about 2 % of all New York Times bestsellers were co-writes, while in 2014 10 % were. There is no set procedure for listing co-authors and there is a wide range in how co-authors are presented. After all, the division of labor for co-authored books can be drastically different. Ghostwriters who write memoirs are not expecting to see their names on the cover. Neither would someone who writes the substance and conducts the research of a book for a politician. But in fiction, there’s an expectation that those who write with others will include both names on the cover. You’ll see “Tom Clancy with Peter Telep” or “James Patterson and Richard DiLallo.” The meaning of the with and and may vary from author to author or book to book, but even the most mass-market writers are expected to give their co-writers some credit.
There are of course exceptions. On the opposite page is the cover for Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater. Though a Glenn Beck book, it is a full-length novel that reached the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. The book is listed almost everywhere, including on the New York Times list and on its Amazon page, as “Glenn Beck with Kevin Balfe and Jason Wright.” But on the cover no space is saved for Balfe or Wright.
In another point of comparison, here’s the cover of a book “co-authored” by Tom Clancy and Grant Blackwood.
Blackwood’s name isn’t all that noticeable next to Clancy’s, but at least it’s there. Clancy’s name is 27 times larger than his co-author’s. Many supporting writers, like Blackwood, are used to the treatment. Blackwood has never penned a bestseller himself but is the co-author with three different writers who all made the New York Times bestseller list. He is also the second author on both Clive Cussler and James Rollins thrillers, where his name is one-seventh and one-fourth the size of his co-authors’.
It is true that any of these big-name authors could share more of the page if they wanted to. Peter Straub and Stephen King co-wrote two books together, The Talisman and Black House, over 15 years apart. Peter Straub is an acclaimed horror writer in his own right, but nowhere near the level of fame as Stephen King. I would guess the percentage of people reading The Talisman because of Straub instead of King would be relatively small. But on the two King-Straub covers, the names are the same size.
It’s very rare, however, for authors of different statures to have equal-sized names on the jacket. Clive Cussler penned six bestselling books with his own son, Dirk Cussler. Even on these books Clive Cussler’s name is six times larger than his familial co-author. Likewise, British mystery writer Dick Francis has penned bestselling novels with his son Felix and his name is three times as large.
I’ve measured the ratio for all authors to have at least two co-authored books appear on the New York Times bestseller list between 2000 and 2014. Sometimes this can vary greatly between novels—James Patterson has some books where his name is twenty times larger than his co-author’s, even though more often than not his name is within twice as large—but the results tend to average out.II
Sharing the Spotlight: Size of Author’s Name vs. Co-Author’s
AUTHOR
HOW MANY TIMES LARGER PRINCIPAL AUTHOR’S NAME IS (MEDIAN)
CO-AUTHOR(S)
Glenn Beck
∞ *
Jack Henderson, Harriet Parke, Kevin Balfe, Jason Wright
Oliver North
28X
Joe Musser
Tom Clancy
25X
Mark Greaney, Peter Telep, Grant Blackwood
Clive Cussler
12X
Graham Brown, Justin Scott, Jack Du Brul, Thomas Perry, Dirk Cussler, Grant Blackwood, Russell Blake, Paul Kemprecos
Catherine Coulter
8X
J. T. Ellison
W. E. B. Griffin
7X
William E. Butterworth IV
Rita Mae Brown
6X
Sneaky Pie Brown (Rita Mae Brown’s “talking” cat)
Dick Francis
4X
Felix Francis
James Rollins
4X
Grant Blackwood, Rebecca Cantrell
Janet Evanovich
3X
Lee Goldberg
James Patterson
1.5X
Michael Lewidge, David Ellis, Maxine Paetro, Marshall Karp, Mark Sullivan, Emily Raymond, Howard Roughan, Richard Dilallo, Neil McMahon, Liza Marklund, Gabrielle Charbonnet, Andrew Gross, Peter de Jonge
Guillermo Del Toro
1.25X
Chuck Hogan
Brian Herbert
1X
Kevin Anderson
Douglas Preston
1X
Lincoln Child
Margaret Weis
1X
Tracy Hickman
Newt Gingrich
1X
William R. Forstchen
Tim LaHaye
1X
Jerry Jenkins, Bob Phillips
* Did not list co-authors on two of three books.
Bigger Books
When Edward Stratemeyer sat down and created the guidelines for the Hardy Boys he mandated not just that all books be the same number of chapters, but that they all have the same number of pages. He wanted books either 215 pages or 216 pages in length; 217 pages was too long, and 214 was too short. Over the years Leslie McFarlane would submit manuscripts to Stratemeyer that were on the short side and receive responses like these from the publishing magnate:
Can’t you drill in some extra pages which I can insert
Please be sur
e to see to it that the story is the proper length to fill 216 text pages
They should be four to five pages longer, as I had to make additions in every instance to bring them up.
Stratemeyer’s insistence on consistency was extreme and formulaic to the point where it was obtrusive. But, as someone who had seen how a series could shift or bloat as it progresses, he wanted to ensure there was not a dramatic change in the books’ style or pace as the books kept coming.
Before Suzanne Collins wrote the smash-hit Hunger Games trilogy, she wrote a five-part young adult series called the Underland Chronicles. Those five books ranged from 57,000 to 79,000 words. It’s not a wild difference, but judging by her future word counts Collins decided to take a page out of the Stratemeyer book when she started the Hunger Games.
Like Stratemeyer designing the Hardy Boys, Collins knew before the first book came out that she would be writing a series. The first Hunger Games was not published until 2008, but she signed a large advance for the entire trilogy in 2006. The three books measure in at near identical lengths of about 100,000, 102,000, and 101,000 words. And just like the Hardy Boys chapter mandate, all books in the Hunger Games are broken into three parts each consisting of nine chapters. The sole exception is a 350-word epilogue at the end of the final book. Otherwise, each book has the same organization down to the length of each section. The shortest part in any of the three books is 30,900 words, while the longest is 35,400.