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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/18260
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If I had a formula for what makes a book a bestseller, then I'd have a bunch of bestselling books to my name instead of the lame few hundred copies my books sell.

I think the biggest factor in making a best-selling book is that the author is already famous. If a big-time Hollywood actor or a well-known politician or a champion athlete writes a book, it will almost automatically sell many copies. (In many cases they don't even write the book. They get someone else to write it and they put their name on it. But that's another story.)

Number two is that the author has previously written best-selling books. Now that Tom Clancy and J K Rowling and so on have written best-selling books, anything they write will sell well.

Number three is having a broad potential readership. Romance novels tend to sell relatively well because a large percentage of women are interested in romance (and several dozen men). A how-to book about re-inking antique typewriter ribbons will not sell very well because the number of people interested in the subject is tiny to begin with. (Though niche books like this have the advantage that there's not much competition.)

After that, I think there's a lot of luck involved. It is not at all clear to me that best-selling books in general are better written than many books that go nowhere. A really bad book that doesn't meet number 1 or number 2 above will probably not sell well. But there are lots of good books that don't sell. Some books just capture people's attention and create a "buzz". Others, for whatever reason, don't. Quality of the book is certainly a factor, but it's not simply a matter of "the best books make it".

Of course you could say the same about marketing anything. There are restaurants that have really good food that go bankrupt while a restaurant across town with mediocre food does well. There are brilliant gadgets people have invented that never take off while less clever gadgets make millions. Etc.

In many cases this is marketing: a bad product with good marketing beats a good product with bad marketing almost every time.

But in the book world, there isn't very much real marketing. You get a book on the shelves at the bookstore and/or listed on Amazon and you hope people will buy it. You rarely see TV commercials or newspaper ads for specific books.

I don't mean to sound negative. I'd just say, "Write the best book you can, do the best you can to promote it, and hope and pray for the best."

Original score: 5