Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T01:27:09.322Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Writing Bestsellers

Love, Money, and Creative Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2021

Kim Wilkins
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Lisa Bennett
Affiliation:
Flinders University

Summary

While the term 'bestseller' explicitly relates books to sales, commercially successful books are also products of individual creative work. This Element presents a new perspective on the relationship between art and the market, with particular reference to bestselling writers and books. We examine some existing perspectives on art's relationship to the marketplace to trouble persistent binaries that see the two in opposition; we break down the monolith of the marketplace by thinking of it as made up of a range of invested, non-hostile participants such as publishing personnel and readers; we articulate the material dimensions of creative writing in the industry through the words of bestselling writers themselves; and we examine how the existence of bestselling books and writers in the world of letters bears enormous influence on the industry, and on the practice of other writers.
Get access
Type
Element
Information
Online ISBN: 9781108663724
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 21 October 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Bibliography

Allen, K. (2008). Bloomsbury Confident of Life after Harry Potter. The Guardian, 2 April. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/2008/apr/02/harrypotter.jkjoannekathleenrowling.Google Scholar
Alter, A. (2020). Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They’re Best Sellers. The New York Times, 19 September. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/books/penguin-random-house-madeline-mcintosh.html.Google Scholar
Archer, J. and Jockers, M. L. (2016). The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel. New York: St Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Banks, M. (2010). Autonomy Guaranteed? Cultural Work and the ‘Art-Commerce Relation’. Journal for Cultural Research, 14.3, 251–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnett, David. (2020). An Author Bought His Own Book to Get Higher on Bestseller Lists. Is that Fair? The Guardian, 21 July. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jul/20/an-author-bought-his-own-book-to-get-higher-on-bestseller-lists-is-that-fair.Google Scholar
Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Berberich, C. ed. (2014). The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction.G London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Berensmeyer, I., Buelens, G., and Demoor, M. (2019). Introduction: Reconfiguring Authorship. In Berensmeyer, I., Buelens, G., and Demoor, M., eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 110.Google Scholar
Bloom, C. (2008). Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Bosker, B. (2018). The One Direction Fan-Fiction Novel that Became a Literary Sensation. The Atlantic, December. Available at: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/crowdsourcing-the-novel/573907/.Google Scholar
Botting, F. (2012). Bestselling Fiction: Machinery, Economy, Excess, In. D. Glover, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 159–74.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. London: Polity.Google Scholar
Bradley, D. (2002). The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Brohaugh, W. (1997). English Through the Ages. New York: Writer’s Digest Books.Google Scholar
Bronstein, J. L. (2015). Mutualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brouillette, S. (2014). Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Canfield, D. (2018). Is Tomi Adeyemi the new J. K. Rowling? Entertainment Weekly, 13 April. Available at: https://ew.com/books/2018/04/13/tomi-adeyemi-children-blood-bone-ya-profile/.Google Scholar
Carpenter, C. (2019). Five Questions for Tomi Adeyemi. The Bookseller, 22 November. Available at: www.thebookseller.com/booknews/five-questions-tomi-adeyemi-1116896.Google Scholar
Carras, C. and Faughnder, R. (2020). Penguin Random House to Purchase Simon & Schuster in Massive Publishing Deal. LA Times, 25 November. Available at: www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-11-25/penguin-random-house-buys-simon-and-schuster.Google Scholar
Coslor, E. (2010). Hostile Worlds and Questionable Speculation: Recognizing the Plurality of Views about Art and the Market. Economic Action in Theory and Practice, 30, 209–24.Google Scholar
Cox, C. (2016). Second-Hand Book Store Overrun with Donated Copies of Fifty Shades of Grey Resorts to Fortin’. The Mary Sue. Available at: www.themarysue.com/fifty-shades-of-grey-fort/.Google Scholar
Darnton, R. (1982). What is the History of Books? Daedalus, 111.3, 6583.Google Scholar
