The Bestseller Formula: A $28 Billion Lie the Publishing Industry Sells Itself

Every year, some data scientist or retired editor publishes a book claiming they've cracked the code — the secret recipe for a bestseller. Plug in a female protagonist, add a dash of trauma, sprinkle some short chapters, and boom: you're the next Gillian Flynn. There's just one problem. If the formula worked, publishers wouldn't reject 99% of manuscripts. And yet they do. Spectacularly.

The uncomfortable truth is that the publishing industry has a worse prediction record than a coin flip. The same houses that passed on Harry Potter twelve times now spend millions on algorithmic tools promising to identify the next big thing. Let that sink in for a moment: the people whose literal job it is to spot winners couldn't recognize the most profitable book franchise in human history when it landed on their desks. Twelve times.

But the formula-mongers persist. In 2016, Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers published "The Bestseller Code," claiming their algorithm could predict bestsellers with 80% accuracy. Sounds impressive until you realize that if you simply predicted "this book will NOT be a bestseller" for every single book published, you'd be right about 99.5% of the time. Their algorithm was actually performing worse than pessimism. That's not cracking the code — that's expensive coin-flipping with a PhD attached.

The formula crowd loves to point at patterns. Short chapters sell! (Tell that to Donna Tartt, whose 800-page "The Goldfinch" won a Pulitzer and sold millions.) Relatable protagonists are key! (Humbert Humbert from "Lolita" would like a word — he's a literal monster, and Nabokov's novel is one of the most celebrated books of the twentieth century.) Write what you know! (Tolkien, famously, had never been to Middle-earth. Shocking, I know.)

Here's my favorite bit of formula mythology: the idea that you need a "hook" in the first page or readers will abandon you. Ernest Hemingway opened "A Farewell to Arms" with a description of dust on leaves. Tolstoy started "Anna Karenina" with an aphorism about happy families that has absolutely nothing to do with trains. Gabriel García Márquez began "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by telling you about ice. Ice! These openings break every rule in every "How to Write a Bestseller" seminar, and they're among the most successful novels ever written.

The real problem with the bestseller formula is that it confuses correlation with causation — the cardinal sin of anyone trying to reverse-engineer success. Yes, many bestsellers have certain features in common. Many bestsellers also have covers. Many bestsellers are printed on paper. The presence of shared features doesn't mean those features caused the success. This is like studying billionaires, noticing they all wear shoes, and concluding that shoes make you rich.

Consider the case of "Fifty Shades of Grey." No formula on earth would have predicted that Twilight fan fiction about BDSM, written in prose that made English teachers weep, would sell 150 million copies. Or that a Norwegian philosophy professor's novel about a girl receiving letters from a mysterious philosopher — "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder — would become a global phenomenon. Or that a 1,079-page novel by an unknown writer about a tennis academy and a halfway house — David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" — would become a generation's literary totem. These books have nothing in common except their total disregard for formulas.

The publishing industry's dirty secret is that bestsellers are, at their core, black swan events. Nassim Nicholas Taleb would have a field day with this industry. The distribution of book sales follows a brutal power law: a tiny fraction of titles generate the vast majority of revenue. In any given year, about 500 titles account for more than half of all trade book sales in the United States. That's 500 out of roughly 4 million titles published annually. You have better odds at some casino tables.

So why does the formula myth persist? Because it's comforting. Writing a book is an act of insane optimism — you're spending months or years of your life creating something that statistically almost nobody will read. The formula gives aspiring writers the illusion of control. Follow these seven steps, and you too can quit your day job. It's the literary equivalent of a get-rich-quick scheme, and it preys on the same human weakness: the desperate desire to believe that success is predictable and reproducible.

There's also a cynical business angle. The "how to write a bestseller" industry is itself a bestseller industry. James Patterson's MasterClass, countless writing seminars, shelves of craft books — all selling the dream that the code can be cracked. The irony is thick enough to choke on: the most reliable way to make money from the bestseller formula is to sell the formula, not to use it.

Now, does this mean that craft doesn't matter? Of course not. A well-structured story with compelling characters and clean prose has a better shot than an incoherent mess. But that's not a formula — that's just competence. The difference between a competent book and a bestseller is the difference between a competent singer and Freddie Mercury. You can teach technique. You cannot teach lightning.

What actually makes a bestseller? Timing. Cultural mood. Dumb luck. Word of mouth that catches fire for reasons nobody can predict or replicate. The right book landing in the right hands at the right moment. "Gone Girl" succeeded not because it followed a formula but because it arrived at a cultural moment when readers were hungry for stories about the darkness lurking inside marriages. "The Da Vinci Code" exploded because it combined conspiracy theories with religious controversy at a time when both were in the cultural water supply. You can't engineer these conditions. You can only stumble into them.

So here's my advice, worth exactly what you're paying for it: stop looking for the formula. Write the weird book. Write the book that doesn't fit neatly into a genre. Write the book that your MFA workshop would tear apart. Because the only books that have ever truly mattered — the ones that endured, the ones that changed how we see the world — were written by people who didn't give a damn about formulas. They were too busy being interesting to be strategic. And that, maddeningly, is the only pattern worth noticing.