Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Read Online Free Page B

of the bestseller list hovered around 20 percent, while in the nineties the percentage climbed to 27.9 percent.
    For the purposes of this book, I’ve bumped that figure up to 33 percent. One-third of the twelve novels we’ll consider were written by women.
OPRAH, ADVERTISING,
AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
    Inevitably, any discussion of bestseller lists must take into consideration the impact of marketing and Oprah Winfrey. How valid is it to draw cultural conclusions from the bestseller list if a great many book buyers are motivated to buy a book not by the intrinsic elements in the book itself, but by slick ad campaigns or a television celebrity who caters to a unique demographic base?
    Well, first, the hard reality is that clever marketing campaigns tend to work only a few times before they are copied by other marketers, thereby neutralizing the advantage. For instance, it was once rare for a writer to hit the road to promote his novel. Mark Twain is a colorful exception. With his trademark white suit and bushy mustache, his catchy nom de plume, and his stand-up comic routine, he established himselfon the rough-and-tumble lecture circuit, selling his books by hand as he moved from one small-town venue to the next. In the modern era, Jacqueline Susann is often credited with breaking new ground in book promotion. Dressed in her Pucci outfits and carrying her poodle, Josephine, under her arm, the indefatigable Ms. Susann went so far as to visit truck stops, buttering up the drivers who used to select which books to stock on the spinning racks in drugstores and groceries. Twain and Susann were pioneers of what has become commonplace with modern authors, tireless and often flamboyant self-promotion.
    Over the last few decades, however, the practice of book touring has become so widespread that on any given night in any given bookstore across the land, an author can be found pacing up and down the aisles, waiting and hoping for his or her audience to appear. The novelty of actually meeting a living, breathing author face-to-face has long ago worn off.
    Then, more often than not, the latest advertising bright idea fails entirely to produce the intended results. Even lavishing hundreds of thousand of dollars on a promotional campaign is no guarantee of a book’s success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. Though they would wish it were otherwise, publishers are less in control of the destiny of individual books than the public (and most authors) often imagine.
    My point is that knowing the historical details and the exact method a publisher used to promote a book to bestsellerdom would ultimately tell us very little, since the whole enterprise is fraught with unpredictability. Over the years, I’ve heard dozens of publishers or agents say some version of the following: “How the hell did that book make the List?”
    “At least half the books on any given week’s bestseller list are there to the immense surprise and puzzlement of theirpublishers,” says Michael Korda, bestselling author and longtime editor. “That’s why publishers find it so hard to repeat their successes—half the time they can’t figure out how they happened in the first place.”
    As for Oprah, well, bless her amazing heart. Starting in 1996, her book club brought enormous numbers of new readers into the marketplace and conferred on dozens of otherwise obscure writers a measure of fame and fortune that, while ephemeral in many cases, was surely deserved.
    However, for the decade that her book club operated at its peak, her chosen books tended to skew the bestseller list toward a type of novel that might not be so heavily represented otherwise, and thereby her selections squeezed off the list (and out of view) novels that many people might have chosen using guidance from more varied sources such as book reviews, booksellers, and word-of-mouth recommendations.
    In any case, I didn’t feel the need to include an Oprah pick on our reading list since at