Deahl, R. (2012). E. L. James: PW’s Publishing Person of the Year. Publishers Weekly, 30 November. Available at: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/people/article/54956-e-l-james-pw-s-publishing-person-of-the-year.html.Google Scholar
Deahl, R. (2014). The Rise of the Seven-Figure Advance. Publishers Weekly, 21 November. Available at: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/64848-the-rise-of-the-seven-figure-advance.html.Google Scholar
Demetrios, H. (2019). How to Lose a Third of a Million Dollars Without Really Trying. Available at: https://forge.medium.com/how-to-lose-a-third-of-a-million-dollars-without-really-trying-d3c343675aca.Google Scholar
Driscoll, B. (2008). How Oprah’s Book Club Reinvented the Woman Reader. Popular Narrative Media, 1.2, 139–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Driscoll, B. and Squires, C. (2020). The Epistemology of Ullapoolism: Making Mischief from within Contemporary Book Cultures. Angelaki, 25.5, 137–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elliott, T. (2018). Markus Zusak: ‘I was Just Failing and Failing, Over and Over Again’. The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 October. Available at: www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/markus-zusak-i-was-just-failing-and-failing-over-and-over-again-20181001-p5071j.html.Google Scholar
English, J. F. and Frow, J. (2006). Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture. In English, J., ed., A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 3957.Google Scholar
Enni, S. (2019). First Draft Episode #215: Leigh Barudgo Transcript. First Draft, 15 October. Available at: www.firstdraftpod.com/episode-transcripts/2020/2/3/leigh-bardugo.Google Scholar
Evain, C. (2004). John Grisham’s Megabestsellers. In Gallix, F. and Guignery, V., eds. Crime Fictions: Subverted Codes and New Structures. Paris: Sorbonne PUPS, pp. 109–24.Google Scholar
Faktorovich, A. (2014). The Formulas of Popular Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Google Scholar
Fisher, J. (2012). The Publishing Paradigm: Commercialism versus Creativity. In Hecq, D., ed. The Creativity Market: Creative Writing in the 21st Century. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 5465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flood, A. (2020). First George RR Martin, now Patrick Rothfuss: The Curse of Sequel-Hungry Fans. The Guardian, 30 July. Available at: www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jul/29/first-george-rr-martin-now-patrick-rothfuss-the-curse-of-sequel-hungry-fans.Google Scholar
Florida, R. (2002). The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (2002). What is an Author? In W. Irwin, ed., The Death and Resurrection of the Author. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 922.Google Scholar
Fujii, M. (2014). Haruki Murakami’s ‘Colorless Tsukuru’ Tops Best-Seller List Again. The Wall Street Journal, 1 September. Available at: www.wsj.com/articles/BL-JRTB-17810.Google Scholar
Gabaldon, D. (2020). FAQs. Available at: www.dianagabaldon.com/resources/faq/.Google Scholar
Gelder, K. (2004). Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gelder, K. ed. (2016). New Directions in Popular Fiction: Genre, Distribution, Reproduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentry, B. (2018). Unstoppable: YA Fantasy Author Leigh Bardugo on World-Building and Having Faith in Your Abilities. Writer’s Digest, 2 February. Available at: www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-wd-interview-ya-fantasy-author-leigh-bardugo.Google Scholar
Glăveanu, V. P. (2014). Distributed Creativity: Thinking Outside the Box of the Creative Individual. Cham: Springer.Google Scholar
Glover, D. and McCracken, S. eds. (2012). The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gould, E. (2014). Into the Woods. In Harbach, C., ed., MFA vs NYC. New York: Faber and Faber, pp. 121–37.Google Scholar
Grady, C. (2017). The Convoluted World of Bestseller Lists Explained. Vox, 13 September.Google Scholar
Gray, T. (2019). Robert Macfarlane and the Dark Side of Nature Writing. The New York Times, 28 May. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/books/robert-macfarlane-underland.html.Google Scholar
Hecq, D. ed. (2012). The Creativity Market: Creative Writing in the 21st Century. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Hennessey, C. (2018). The Secret Lives of Writers (and their Day Jobs). The Irish Times, 5 October. Available at: www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-secret-lives-of-writers-and-their-day-jobs-1.3651509.Google Scholar
Hentges, S. (2018). Girls on Fire: Transformative Heroines in Young Adult Dystopian Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.Google Scholar
Khatchadourian, R. (2020). N. K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds. The New Yorker, 20 January. Available at: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/27/nk-jemisins-dream-worlds.Google Scholar
King, S. (2000). On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London: Hodder and Stoughton.Google Scholar
