Million Dollar Outlines - 2013

Part 9: Audience Analysis: Novels

In considering how to approach this topic, it seemed to me that there are some things that I could teach you, or there are things that you can teach yourself. I sometimes believe that you learn better by doing. So instead of analyzing some bestsellers, I'm going to give you a list of books and show you how I would approach those books to see what kinds of things they have in common. But you should do your own analysis. 

In other words, I'd like you to learn how to think.

So here is a list of the 20 bestselling novels of all time. This is a list that covers books read by both young adults and adults. So there aren't any picture books in it for example. The books and the numbers are taken from Wikipedia, and the list is obviously wrong in at least one instance. The list shows Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows high on the list but doesn't show the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone anywhere at all. Since the first books in a series will always outpace the last books in sales (because there is always some falloff), it is obvious that we've got a problem. Furthermore, sales of the Harry Potter books hit over 400 million for the series as a whole several years ago. With seven books in the series, that means we have average sales of near 60 million copies, not the 44 million listed as top sales here. In short, all seven books in the series should be on this list, not just the last book, and the numbers should range higher.

In any case, the list should still be instructive:

1—A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

2—The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

3—And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

4—The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

5—She by H. Rider Haggard

6—The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

7—The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

8—The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

9—The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

10—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

11—Jonathon Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

12—To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

13—Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

14—Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

15—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

16—The Godfather by Mario Puzo

17—Jaws by Peter Benchley

18—Shogun by James Clavell

19—The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

20—Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Now, given the list above, look for the similarities, for patterns, in order to determine the elements that make a bestseller.

Settings

Let's start with the settings. How many of the books distance the reader from current time and space?

You'll notice that the first book on our list take place six decades before the readers of the 1860s were around. Most of the readers wouldn't have been alive. It would be like me writing about World War II. Also, the book is set in two countries―England and France. In other words, no matter where you were living, the book offered some escape from the contemporary setting.