by Alex Palmer
Lulu.com attempted a more scientific (though admittedly flawed) study of what tops the list, in 2005. The company used a computer model to evaluate what attributes (including number of words and whether titles contained the names of places or people) appear in the titles of #1 New York Times bestsellers between 1955 and 2004. It determined that with its abstract words and short title, Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder (#1 in 1976) was perfectly phrased to ensure big sales. Literal titles like the Harry Potter books or The Da Vinci Code did not score as well.
With the sale of pirated versions of these works rampant, it was impossible to get accurate sales numbers. Spin-offs and translations helped stoke the popularity of existing works, with Robinson Crusoe alone being a source of some 700 alternate versions over the decades after its first publication. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s bestselling novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), led to spin-offs like porcelain puppets, jewelry, and Werther eau de cologne.
A less pleasing by-product of the work’s success was the “Werther effect,” as young men throughout Europe not only emulated the style and dress of the young artist at the center of the story, but also followed his example by killing themselves. As numerous reports of suicide across Europe followed the publication of Goethe’s book, several countries banned the novel. The author Christoph Friedrich Nicolai took perhaps a more constructive (and profitable) approach by writing The Joys of Young Werther (1775), which gave the story a happy ending.
As literacy expanded and the costs of buying and borrowing books decreased, Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819) and Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels marked the beginning of true bestsellers as we understand them today. In the nineteenth century a top seller could expect to sell 50,000 copies.
Can a Book be Too Much of a Bestseller?
In 2008, after appearing on The New York Times bestseller list for eighty consecutive weeks, thanks to its selection for the Oprah Book Club, Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960) was abruptly dropped from the list. Public Editor Clark Hoyt explained that, “The Times’s news survey department, which compiles the list, decided the Holocaust memoir wasn’t a new bestseller but a classic like Animal Farm or To Kill a Mockingbird, which sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year largely through course adoptions.... We simply cannot track such books indefinitely.”
The first bestseller list appeared in the industry journal Bookman in 1895 (only listing fiction) and seventeen years later Publishers Weekly introduced the first list for nonfiction books. Over the following decades, dozens more papers and outlets began their own weekly or monthly charts of the top-selling books, with The New York Times finally adopting its list in 1942. Less enthusiastic than Americans about having books compete with one another, the British held off on any sort of formal list until the 1970s, when The Bookseller and the Sunday Times introduced theirs.
These lists tracked a stream of major hits that held on to the top spot week after week, from Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), which sold a million copies within its first few months of publication. The paperback revolution that began in 1935 and exploded in the 1960s gave an extra jolt to the numbers for hits like Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969), Erich Segal’s Love Story (1970), and Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971).
Did You Know?
The first paperback to sell a million copies was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). It went on to sell 15 million copies globally.
All of the above-mentioned books also had massive movie adaptations that helped further propel their sales, reflecting the growing role that marketing and cross-promotion have come to play in ensuring bestseller status. The making of a blockbuster book had quickly become a science for major publishers, based on an increasingly well-defined set of marketing techniques to help ensure a hit. Some combination of Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell, Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, James Patterson, and Nicholas Sparks have been responsible for an average of six of the ten bestselling books every year for the past decade.
Despite this predictability, there are still the stories of small presses or unknown authors having huge success. Canongate paid Yann Martel £3,000 for The Life of Pi before it took home a cartload of literary prizes and sold a million copies for its Scottish publisher. J. K. Rowling was paid the same for her first Harry Potter book with Bloomsbury.
Bestselling Scandals
Sometimes marketing efforts can go too far. In the 1980s, the Scientology movement was accused of pumping up the sales numbers of founder L. Ron Hubbard’s books so they would appear on The New York Times list.
In the mid-1990s, the consulting firm that employed the authors of the business book The Discipline of Market Leaders bought tens of thousands of copies from retailers, so they could give the books to their clients and garner some buzz by making the bestseller list. Though these efforts were considered unethical, they were not illegal and certainly got the book press, though it might not have been the kind the authors had hoped.
Sarah Palin’s blockbuster Going Rogue (2009) was accused of something similar when it was revealed that her political action committee had spent $63,000 buying copies of her own book to give to donors. Considering the book went on to sell 2.6 million copies, that was just a drop in the bucket.