Kirkpatrick, D. P. (2019). Sitting at J. K. Rowling’s Table. Available at: https://writingcooperative.com/sitting-at-j-k-rowlings-table-1b12eade0d4d.Google Scholar
KRT. (2002). J.K. Rowling: Busting the Myths. The Age, 28 August. Available at: www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/j-k-rowling-busting-the-myths-20020828-gduj7q.html.Google Scholar
Lahire, B. (2010). The Double Life of Writers. G. Wells trans. New Literary History, 14.2, 443–65.Google Scholar
Lee, H. (2017). The Political Economy of ‘Creative Industries’. Media, Culture, and Society, 39.7, 1078–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lord, A. (2020). J. K. Rowling Shut Down and Edinburgh Cafe’s Long-Held Claim that it’s the Birthplace of Harry Potter. The Independent, 22 May. Available at: www.insider.com/jk-rowling-edinburgh-cafe-harry-potter-2020-5.Google Scholar
Magenau, J. (2018). What Makes a Book a Best-seller? Deutsche Welle, no date. Available at: www.dw.com/en/what-makes-a-book-a-best-seller/a-43138368.Google Scholar
Magner, B. (2012). Behind the BookScan Bestseller Lists: Technology and Cultural Anxieties in Early Twenty-First-Century Australia. Script & Print, 36.4, 243–58.Google Scholar
Maher, J. (2019). ‘NYT’ Shifts its Lists Again. Publishers Weekly, 26 September. Available at www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/81272-nyt-shifts-its-lists-again.html.Google Scholar
MasterClass (2019). James Patterson Teaches Writing. Available at: www.masterclass.com/classes/james-patterson-teaches-writing.Google Scholar
McDowell, E. (1981). Behind the Best Sellers: Toni Morrison. The New York Times, 5 July. Available at: www.nytimes.com/1981/07/05/books/behind-the-best-sellers-toni-morrison.html.Google Scholar
McGurl, M. (2016). Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon. Modern Language Quarterly, 77.3: 447--71.Google Scholar
Murphy, B. M. and Matterson, S. eds. (2018). Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Nicolaou, E. (2018). Danielle Steel On Raising 9 Kids, Writing 174 Books, ‘Authoritarian’ Ex-Husbands. Refinery 29, 28 November. Available at: www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/11/217825/danielle-steel-books-beauchamp-hall-successful-career-interview.Google Scholar
Niidas Holm, K. (2019). Q & A with Tomi Adeyemi. Publishers Weekly, 21 November. Available at: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/81805-q-a-with-tomi-adeyemi.html.Google Scholar
Parlett, J. (2018). Robert Mcfarlane. British Council. Available at: https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/robert-macfarlane.Google Scholar
Picoult, J. (2020). FAQs. Jodi Picoult. Available at: www.jodipicoult.com/faqs.html.Google Scholar
Pierleoni, A. (2015). Best-Selling Author Dean Koontz Talks about his Success, Latest Hit Character. The Sacramento Bee, 2 February. Available at: www.sacbee.com/entertainment/books/article8952776.html.Google Scholar
Quinn, J. (1999). ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ Sequel Comes June 8. Publishers Weekly, 5 April. Available at: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/19990405/30649-the-silence-of-the-lambs-sequel-comes-june-8.html.Google Scholar
Ray Murray, P. and Squires, C. (2012). The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit. Book 2.0, 3.1 323.Google Scholar
Reid, C. (2017). ‘New York Times’ Cuts a Range of Bestseller Lists. Publishers Weekly, 26 January. Available at www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/72605-new-york-times-cuts-a-range-of-bestseller-lists.html.Google Scholar
Reinstein, M. (2019). Educated Author Tara Westover Reflects on her Success, her Regrets and her Advice from Oprah. Parade, 6 February. Available at: https://parade.com/777230/maramovies/educated-author-tara-westover-reflects-on-her-success-her-regrets-and-her-advice-from-oprah/.Google Scholar
Ritz, J. (2015). Why You Should Be Reading Leigh Bardugo’s Y.A. Novels – Even if You’re an Adult. Vanity Fair, 25 September. Available at: www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/leigh-bardugo-six-of-crows-grisha-trilogy-interview.Google Scholar
Roose, K. (2013). The Incredible Economics of Fifty Shades of Grey. New York Intelligencer, 27 March. Available at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/03/incredible-economics-of-fifty-shades.html.Google Scholar
Rothstein, M. (1991). A New Novel by Amy Tan, Who’s Still Trying to Adapt to Success. The New York Times, 11 June. Available at: www.nytimes.com/1991/06/11/books/a-new-novel-by-amy-tan-who-s-still-trying-to-adapt-to-success.html.Google Scholar
Rowling, J. K. (2008). Text of J.K. Rowling’s Speech. The Harvard Gazette, 5 June. Available at: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/.Google Scholar
Sawyer, K. (2006). Explaining Creativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, A. O. (2014). The Paradox of Art as Work. New York Times, 11 May.Google Scholar
