What makes books sell?

There are two general ways books become bestsellers: good writing and hype. Good writing sells itself with only a minimum of marketing. Other, poorly written books (like the Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey series) succeed based only on hype and massive amounts of marketing.

Usually the books that sell, if they are by an unknown author, have either a unique selling point or take advantage of a current cultural trend. The whole vampire thing, with true blood and anne rices books being popular etc meant that there was a market and a demand for those twilight books and so they sold. If you look at the likes of the Da Vinci code, it hs a unique idea behind it, even if it is badly written, and people bought into that idea becasue it was unique and different and the books reputation grew as word got round about it. You can see the same thing happening at the moment with that awful 50 shades of Grey at the moment which has a USP and has an already formed target audience ie bored housewives who pass the word around.

Commercialism. If the book is given the opportunity to undergo full-fledged advertising, it WILL become a hit. However, some books such as Twilight started out as an underground read. It wasn't until it went commercial that things really flew sky-high. This is why James Patterson is on the TV every two seconds with a new book. He wants to be commercial.

Same with books like Hush, Hush. The appearance and teen-appeal really make a difference. I absolutely hate YA novels, and yet I once picked up Hush, Hush because I liked the cover and title.

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