So You Want to Write a Bestseller

So you want to write a bestseller. Join the club. Every writer wants to write a bestseller. Every editor wants to acquire a bestseller. Every writing coach wants to incubate a bestseller. And if we all had a formula for producing bestsellers, we’d be awash in bestsellers.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we don’t.

When I ghostwrote my national bestseller The Legacy of Luna, I had a terrific story and an amazingly articulate “author” to work with. But without my dear friend and editor, Liz Perle, one of publishing’s true greats, I’m sure the book would never have sold as well as it did.

When my dad’s book The Last Jews in Berlin was published by Simon & Schuster in 1982, critics greeted it with high praise.

• “The author’s skillful selection of detail and his narrative drive have created the type of history that illuminates an entire subject.” – New York Times Book Review
• “A tour de force . . . A consummately suspenseful narrative . . . remindful, in exquisite detail, of Capote’s In Cold Blood” – Los Angeles Times
• “An historian’s book, a storyteller’s book, and – most of all – a reader’s book . . . All the real-life stuff of a John le Carré novel” – Los Angeles Herald Examiner

So far so good.

One of the book’s real-life stories got made into a film called Forbidden directed by Anthony Page and starring Jacqueline Bisset, Jürgen Prochnow and Irene Worth. The movie was broadcast on television in the U.S., but released in cinemas in other countries.

Even better. But still sales just didn’t measure up to the book’s worth.

In 1999, Basic Books republished the book as a paperback.

See above re sales.

Then in January of this year, Open Road Media published an electronic version of the book. I remember Dad saying something about that, but I barely paid attention. I figured that we’d just see more of the same.

We got the news that the book had hit #8 on Amazon and #5 on Barnes and Noble on April 23, two days after Dad’s 87th birthday and five hours after his death, following a promotion Open Road Media had launched that same week. I discovered that The Last Jews in Berlin had climbed to #5 on the Wall Street Journal nonfiction ebook bestseller list eight days after Dad’s passing—and 33 years following the original publication date—when I did a search for my father’s name in the New York Times.

What’s the secret if you want to write a bestseller? Clearly you have to have one hell of a book. But just as clearly, luck and promotion play one hell of a big part.

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