Is the Best Selling book also the Best Written?

The author Robert Kiyosaki mentions a meeting with a journalist in Tokyo in one of his books. She wanted to become a best selling author so he advised her to learn to be a salesperson. She was horrified at the suggestion saying she wanted to write not sell. Robert pointed out that he has never been accused of being a best writing author, he was a best selling author.

While there are many best selling books which have additional value the idea that bestsellers are not the best written books is probably correct. I'm not suggesting that you have to head off and become a salesperson to learn the making of a bestseller but I am suggesting that you need to learn how to sell and market to be able to become a best selling author.

How is learning to sell going to help you write a bestseller? Sales is all about learning to read people. You learn to use language to explain, convince and motivate. There is no high pressure or misleading involved despite the misconceptions of some people. There are others who think that you need "the gift of the gab", Australian slang for being able to talk a lot, to be a good salesperson but the reality is that you need to be very good at listening to the words that are said and how congruent they are with the body language being displayed.

Unless you are extremely lucky it takes the combined efforts of your publisher and you to market your book to bestseller satus. Mass market paperbacks, hardbacks,separated into fiction or factual stories doesn't matter. Good marketing is the key and that requires similar skills to salespeople.

Really that's the point, once you have the ability to study people and read their actions to get an idea of their motivations you have the ability to write it down so your characters are three dimensional and they behave and say things which fit the characters you have created. These are the things which make your stories roll along and be believable. It seems that this is an area which many authors struggle with. Many seem to want to hide from people and then write about them. This is like writing out a set of instructions on how to play golf without ever having picked up a set of clubs or even watched the game on TV.

If you want to write bestsellers that's the key right there. Not clever academic tomes, not brilliant verbiage or grammatical structures. Save them for your thesis for your PHD. It is also the key to getting published. Publishers want a book they think has a chance of selling, it has to engage them in the first chapter or you miss the chance. They are in the business of selling books, not publishing for the sake of it. They want your book to be capable of getting on the bestseller lists, particularly those for the mass market.

How can you be sure you have the ingredients of a best seller? The story has to flow. Good stories hook you in and keep you reading, you don't notice the passage of time or even the beginning of the next chapter. In the book Misery the captive author describes himself as "falling into the page" which I think is an excellent description. That's what happens to me, same for you?

You'll know when you are writing like that because you'll experience the same sensation. The best advice is to "write furoiusly" which means that you should not make any corrections as you go, write first edit later is the rule.

Your book can be a bestseller even if it isn't perfect, it will probably never be perfect so don't delay submitting it. If you can get the reader hooked into the story you are telling and keep them there to the end you'll have a bestseller on your hands. Focus your efforts on writing a good story and let the spelling and grammar fall where they may until you have finished it.

The other thing you need to do is write lots and lots. On my website at www.bearlybooks.com there are a lot of long posts. A typical post would be around 300 words, I seem to be a bit wordy when I get a head of steam up and have trouble being concise. You may have noticed.

If you then do a count of the number of posts here I probably have written a small novel since around December when the site really got started. But I have also written posts and articles for other sites, put comments on other peoples blogs, written some manuals, done a bunch of coding on this and other websites so I guess that I have written possibly another small novel in that time as well if you just look at the number of words I have committed to the screen.

Mybey I should have just written the novel by concentrating on one area. I doubt that what I write is of any academic value but it doesn't have to be, it has to communicate and I see no reason why you can't do the same. The act of writing and reading will make you a better writer so don't hold back.

In the world of of self-development they say that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, at first. So write lots, write badly because you'll get better with practise. Remember there is always time to edit after you're done so write it as badly as you need to get it all down.

Get writing. There may well be a bestseller inside you fighting to escape, let it out.