Big sales have certainly not meant longevity for many bestselling titles, as many are forgotten as soon as they drop off the list. Critics have derided the low quality of writing in many of the works, complaining that works of predictable genre fiction with simple characters and writing are the most likely to be devoured by the public, decade after decade. In Junk Fiction: America’s Obsessions with Bestsellers (2009), S. T. Joshi looks over a list of the fifteen books that have sold more than seven million copies, and concludes that, excluding To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and two Orwell novels:
Not a single work is anything but a potboiler. ... They are, in effect, inferior works embodying certain recognized flaws that doom them to insignificance, and their popularity during their heyday was based largely upon their hitting a popular nerve and—one might as well come out and say it—their appeal to a broad mass of ill-educated and uncultivated readers.
Zing! With reviews like this, it’s no wonder that many bestselling authors prefer to worry less about their canonization and more about their cash flow. John Grisham, who’s had the top-selling book of the year nine times since 1994, said, “Life is much simpler ignoring reviews and the nasty people who write them. Critics should find meaningful work.” Danielle Steel offered a lighter defense, saying, “A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it.”
Mickey Spillane, the crime writer who in 1980 had written seven of the top fifteen all-time bestselling fiction titles in America, was one of the most unapologetic proponents of commercial literature. Among his ripostes:
“There are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.”
“I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers.”
“Inspiration is an empty bank account.”
It should be no surprise that Ayn Rand was a fan.
Can these writers be defended from a literary perspective? Writing in The Spectator in 2007, journalist Tony Parsons did his best to mount a sympathetic defense of bestselling authors. He declared that every blockbuster comes from a place of passion and often after years of struggling through flops. “Anything that gets on to the bestseller list deserves to be there. And even if it is not your cup of Darjeeling, never doubt that the author of The Da Vinci Code is as serious in his intent as the author of Atonement.” Perhaps the Pattersons and Browns of the world deserve an “A” for effort, in addition to their enviable royalty checks.
Best-selling books of all time
1. The Bible 5,000+ million
2. Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong by Mao Zedong 900 million
3. The Qur’an 800 million
4. Xinhua Zidian 400 mi
llion
5. The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith,Jr. 120 million
6. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling 107 million
7. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie 100 million
8. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien 100 million
9. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling 65 million
10. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown 65 million
Source: Publications International, Ltd.
WHY DON’T TODAY’S WRITERS HAVE AS MANY GROUPIES AS LORD BYRON?
The rise and fall of literary celebrity
Before there were rock stars or movie stars, there were literary stars. Gossiped about, adored by fans, and featured on the covers of magazines, famous authors were at the pinnacle of the celebrity world for a good part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. As the first mass-media celebrities, authors had to navigate uncharted waters as they figured out how to mold their public image, striking a balance between artistic integrity and naked self-promotion. By the 1970s, artistic integrity won out, ending the era of the literary star with a whimper.
If there was one man who blazed the trail for national literary stardom, it was Lord Byron. The publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) brought him massive attention from the burgeoning press and general public, curious about the man behind the verses. Byron cultivated a public image as the sort of brooding and passionate “Byronic hero” found in his poetry.
When having portraits done, Byron would instruct artists to portray him as a “man of action,” without a pen or book in hand (more images of Byron remain than any of his fellow Romantics). His friend Lady Blessington commented on his behavior in a letter: “There was no sort of celebrity he did not, at some period or other, condescend to seek, and he was not over nice in the means, provided he obtained it in the end.”
There was also no sort of smitten fan that he did not pursue. Bedding men, women, boys, and girls, Byron’s sexual appetite was notorious. His wife, Annabella, coined the phrase “Byromania” to describe the adulation he received from admirers, sardonically describing, “how all the women were absurdly courting him and trying to deserve the lash of his Satire.” No wonder their marriage only lasted two years.
Fame was something Byron reflected on frequently, making such statements as:
“Fame is the thirst of youth.”
“What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.”
“Folly loves the martyrdom of fame.”
Byronic Ego
John Keats mocked all this Byromania, writing in a letter that, “Lord Byron cuts a figure—but he is not figurative—Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it.”
Byron was just the most visible face in what was a burgeoning literary celebrity culture. Other Romantics, especially Keats, Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, received fan letters and requests for autographs and souvenirs at a level not seen before. Fans would even imitate their dress and mannerisms. In a time where books were one of the only forms of mass media, authors commanded much attention.
Of course, this celebrity worship could create some tension with authors’ desire to be taken seriously. Critics have suggested that Byron’s credibility as a poet was undermined by his celebrity with the masses, and indeed, these days more readers are likely to know of Byron than read his poetry.
This was encouraged and complicated by the changing nature of the book-publishing market. As literature became more commercialized, authors were brought into the advertising and publicity of their works. Authorship could come very close to entrepreneurship, with the writer’s personality serving as a major selling point.
