Exiting Hitsville

Iain Ryan on shifting from "bestseller" to "just seller"

One of the biggest myths in writing is that you should aim for mass market appeal.

It’s insane how ingrained this is, not just within publishing, but within individual writers too. When you’re starting out, it’s easy to get swept up in it. You have to be ambitious to write a novel.

And then you look around and start thinking, hmmm selling a book seems difficult. Surely I should give myself every chance at this by tapping into a huge audience.

Wrong!

You can’t manufacture books for a mass audience because the core thing people are buying is ‘joining in’.

A bestseller is not a story.

It’s a story + millions of readers in communion with each other.

Those mega-selling books live in a place that Seth Godin calls **Hitsville.** It’s where the big sales are, the books that ‘sweep an industry, like a thresher through a wheat field.’

There are three ways a hit happens:

Many people who love a particular medium (music, the theatre, books) coalesce around a single new title.

Many people who rarely spend time in that medium make this title the one thing they’re going to engage in.

A few people consume that title over and over again.

That’s not your product at all, is it? By comparison, you’re on your own. It’s just you and whoever reads your stuff.

The thing to get out of your head is this:

You can make the jump.

Because you can’t.

No one person or team creates a bestseller. It’s a cultural phenomenon, a positive feedback loop running white hot on its own juice. You can’t reverse-engineer the desires of millions of people any more than the weather. Colleen Hoover doesn’t know how she engineered her own success.

And yet you presume to?

Leave it alone.

You’re better off accepting that you cannot turn your book into a cataclysmic cultural event (because absolutely no one can) and focusing on, Where does that leave me now?

Forget ‘bestselling’ and focus on ‘just selling’

How are you going to sell your book?

You’ve got to have an answer or you’re not a writer, but the thing is everyone knows the answers:

• Sell the book to traditional publishing and they’ll sell it to stores and those stores will hire people to hand-sell it to readers.

• Sell it to a small press and those presses will, typically, do a mix of the above and some sort of online and/or direct sales.

• Self-publish the book and sell it yourself online — or in David Simmons’ case, stock it in tattoo shops.

• Some hybrid of the above (that’s my answer).

Guess what?

It’s all the same thing outside of Hitsville.

Only the deal terms change.

And did you get into writing to benchmark your self-worth and creative success on your deal terms? What the fuck? Of course, you didn’t.

With digital publishing, we should be getting a lot saner about this stuff, but we aren’t.

Most writers still feel like they live their whole lives at the whims of the market, swept about like a small boat on a big sea. The world is oppressively disinterested in their work, and there’s a fuck-tonne of things that can derail a book release (bad timing, bad deal terms, no budget, bad promo, wrong book, bad cover, global events, etc).

All that uncertainty is easier to manage after you forget about Hitsville. Suddenly all that trouble and risk just is what is it is:

Business nonsense.

Everyone in business has to deal with nonsense. It’s part of why you get paid. It’s your job to deal with it.

Praying for ascension is not how you deal with it. That’s not a job. As a public disclosure of your craftmaking, it’s boring and unproductive. No one wants to see you kneel down.

What then? Seth Godin has a few antidotes to Hitsville. You can look those up. But one of them feels especially relevant here:

Start a cult.

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Iain Ryan can be found on Twitter at @iainkryanauthor. His latest book is called What Living And Dying Is Like.