I don’t often get asked the question that is the title of this week’s blogpost, but I do hear it from time to time. Of the millions of books that are published, damned few are best sellers. And I don’t personally know anyone who has written one.Of course, there are all kind of nominal “best sellers.” The New York Times’s best seller list is the gold standard, but Publishers Weekly’s list also carries a lot of weight.
If an e-book is on Amazon Kindle, Amazon has their own lists. Yes, lists, plural. They have lists broken down by genre, not just overall. And it’s certainly easier to attain a place on the best-seller list of a genre that’s less heavily written in, where there is less competition, than it is to achieve putative best-sellerdom on the overall list or a list crowded with entries, not to mention how extraordinarily much easier it is than to rank on the New York Times best-seller list.
Quite a few of my editing clients come to me fired up with the notion that they have written the next best seller. Sometimes I try to lay out the cold, hard facts for them before reality does them in. Sometimes I merely wish them luck and let them deal with the disappointment that, inevitably, hits them.
I have no hopes of writing a best seller myself—and I have written over 100 books. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to write a best seller. Who wouldn’t love that? It’s just that I have a pretty firm grasp of reality.
My PERSONAL best seller—which is quite a different thing (it’s the book of an author’s that has sold more copies than any of her/his other books)—is DIVORCE HELPBOOK FOR KIDS. And that’s a pretty sad commentary on the state of marriage and families. That book has sold more copies than any of my others in any genre—for adults or for kids, fiction or nonfiction…anything. While I’m sad to think that such a book would be so badly needed, I’m pleased to be able to help.
I’ll keep on writing, and I hope that some of my other books also fulfill a real need for people. But I still don’t expect to ever make the best-seller list.