THE CULLING, PART TWO

(in which every author dares to dream of their first appearance on the New York Times bestseller list)

I enjoy hearing from readers. An email arrived from one yesterday:

“Your Substacks are all alarming, as they are meant to be, but this one goes way beyond.  It seems… distraught. Hopeless. If it’s for effect, bravo. If not, you OK?”

It is heartening to know readers are concerned about my well-being. The world is a rough place, and we all need people checking in on us. For the record: I am OK. I mean, I probably drink too much, and the bridge collapse thing weighs on me, and yesterday’s eclipse had me thinking about the end of the world, but other than that, OK. Keep the emails coming.¹

The eclipse over the Winooski River, Vermont

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Writers interest me. If they had to choose between their success and, say, your death and mine, they would choose the latter without equivocation. I have always admired the ferocity of their ambition.

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I hear from writers all the time in this new endeavor. One of the questions I ask them concerns their expectations. “What are your hopes and dreams for this publication?” Every one of them says they want their book to be a New York Times bestseller. Again, this ferocity of ambition.

Some of them reference other writers in response to this question, suggesting their own work is better.

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I mean, (insert author name here) is OK I guess.

It’s not a competition.

It is a competition. They are selling more books than I do.

You can’t spend your life envious of other writers’ success.

They’re on the Times list. I’m not.

You should be grateful that people are reading books at all.

Well, they’re not reading enough of mine.

Look, it’s better for you to focus on what you can do to improve your standing with readers.

Isn’t that your job?

Possibly.

Possibly? What business are you in?

We’re in the “optimizing your book’s chances for success” business.

That sounds like business school patois. BEAT. I would hire someone to kill (insert author name here) if I could. BEAT. Look, can you get my book on the Times list or not?

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Clarity of purpose. Ferocity of ambition. We should all be so blessed.

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To be clear: it is good to know a writer’s ambitions from the outset. It helps cull the client list.

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Depending on whose data sets you are looking at, roughly 3.3 million books were published last year (this figure does not include self-published books).² 500,000 of those books were novels. This sounds like a lot (too many). There would be a systemic collapse of AI if it had to read that many novels.

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Since many of the potential clients who approach me (and not just me - they are your clients, too) are novelists, I thought it would be useful to examine the availability of the New York Times bestseller list to them with some back-of-the-envelope calculations.³ And yeah, this was an interesting exercise/data grab.