For twenty years I taught a graduate course in Bestsellers to several generations of aspiring writers and literature majors.

I began teaching the course with the wrong-headed idea that I was going to make fun of these cliche-ridden, melodramatic, badly written books and show how inferior they were to books from the literary canon that my colleagues and I taught.

I’d never read Gone With The Wind or From Here To Eternity or some of the other books I used in that first course, so I was shocked to discover that despite the cliches and banalities and poor writing, I was enthralled by these books.  I was moved in ways that some of the more highbrow novels I regularly taught did not move me.

After confessing this to my first group of grad students, we had to decide as a group, what we were going to do now that we were no longer going to make fun of these books.

We decided to see if there were any consistent features, any themes or character types or other aspects that these books shared.  What made them appeal to so many millions of readers?

That course matured and evolved over the years and several of the grad students who took the course went on to publish their own novels which became bestsellers.  

I never set out to “crack the code” of bestsellerdom.  This book is not a how-to guide for writers to conquer the bestseller list.  I tried to make the book fun and accessible for general readers as well as aspiring writers.  It sure can’t hurt a writer to know a dozen or so common denominators between the most commercially successful books of the 20th century.