Myth 4: To Be a Bestseller, a Book Must Be Well Written

By Chris Maddock - Jun 08 , 2009

By Chris Maddock & Michael Drew

Certainly any book that attains the aerie heights of bestsellerdom is artistic. Surely such a work must be the work of the muse. It must be well-written, right?

Nope.

Go to the non-fiction bestsellers section of your local bookstore, if you still have one of those. Read about a page from each of the top five books. That this preconception is a myth will be readily apparent. Despite the “scratch-your-back” recommendations on the back of each, most aren’t well-composed. They may contain some great information (some really don’t), but they aren’t well-written by any standard.

No matter. A platform and savvy marketing campaign are infinitely more important than good writing.

If you’re a writer – especially a published one – you probably don’t believe me.

Of anything I say in our Book Publishing 2.0 class, which is often attended by authors with books in print, this is the statement that garners me the most crap. It’s also one of most important facts a non-fiction author needs to realize if she wants to sell a whole lot of books.

Having another 100,000 people you can call on to purchase your book upon publication means immensely more than somehow channeling Sinclair Lewis to pen your work.

Unless you were born with just the right mutation in your Cox-4 gene, or suffered years of torture in composition classes, you’re probably not a very good writer, anyway. No worries. Neither are the huge majority of bestsellers each year. And while it is possible to mold yourself into a better wordsmith, it’s a heck of a lot easier to build a platform.

What’s a platform, you ask?

It’s all the people who know you, or know about you or your work. Its all the people impressed by who you are and what you do. Rush Limbaugh’s platform, I hear, numbers around 6 million people, and consists of his regular listeners and those who read his blog. Although I’m unaware of the exact statistic, and don’t care enough to go fishing for it, I’m sure Oprah’s number is much, much larger.

But those guys are A-listers

I work in the world of B, C, and no-listers. People that barely have a name. Or don’t at all. And it’s these sorts of authors I work with to build platforms so they can call out to someone who will listen when publishing time comes around.

So, sure, write as well as you can. Make your words sing and moan. But if I were you, I’d spend more time trying to do what I’m doing instead. Try to build your platform WHILE you’re writing your book. Try blogging the thing. Try to get people to read your blog. Keep trying till you have a lot of people familiar with you and your work. Then publish.

Try to build your platform so that enough people will know about you and your ideas. That way, when you finally publish your book, you’ll have an audience to market to that may possibly buy it. If you attempt to gain the attention of a big publishing house – a big audience will help a lot. And if you’re self-publishing, it will give you somebody to sell to on your own.