How can I strategically write a complex bestseller? (4HS001)

If writing is anything like music, becoming a bestseller is probably a matter of luck:

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song's merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had "social influence": Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that's what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another's opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here's the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs--and the bottom ones--were completely different. For example, the song "Lockdown," by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song's success seemed to be due to merit. "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

When I was around 13 a guy who went on to some success as a writer asked me a question. "Trevor, what do you write with?" I answered a typewriter. "No, what do you write with?" I answered, um, sometimes a pencil? "No. You write with your ass. Because if you don't put your ass in a chair, you don't write." There's no substitute for thousands of pages of terrible writing to cull out the acceptable writing to shape into the good writing.

When I was around 20 a woman who was a professional writer told me she was working on her next book. "What's it about?" I asked. She said thanks for asking but she wasn't going to say. She said you can either write, or you can talk about writing. You need to decide which one you're going to do and not confuse them. When you talk about writing, your brain thinks you've written and stops working. Only writing is writing. Feedback from peers can be helpful. General statements of where you're at, fine. Specifics of what you're doing to the general public is making a big map and never walking in the territory.

These two bits of advice have been tremendously helpful to me. I get published every once in a while.

Look, if you set out to basically do the impossible (writing a guaranteed bestseller not having sold a book before), you better not use the standard strategies which experimentally have one in a million success rate. Anything obviously exploitable without a one-in-a-million talent would have been done already, given the low barrier to entry these days. You may accidentally hit a jackpot (a teenage girl meeting a noble vampire and a hunky werewolf, or a young woman meeting a charismatic executive with dark carnal secrets), but the odds are just that, of hitting a jackpot. You should probably either lower your expectations or look for ways to drastically improve your odds in extremely creative ways. Or find that part of your talent which is one-in-a-million and exploit it mercilessly.

Behold! Millions of stories that will never, ever get professionally published, much less reach best sellers lists. The academic/non-fiction market's much smaller, but also fiercely competitive. I'm reminded of the "everyone has to write a million words of crap before they can start producing good fiction" quote (attributed to Raymond Chandler, it seems), so I guess it's reasonable to ask your experience with writing: How much have you written, and how often have you accomplished the substantially lesser tasks of getting published at all and making (any!) money off your work? Since you listed a bunch of pop-non-fiction to fill, your, err, "intensional cluster", what are your areas of expertise? Most of those authors were either well established in their fields or had written extensively already.

Anyway, as for ideas, Dan Carlin recently gave a potential topic (not for money, but for attention) at the very beginning of one of his recent podcasts. Could try something like that. Controversy seems a more reliable way than others to sell.

writing for money is a waste of time. Most people would do better by getting a minimum wage job and spending their entire paycheck on lottery tickets.

Sarah Wynde

How many words do you write per day?

My guess about a good strategy:

First, choose a topic. It should be something many people strongly care about, have different opinions about, and many of them are optimistic about. Good choices are: making money, sexual relations, human nature, human thinking... essentially "how to live well in this society?" or "how to understand humans?". (Avoid topics like conspiracy theories, politics, or religion, where people usually just get angry.)

Second, do a research. Find many books, magazines, blogs, etc. related to the subject. Make notes about everything, but most importantly about interesting stories (humans love reading stories about other humans). The more quotes from various sources you make, the more serious and valuable your book will seem.

Third, make a structure and write a book. When you have your notes, perhaps some clusters will appear there naturally. Those will be the main parts of your book. Separate the notes to piles, and write each part of the book. Always start a chapter with an anecdote, then put in everything that seems related, and finally write a simplictic easy-to-remember conclusion using large letters. Write an introduction describing why the topic is personally so imporant for you, why destiny chose you to describe it, how you spent all your life researching the topic, and how writing the book completely changed your life. Write a finishing chapter where you will repeat all the wisdom from the previous chapters, thank readers for buying your book, and suggest that the knowledge in this book, if properly understood, will completely change the science and the society as we know them.

Fourth, marketing. --- I don't know much about that. Sending a free copy of the book to some influential people, and paying some bloggers and journalists to write some hype about you would probably help, but I guess there is a whole industry that does the same thing professionally, and you just pay them to do it for you.

How much utility would you get out of an unfinished book? Have you factored that into your expected utility for the project?

I think you should go for an episodic format, with pieces that could be publishable by themselves even if you don't achieve your primary goal. Like Freakonomics. Big monolithic narratives like The Better Angels of our Nature are great if you're an experienced and (more importantly) well-known author who can easily recruits lots of assistance.

Strategic offering: Get someone whose opinion and emotional support you trust to nag you to write every day for multiple hours.

I had a lot of vague fictional story ideas where I would think of a concept, write a chapter about a concept, and then never have it go anywhere past Chapter 1 or 2. I was able to use the above to fix that.

Examples:

A woman is kidnapped wakes up in a prison for people with superpowers, but she doesn't seem to have a superpower, at first.

Bulma from Dragonball Z is a lot like MOR Harry Potter.

Pinkie Pie ascends to Alicornism and institutes Transequinism.

A MMORPG from the perspective of an Artificially Intelligent Villian capable of leveling up and acting as a Player Character could.

And my wife has a great deal of fun having me be a DM, so I had been coming up with encounters and game worlds. In the most recent one, in a superhero campaign, I would often write out Monthly reports in Google Docs, about how these people had gone after these things, and Irradiated Bionic Aliens had been trying to invade these states. But these were just summaries.

I had had my latest writing Idea which was unlikely to go very far, which was "Hey, why don't I put all 6 members of MLP in a D&D universe setting as humans. Pinkie Pie can be a Bard, Applejack can be a Ranger, Twilight Sparkle can be a Wizard, Rarity can be a Sorcerer, Fluttershy can be a Druid, and Rainbow Dash can be a Monk. I can have them go through Dungeons together and I can keep track of their progress."

What actually got me to have 250 pages and almost 100,000 Words (as opposed to 7 Pages and not even 3,000 words, like some of my other ideas.) in what seems to have been just a few months was my wife saying:

"Oh, can I play?" after I was idly chatting with her about what bonus feats various Ponies could get.

So the 6 characters from My Little Pony Friendship is Magic universe, and Megan, a D&D universe native (And also another MLP reference from a previous generation) are questing and questing and questing, and so I was writing, and writing, and writing.

Because she was insisting on playing, or having me prepare another session, 5 days a week, like it was a second job which I did, because well, she's my wife.

All because I had one person who I wanted to keep happy and who was having me write and write and write even when I really would rather not have been writing.

This does not mean I'm a GOOD writer, by any means. (Looking it over, the story needs a truly enormous amount of editing, at least in part because I'm typing it and DMing at the same time and in part because the quality and level of detail shifts rather substantially from page to page.) But that certainly got me way, way past the "Oh I have all these great ideas but I never seem to get them to chapter 3. Maybe later I'll have the time!" phase of writing.

Also, I have to give credit to my wife in addition to forcing me to keep writing, sometimes she'll follow along on her smartphone and edit as I type, fixing spelling errors or having me reword phrases when she has no idea who is speaking.

Idea: make a bunch of money using some other method, then offer your book for 1 cent (or cheaper?) and buy a bunch of copies of it yourself.

Even though you seem to be focused on non-fiction, you might want to strategically examine what kinds of themes and historically bestselling novels have tackled: read something like Hit Lit for a good breakdown. Stories can be critical in non-fiction too.

I upvoted as soon as I saw "critical minimum threshold of upvotes and comments necessary to keep me motivated". This is probably a bad attitude for me to have, but the overall post I think still deserves an upvote anyway, I look forward to seeing what happens next.