What’s the difference between writing a hit and a flop?

Jeffrey's answer

The difference between a hit and a flop is, more often than people would like to admit, luck. But underneath the luck there are patterns, and some of the patterns are worth talking about.

When Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less first appeared in 1976, it did not set the world alight. No bestseller list. No critic declaring that literature had been reborn. Three thousand hardbacks. A few more in paperback after twelve months. Modest, by any measure. Enough to keep hope alive — but not enough to clear the debts I had spent the year before trying to write my way out of.

And yet the book refused to die. It was passed from hand to hand. It was pressed on friends with the words: you’ll enjoy this one. It was discovered on trains and in hospitals and on holiday. It travelled, slowly, further than any marketing plan would have predicted. By 1979 it was a bestseller. By 1985 it was selling globally. Today it has sold many millions of copies, and the 50th Anniversary Edition is out this June.

Word of mouth — the most powerful force in publishing, and the one publishers can least control — found it.

That, in my experience, is the difference between hits and flops. A hit is a book that readers actively press on other readers. A flop is a book that readers finish and forget. You cannot manufacture pressed-on-other-readers. You can only earn it. And you earn it by writing a book that, at some point, makes the reader say: I have to tell someone about this.

Charles Dickens worked this out faster than anyone else of his generation. The Pickwick Papers was not, at first, a book at all — it was a monthly serial, and every month a fresh instalment was published, and every month readers waited for the next one. Word-of-mouth turned a parliamentary reporter into a literary phenomenon inside a year. Today there is no monthly serial, but there is BookTok, and there are book clubs, and there is the friend on the train holding the book up so you can see the cover. The mechanic has not changed in two hundred years. Only the venue.

How do you write a hit? You write a story that grips. You write characters the reader cannot quite forget. You build chapters that make the reader unable to put the book down. You finish on a last paragraph that pays the promise of the first. You do all of this for fourteen drafts. Then you accept that the book is now no longer in your hands. The public decides. They always have.

Do not write to the market. The market changes faster than you can write. Write the book that is yours. The hit, if it comes, will come because readers told other readers it was unputdownable. That is the only marketing that has ever worked, in the end.

A few practical notes

• Hits are 80% the book and 20% the moment it lands in. Same book, different launch month, different result.
• But the 80% you control is the only part worth thinking about. Worry about the book. Worry about the marketing only when the book is finished.
• Hits share three things at the book level. (1) A premise the reader can describe in one sentence to a friend. (2) Characters readers want to spend more time with. (3) An ending that delivers the opening’s promise.
• Word of mouth is what makes a hit. Not advertising, not reviews, not author tours. Reader pressing book on friend.
• Most flops fail at the premise. If the elevator pitch is ‘um, it’s about a man who, you know, learns about himself’ — the book has not been positioned to be talked about.
• Don’t read the reviews. After publication, the writer’s job is to write the next book.
• BookTok is the new version of word of mouth. If a book takes off there, it can sell 100k copies in a month. The mechanic is unchanged from 1976: readers telling other readers what to read.