One of the major platforms for promoting an author was the lecture circuit, and if Byron’s swagger made him something of the Elvis of literary celebrity, Charles Dickens was a Beatle, bringing a British invasion to America during his two reading tours across the country. During his first, in 1842, the author was greeted by newspaper editors jockeying for an exclusive interview when his ship pulled into Boston Harbor.
Dickens’s audiences wanted more than just to hear him read, as summarized in a Dublin newspaper: “Nowadays the public must know all about your domestic relations, your personal appearance, your age, the number of your children, the colour of your eyes and hair.” Sound familiar?
These live performances were big business for Dickens—as well as the other two major celebrity authors of the nineteenth century, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde—with fans waiting in line overnight, sold-out theaters, and big box-office receipts.
Like Byron before him, Twain deliberately cultivated an image of himself that was hard to separate from his work: that of the quintessential American, complete with a trademark costume of an all-white suit. Unlike Byron, Twain focused his appearances on humor and telling a good joke (he is considered by some to be America’s first stand-up comic). A New York Times reviewer called Mark Twain’s style “a quaint one, both in manner and method, and throughout his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of his audience and frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter.” Newspapers and magazines helped feed the “event” status of these live shows.
Though the lecture circuit lost steam in America beginning in the 1880s, this coincided with a second wave of new periodicals and newspapers, including the inexpensive illustrated weeklies Life and later Time, which created a truly national media. These magazines featured profiles of the authors, with cover photos to tie them to their public personas—J. D. Salinger in a field of rye, T. S. Eliot among a surrealistic landscape of hands growing from the ground like trees.
Cover Boy
Ernest Hemingway is a favorite literary cover boy, gracing the front of Time twice and Life three times.
Many celebrated writers were hardly mainstream, with modernists like Eliot and Gertrude Stein grabbing their share of national attention. In 1934, Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas returned to New York to be greeted by a revolving billboard in Times Square reading “Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York,” before heading to Washington D.C. for tea with Eleanor Roosevelt and on to Hollywood to rub elbows with Charlie Chaplain. As Loren Daniel Glass writes in Authors Inc., “Few things are more striking about the primary spokespeople for modernism than the contrast between their stated theories of self-effacement and their actual practice and literary-historical destiny of self-aggrandizement and even shameless self-promotion.”
Several other famous writers, including Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, were frequently discussed in the media. As with earlier celebrity authors, Hemingway’s press attention came from the perceived overlap of his life and his fictional writing, with much coverage of his dramatic adventures, including bullfights, African safaris, and reporting on the Spanish Civil War.
A Bit Sensitive
Hemingway cared deeply about what was said of him in the press, and in one famous instance went to blows with critic Max Eastman, who had written that Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932) had the tone of a man “wearing false hair on his chest.” Bumping into Eastman at his publisher’s office, the author demanded they compare chests, and after mocking Eastman’s relative hairlessness, slapped him in the face with a book. He told The New York Times, “I’ll put up $1,000 for any charity he favors or for himself. Then we’ll go into a room and he can read his book to me—the part of his book about me. Well, the best man unlocks the door.”
Hemingway was truly larger than life, but unlike Byron or Twain, he had to compete for attention from a public that was becoming more interested in film and television stars. Following in Hemingway’s legacy of hypermasculine braggadocio was Norman Mailer, who not only wrote critically acclaimed novels but also ran for mayor of New York, challenged professional boxers to fight, and sparked public feuds with other authors. He is believed to have been interviewed more times than any writer wh
o has ever lived.
Success took its toll on Mailer. In his collection of commentary and short works Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer writes, “Success has been a lobotomy of my past,” and, “I was a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and status,” and his apparent exhaustion with the whole enterprise reflected a significant shift in how big authors related to the public.
The next literary star in the succession should probably have been Philip Roth. His 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint received much attention, with television hosts and tabloids discussing it as if, like Byron’s Don Juan before him, the novel’s hypersexed protagonist was simply an extension of its author. In interviews and appearances, Roth came across as a thoughtful, reserved intellectual, keeping interviews on serious, impersonal topics and avoiding the salacious details the mass market was hoping for.
It was the same with John Updike. His 1968 novel Couples became a number-one bestseller and landed him on the cover of Time, but Updike simply focused on his writing, gave genial interviews, and made little effort to play up his public persona. When Updike followed up his hit with the eight-hour closet drama, Buchanan Dying, he described it as, “an act of penance for a commercially successful novel set in New England.” You weren’t likely to catch Updike at a bullfight.