Best Selling or Best Written?

The author Robert Kiyosaki mentions a meeting with a journalist in Tokyo in one of his books. When she asked him how to become a bestselling author his advise was to take a job as a salesperson. ”But I want to write not sell” she replied. Robert’s response was that he was a Best Selling not a Best Writing author.
While there are many best selling books which have additional value the idea that bestsellers are not the best written books is probably correct. I’m not suggesting that you have to head off and become a salesperson to learn the making of a bestseller but I am suggesting that you need to learn how to sell and market to be able to become a best selling author.
Why would learning sales skills help you become a better writer? Sales is all about learning to read people. You learn to use language to explain, convince and motivate. There is no high pressure or misleading involved despite the misconceptions of some people. There are others who think that you need “the gift of the gab”, Australian slang for being able to talk a lot, to be a good salesperson but the reality is that you need to be very good at listening to the words that are said and how congruent they are with the body language being displayed.
Bestseller status comes from the marketing efforts of the publisher and the author (that’s you) and it doesn’t matter if the books are separated into fiction or best sellers by genre. Best sellers can be serious hardbacks or mass market paperbacks, fiction, factual or historic. Good marketing is the key and that requires similar skills to salespeople.
Really that’s the point, once you have the ability to study people and read their actions to get an idea of their motivations you have the ability to write it down so your characters are three dimensional and they behave and say things which fit the characters you have created. Real people behaving like people we know in believable situations and your stories will flow and read well. It seems that this is an area which many authors struggle with. Many seem to want to hide from people and then write about them. This is like writing out a set of instructions on how to play golf without ever having picked up a set of clubs or even watched the game on TV.
If you want to write bestsellers that’s the key right there. Not clever academic tomes, not brilliant verbiage or grammatical structures. Save them for your thesis for your PHD. It is also the key to getting published. No self respecting Publisher has any interest in publishing a book which is unlikely to sell. Publishing is an expensive business, they will not waste money on a outside chance. If your book can’t hit the mass market bestseller lists then they are unlikely to pick it up.
How can you be sure you have the ingredients of a best seller? Your story has to flow and draw the reader in. Good stories hook you in and keep you reading, you don’t notice the passage of time or even the beginning of the next chapter. In the book Misery the captive author describes himself as “falling into the page” which I think is an excellent description. Psycologists call this a Mu moment and this is what happens with me when I’m reading, same for you?
I have never had this experience when writing but I have no trouble imagining what it is like. The trick is to just write furiously, don’t stop to spell check or correct the grammar, there will be plenty of time to make the corrections later, just get the story down on paper or on the screen and save as you go.
Your book can be a bestseller even if it isn’t perfect, it will probably never be perfect so don’t delay submitting it. What it does have to do is to engage the reader on at least one level so they keep engrossed in your writing. Stay with just writing a great story, there is always time to edit after your have completed it.
The other thing you need to do is write lots and lots. On my website at www.bearlybooks.com there are a lot of long posts. A typical post would be around 300 words, I seem to be a bit wordy when I get a head of steam up and have trouble being concise. You may have noticed.
If you then do a count of the number of posts here I probably have written a small novel since around December when the site really got started. If you add in the content for other sites, the manuals, computer code and other things that probably adds up to at least a second novel just on the number of words I have written.
Perhaps I should have focussed on a single area and completed just one novel. I doubt that what I write is of any academic value but it doesn’t have to be, it has to communicate and I see no reason why you can’t do the same. The act of writing and reading will make you a better writer so don’t hold back.
There is a saying in the motivational world, if it is worth doing it’s worth doing badly. Don’t be afraid to write badly as the practice will help you get better. If it is worth writing at all it is certainly worth writing badly at first and correcting it later.
Just get and keep writing. There may well be a bestseller inside you fighting to escape, let it out.

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