How to write a bestseller (according to what I've learned from Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey)
- Find a hammer. It is key to have this later on in the process.
- Fill yourself up with as much hormonal angst as possible. You’re going to need enough to be boiling and making you almost a psychotic sociopath.
- Now, look at a lot of porn, but don’t masturbate. You’re adding unrealistic pent up lust to the equation, it’s key for these bestsellers.
- Now get absolutely shitfaced drunk. Just short of vomiting, but enough to give you a killer hangover.
- Remember the hammer? Good. Give yourself a couple of solid whacks to the head, you’re shooting for a fairly serious concussion.
- Your cognitive processes should be impaired enough to write an absolutely horrible plot with very flat and bland characters. The pent up angst will make them whiny enough to give a very flat “depth” to the characters, and the pent up lust will add a nice level of misogyny and some poorly rendered sex scenes. This is key in attracting a female audience. They love lusting after angsty, sociopathic, misogynistic, pretty boys, the bestseller and movie numbers don’t lie.
- Crap out about 200-250 pages.
- Call 911, get rushed to the hospital.
- When you get released, call up an English major or someone with an I.Q. that’s average to above average.
- If they start convulsing both in rage and the sheer horror of your works, you did it right.
- Call a publisher.
- Profit.
The Woodcutter or My Experience on Kindle Direct Publishing Select
So, there is a great resource for authors and Kindle owners called kindleboards.com. I have no affiliation with this site other than that it has become my “go to” resource for eBook information.
Amazon introduced this new program called Kindle Direct Select, which has been a point of great discussion on these boards. and after some hemming and hawing, I decided to listen to the wisdom of the Boards and give it a go.
January had been a tough month. I had sold a grand total of five books (two titles). RIGHT!?!
So, I signed up and decided to run a two day “freebie” promotion.
In a 48 hour period, over 15,000 people grabbed a copy and shot The Woodcutter to the #1 Fantasy book, the #10 Fiction book, and the #16 on the Top 100 Free list on Amazon.
So then the sale ended and The Woodcutter switched over to the dreeeeaded Paid Top Seller list. There are 1.8 million titles on Amazon. Within 12 hours, The Woodcutter broke the Top 1000 Paid Best Seller list and has stayed there (hovering around the 600-700 mark) for five days. This is the book I felt really great about if I sold twenty copies in a month. It has been #1 in World Literature, #4 in Epic Fantasy, and #7 in Mythology.
This book is truly the Little Novel That Could. I wrote The Woodcutter over six years ago when I should have been paying attention in anatomy class. Being a secretary to support my acting career had been wearing thin and I was going through a tough time trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. So I went back to school… and learned that I could rule out x-ray tech.
What came from that exploration, though, was this book. I went through another five years worth of rejection letters before finally being published. Truly, if it was not for the digital era we live in, this book would still be sitting in a drawer gathering dust.
The responses I have received since its original publication have overwhelmed me and filled me with such gratitude. And so if you picked up a copy, I just wanted to say thank you. So. Thank you.
And if you’re thinking about giving away some books on Kindle Direct Select? It ain’t a bad thing. At all.
”Have You Ever
had so much to say
that your mouth closed up tight,
struggling to harness the nuclear force
coalescing within your words?
Have you ever
had so many thoughts
churning inside you that you didn’t
dare let them escape
in case they blew you wide open?
Have you ever
been so angry that you
couldn’t look in the mirror
for fear of finding the face of evil
glaring back at you?”
- Ellen Hopkins
