Review of 'Hit Lit' -- New Book About What Makes Bestsellers TIck

[Dave Shiflett]

Happy Monday

Thought some Mobilereaders might enjoy a review I just published about "Hit Lit" -- a book about what makes bestsellers sell so well. From this past Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

So You Wanna Sell A Million Books?
By Dave Shiflett

If you want to make the big money in fiction, don't skimp on the friction—especially the sexual, spiritual and political varieties—and go light on the navel-gazing. So counsels James W. Hall in "Hit Lit," a study of what makes best sellers tick.

Mr. Hall, himself no stranger to the best-seller lists as a thriller writer, teaches a college course on 20th-century mega-best sellers. "Hit Lit" offers insights from his own study of these books and from his classroom discussions.

Job one, Mr. Hall writes, is to hook readers quickly, perhaps by having a naked young woman chomped in half by a shark or a man murdered by an albino monk, or by flashing some thigh (and perhaps adjacent real estate). Once hooked, customers must be goaded to keep turning the pages, the quicker the better. If they hesitate, you are lost. "Hit Lit" warns sharply against going introspective. People in blockbuster land don't have navels. "These characters are not self-absorbed or contemplative," Mr. Hall explains. They are "pitted against large forces, not characters in conflict with themselves" (take that, William Faulkner). Also, don't dillydally with needless personal detail. He notes that in "Gone With the Wind," Scarlett O'Hara "is married and becomes a widow in a single sentence at the beginning of Chapter 7."

[edited due to excessive length - MODERATOR]

—Mr. Shiflett is author of a lightly
read novel called "In the Matter
of J. Van Pelt."