It’s Gonna Be a BESTSELLER!

People not in the know think producing a bestseller is as simple as coming up with a cool idea.

That’s it.

And plenty of people will think they have it.

They’re the one person in the world – the only person in a population in excess of 8 billion – who’s stumbled upon THAT ONE IDEA that is going to trump everything else.

In the time I’ve worked in the hybrid publishing space, it’s the number one thing I hear.

An author will come in and say, “I’ve written a book – it’s going to be a bestseller.”

Or, “I’m going to write a book – it’s going to be a bestseller.”

Or, “I have such an amazing story – nobody else has a story as amazing as mine, so I know it’ll be a bestseller!!”

My boss and I used to look at one another and think the same thing: Another one. It was the equivalent of a mutual eye roll.

So many people – and they’re primarily inexperienced writers – think this, like they’ve been ordained and they have an entitlement nobody else has. I used to think this when I was an inexperienced writer. It must be a rite of passage that you think you’re so shit hot, and everybody else isn’t (or isn’t nearly as shit hot).

But here’s the simplest truth: You can’t all be right.

According to Grok, 4.17 million ISBN-registered titles were released in the US in 2025 (although this number will be inflated by the same title being released across different formats, e.g. paperback, ebook, audiobook). That’s just in the US.  Grok estimates that 642,242 of those were traditionally published, and the rest were self-published – the latter will now increase, unfortunately, due to AI.

Although the quantity that constitutes a bestseller can vary from location to location, typically under 1% of books released in any given year are bestsellers.

One percent.

So how can every new author ultimately be so certain they’re going to produce a bestseller? It’s not about the story. Plenty of writers think they have THE ONE STORY that’s better than everybody else’s, past, present, and future. There are plenty of great stories out there. But they’re not all being bestsellers. The statistics prove that.

Here’s the biggest myth: nobody gives a fuck how original you think your story is, and that originality is going to be this market-breaker while every other title out of there lags pathetically behind.

Nobody cares how amazing your story is.

Nobody cares how … well, throw in any (positive) adjective to modify “story” is.

The story might contribute to a book’s success, but it’s not the exclusive motivator.

Neither is the quality of writing.

A friend and I were talking about how one author who’s had multiple bestsellers could possibly rate in the 4s on Goodreads given her writing is clunky, and better writers – writers who’ve won major awards and are revered by esteemed peers – were sitting in the mid 3s.

My friend made a good point: the mass consumers reading this particular’s author’s books weren’t discerning (and to back this up, one of our interns said her friends love reading trashy romance, even knowing they were poorly written). The people who read better writers were more critical of the prose and storytelling, and were harder in rating them.

It shows you how the market skews, and not necessarily in favour of THE BIG IDEA, or THE BEAUTIFUL WRITING, or THE ORIGINAL STORY, or a combination of these things.

Something else to consider is that people in different parts of the world might come up with the same idea at the same time. Many writers will contrive plagiarism accusations, and while I don’t dispute plagiarism happens (although nowhere near as much as some fear), sometimes, it is just coincidence.

Back in the early 1990s, I was writing a screenplay about werewolves imaginatively entitled Wolf. One day, I was watching Entertainment Tonight – which,  in the world of pre-internet, was one of the few ways to get entertainment news – when they ran a story about a new movie in which Jack Nicholson would play a werewolf. The movie was called Wolf.

Did they rip me off? No. Shit happens.

There’s something called “multiple discovery” (or “simultaneous invention”), which posits that the same scientific discoveries are made simultaneously by different people. The same happens with creativity. I’ve experienced it. I know other people who have, too.

And even if you don’t believe that, think about all the creative people out there coming up with stories. Just based on numbers, there’ll be some coincidental overlap.

So, if you’re a creator thinking you have that idea that’s going to bust through a saturated market and be a bestseller, I commend you for your enthusiasm and self-belief.

But a book’s success isn’t just based on the idea.

Other things come into play:

• • Marketing: it’s pivotal, and yet there are examples of publishers investing heavily in an author and their book, and it not paying off. (There’ll be a sequel to the blog just about marketing.)
  • Trends: what else is going on in the market? You release a book about werewolves, but the market’s more interested in vampires. Trends are constantly changing.
  • Timing: something might be happening in the world that changes the market. In the wake of 9/11, a slate of action movies featuring terrorists, bombings, CBD destruction, etc., were pulled because they were now considered in bad taste. That’s a drastic example. It might be as simple as a vampire novel capturing the market, inspiring a flood of copycats that fatigue the market, and then tastes changing (which then goes back into trends). Years ago, a published friend was told to abandon writing her WWI-based book because there’d be a glut to celebrate the approaching 100-year anniversary of The Great War.
  • Author Profile: unfortunately for introverts, the visibility of the author across social media platforms can play a factor in their book’s success.
  • Luck: and this is the big one. Who knows what’ll go viral and what won’t? Think about the term viral. It comes from virus. You generally catch a virus by accident, rather than design. And we see that on the net all the time – stupid videos suddenly blowing up.

There’s so many variables to consider. You can do everything right, and it still might not happen. That’s not necessarily the case in other vocations. In most other vocations, if you’re good at your job, you’ll progress, get more business, earn more money, etc.

Not so with writing – or the creative industries.

It’s unfair, but that’s not only the creative life, but life in general. Nobody has an entitlement to anything, and when it comes to writing you have even less than that.

Thinking you’re somehow a step ahead of everybody else is not only flawed thinking, but common.

All you can do is write the best book you can, try and do everything right, and hope it clicks.

Now I don’t want to be all doom. Authors do have bestsellers. As I tell authors at work, nurture the hope and do all the hard work required because it does happen.

But be realistic.

There are no guarantees.