Stuck in the Midlist

Everyone knows what the midlist is, right? Every month, publishing houses release one or two books they expect to be bestsellers; these are their “lead titles.” Everything else is midlist. (It would follow logically that some books must be “endlist,” or bottom feeders, but no one ever calls them that.)

My writers’ group has spent years trying to figure out what makes a bestseller. We’ve had some fascinating discussions. Last week one member suggested we flip this and look at what keeps some books in the midlist. We’re not talking quality of writing here. Surely Dan Brown shattered forever anyone’s illusion that quality of writing has anything to do with reaching the bestseller list. For literary fiction, yes; for genre fiction, no. So what elements in a writer’s books could be keeping him or her from grabbing the brass ring?

We bounced around some interesting possibilities. It’s all speculation, of course, because we have no way to prove that our ideas are right. But we came up with the following “rules” that authors ignore at their peril. Like any list of rules, one can always find exceptions, but here’s what we came up with so far:

Respect the appeal of the familiar: Americans like to read about Americans, or at least white Americans like to read about English-speaking Caucasians. So if you set a series in medieval Japan, your hero had better be Caucasian. Make him Japanese and you will probably condemn your series to the midlist. If you’re going to write about an African-American hero, he’d better sound and act like a white man. One member pointed out that he hadn’t realized James Patterson’s Cross character was supposed to be black until some throwaway comment by a secondary character near the end of the book; JP knows what he’s doing. Likewise, Daniel Silva’s Israeli hero would be very out of place in most parts of Israel; basically, he’s an American.

Don’t violate reader expectations. Cozy readers, for example, don’t like angst. Make your cozy heroine the angst-ridden mother of an illegitimate child, and you’ll lose readers. My historical mystery series is set in Regency England. Regency England is associated in many people’s minds with light comedies of manners, but the Regency England of my books is a darker, more dangerous place. Has this hurt me? Perhaps. People looking for a light book might be shocked by some of the things I write. Other readers who like darker, more dangerous books might be put off by the Regency setting, since they associate it with frothy romances.

Don’t violate your readers’ moral codes. Julia Spencer-Flemming is a wonderful mystery writer. She’s won all kinds of awards but her books have still not hit the NYT. Why not? Well, one reason may be because her heroine is a priest. It’s possible that people who want to read about priests don’t want to read about bloody murder. It’s also possible that the kind of people who want to read about priests might object to that priest having an adulterous affair. At the risk of spoiling things for readers not up to date with the series, that aspect seems to have gone away. Our prediction: she’ll probably hit the Times soon.

This is a topic we’re going to be kicking around for a while, so I’d welcome any input from my blogeagues.

I won’t be posting again until the end of the week.