Becoming Bestseller
When you walk into a bookstore, the first thing you’ll see are several tables of recent books on display. As you now know, it is often the case that someone has paid for most, if not all, of those books to be the first ones you see. For that reason, they might be a mix of all sorts of writing— literary novels, autobiographies, cookbooks, page-turners. The rest of the store, though, is arranged by category. If you’re a novel reader, you know that there is typically a general fiction section that houses classic and contemporary authors alphabetically, and then the genre writers have their own shelves under headings like Romance and Science Fiction. We are so used to this organization of stores and libraries that finding books has become second nature.
The arrangement of books in Barnes & Noble or any online book retailer reflects the belief that the most important aspect of a book to a reader is what it is about. The whole industry is organized around this assumption. Every book that is traditionally published is assigned one or more BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communication) subject codes. These codes are determined by the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association that is responsible for maintaining industry standards.
There are thousands of codes to choose from: in fiction alone, there are 152 BISAC codes that determine how a book will be categorized, displayed, and sold, and they get as specific as “historical romance novels with Vikings.”
old or young, or if a story is set in London or Hong Kong. It should be fair to say, then, that the “what” of a book is considered paramount. If you recommend a book to a friend or if you are a writer yourself and you mention your work, the first question you’ll be asked is likely going to be, “What is it about?” Which begs the question, what is the killer topic? Well, our computer thinks there are a few, and so do blockbuster authors. In On Writing— one of the most popular recent books by a genre author about the craft of writing— Stephen King suggests that aspiring novelists take a subject they
” It’s a curious observation about work, telling about our culture, and it turns out that our computer model more or less agrees with King on this one. King is also on fairly safe ground in recommending relationships. When it comes to sex in fiction, though, our machines tell us that King is surprisingly wrong (we will get back to this sex business soon), and neither is the best serving those readers who will take him literally when he suggests that “plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.” Don’t do it. Of course, King’s tone is as entertaining as ever and somewhat glib, and very consistent with other writers on the subject of theme. Ultimately, though, he is not all that helpful. The brevity of commentary on literary topics from one of the most commercially successful writers of the past hundred years is perhaps to do with one or the other of two stated beliefs.
” This is likely more humble than it is true, but why should an imaginative writer be expected to explicate analytically what might come naturally— in this case the right topics in the right proportions that will appeal to a mass readership all over the world? Second, King writes that to select a theme in a premeditated way with commercial success in mind is “morally wonky.” This claim is also likely more humble than it is true.
It is hard to believe that the multimillion-dollar authors out there don’t think with some savvy about themes that readers will buy, especially when they know just how many copies will be involved in meeting their publishers’ expectations. It might also be unfair for King to imply that a deeper understanding of topics that sell, and any attraction to working with them, is morally grey.
Our job here is not to say whether a writer’s choices are morally right or wrong. Neither will it be to say that one novel is good and another bad, or one subject is more appropriate or worthy for the pen than any other. We will leave the ethics of creativity to the creatives and the job of judgment to the critics. Our job as literary scholars is simply to bring new explanations or uncover hidden truths, in the hope of making something once obscure more evident. To do this for the role of theme in literature, we have to become clear about the difference between a topic and a theme, and how both work together to create the unique art that is fiction.
Why Read? If you think back to your time in high school, where one of the first novels you were asked to read with literary critical eyes was likely To Kill a Mockingbird or Lord of the Flies,
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