Any writer who has struggled to publish or seen their published book’s sales head straight into the crapper has wondered—usually out loud in a drunken slur while pushing their finger into someone’s chest—how it is that so many terrible books get published and sell well while good books, like theirs, languish.
The answers they come up with usually cycle through some common tropes: The reading public has bad taste, publishers allocate marketing and promotion resources unfairly, they’re too good-looking and smart to ever find true success in a suckass world (that last one might be specific to me).
While these things might be true for certain books, it’s worth getting something clear: A book can be well-crafted—and thus 100% publishable and capable of selling well—while being a pretty terrible book. Because craft and art are wholly distinct things.
The Well-Crafted Turd
Every writer has read a popular book and wondered how in the world it’s so successful. Dumb plot, stiff dialogue—we’ve seen it all in some of the biggest-selling books ever written. And yet most of those books are well-crafted, in the sense that the sentences flow, the story lines up, the characters have clear motivations. No matter what bestseller you hold up as an example of a terrible book that does well, you’ll find (if you look at it objectively) that it’s probably pretty well-crafted.
Craft, though, is just the tools and raw materials of the trade used competently. It’s like making a chair: You can learn the basics of woodworking and eventually get to a point where you can make a chair that will function just fine and have a bare minimum of aesthetic appeal. But no one’s going to cheer your work as a reinvention of the form, or ogle the subtleties you brought to the piece.
In the same way, you can learn the fundamentals of telling a story and use those tools properly. The end result will be a novel, and if your craft is up to snuff that novel will probably be publishable even if it isn’t art. No matter how terrible your example of a bad novel might be, it adheres to the basics of good craftsmanship, and that’s why it can sell in the millions to people who don’t care if it’s art, they just want someone to tell them a story, even if it’s a variation on a story they’ve heard before.
Now, all of you people who held up one of my books when I asked about an example of bad books, very funny.