Shamsian, J. (2018). How J. K. Rowling went from Struggling Single Mom to the World’s Most Successful Author. Insider, 31 July. Available at: www.insider.com/jk-rowling-harry-potter-author-biography-2017-7.Google Scholar
Smith, D. (1999). Long After ‘Lambs,’ Dr. Lecter is Returning. The New York Times, 30 March. Available at: www.nytimes.com/1999/03/30/books/long-after-lambs-dr-lecter-is-returning.html.Google Scholar
Smith, D. (2004). Parlaying an Affinity for Austen Into an Unexpected Best Seller. The New York Times, 14 June. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/books/parlaying-an-affinity-for-austen-into-an-unexpected-best-seller.html.Google Scholar
Spencer, K. (2017). Marketing and Sales in the US Young Adult Fiction Market. New Writing, 14.3, 429–43.Google Scholar
Squires, C. (2007). Marketing Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Stougaard-Nielsen, J. (2019). The Author in Literary Theory and Theories of Literature. In Berensmeyer, I., Buelens, G., Demoor, M., eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 270–87.Google Scholar
Sullivan, J. (2015). Turning Pages: The Curse of the Big Advance for Literary Novels. Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December. Available at: www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/turning-pages-the-curse-of-the-big-advance-for-literary-novels-20151211-gllqza.html.Google Scholar
Sutherland, J. (1981) Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Sutherland, J. (2007). Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tanggaard, L. (2012). The Sociomateriality of Creativity in Everyday Life. Culture and Psychology, 19.1, 2032.Google Scholar
The Sydney Morning Herald (2002). Having a Spell. 25 May. Available at: www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/having-a-spell-20020525-gdfb44.html.Google Scholar
Throsby, D. (2008). Globalization and the Cultural Economy: A Crisis of Value? In Anheier, H. and Yudhishtir, R., eds., The Cultural Economy. London: Sage, pp. 2941.Google Scholar
Velthuis, O. (2007). Talking Prices: Symbolic Meaning of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wappler, M. (2017). The Boundary-pushing Fiction of Sean McDonald and his New FSG Imprint, MCD. Los Angeles Times, 28 July. Available at: www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-mcd-imprint-20170728-story.html.Google Scholar
Webb, J. (2012). Creativity and the Marketplace. In Hecq, D., ed., The Creativity Market: Creative Writing in the 21st Century. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 4053.Google Scholar
Webster, J. (2014). The Marketplace of Attention. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wilkins, K. (2014). Writing Resilience in the Digital Age. New Writing, 11.1, 6776.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilkins, K. (2017a). ‘A Crowd at your Back’: Fantasy Fandom and Small Press. Media International Australia 170.1, 115–25.Google Scholar
Wilkins, K. (2017b). Writing Time: Coleridge, Creativity, and Commerce. Text, 41.Google Scholar
Wilkins, K. (2019). Do the Hustle: Writing in a Post-digital Publishing World. Sydney Review of Books, 27 September.Google Scholar
Wilkins, K., Driscoll, B., and Fletcher, L. (in press). Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Williams, A. (2003). The New Literary Lottery. New York Magazine, 11 July. Available at: https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/n_8972/.Google Scholar
Williams, R. (1983). Culture & Society. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Wood, H. (2019). Susanna Clarke’s ‘Perfectly Constructed’ New Novel goes to Bloomsbury. The Bookseller, 30 September. Available at: www.thebookseller.com/news/susanna-clarkes-perfectly-constructed-next-novel-goes-bloomsbury-15-years-after-jonathan.Google Scholar
Wroe, N. (2011). A Life in Writing: John Grisham. The Guardian, 26 November. Available at: www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/nov/25/john-grisham-life-in-writing.Google Scholar
Wynne, Paula. (2020). Pimp My Fiction: Write a Bestselling Novel by Learning Powerful Writing Techniques. Kindle Edition. Available at: www.amazon.com/Pimp-My-Fiction-Bestselling-Techniques-ebook/dp/B0190T0Z24/.Google Scholar
Yucesoy, B., Wang, X., Huang, J., and Barabasi, A. (2018). Success in Books: A Big Data Approach to Bestsellers. EPJ Data Science, 7.7, doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0135-y.Google Scholar
Zelizer, Viviana. (2005). Circuits within Capitalism. In Nee, V. and Swedeburg, R. eds., The Economic Sociology of Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 289321.Google Scholar

Save element to Kindle

To save this element to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Writing Bestsellers
Available formats
×

Save element to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Writing Bestsellers
Available formats
×

Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Writing Bestsellers
Available formats
×