Folks might want to use caution assigning the single criteria that must be included: advice must come from a published author. Good teachers are going to be good writers, there's no doubt there. But not all good writers have the main goal of being published for any number of reasons. It's like anything requiring skill, teaching and understanding the elements of writing are separate things from publishing and marketing success. How many great coaches were never star players? A good coach might be both, but the key isn't that they were once a star, the key is they can step back and see what goes into winning the game and they can articulate that so the players understand. How do you know? If you're in a critique group you pay attention. It doesn't take long to sort out who is giving mundane advice: they don't like this or that, something isn't clear to them (sometimes important); and to recognize who is giving advice that makes sense: don't let the protagonist off the hook so easily, put more obstacles in the way of the lovers, that ending has plot, but you need to tie the story into the 'events'. A good critic can ask you, why should we care about that character, that whole first page does nothing, start right here on page two. And you listen to that advice and it makes sense. You can go to other successful books you are reading and see exactly what that good critic was on about. For me, when things came up, from the basics to more advanced elements, I followed them up reading what blogs and writing technique books had to say. A concept is introduced, then you do some homework on that concept. If you've gotten bad advice, you won't find blogs and writing technique books that support the advice you got. For a good education, you get what the teacher introduces and then you supplement it with homework, and then you put what you learned into practice.
I trust what works for me. Well, and I typically check to see what others are saying about their advice (Amazon reviews), if they have any credentials, have successfully been published. There's a lot of advice and how-to books out there, and I don't have time to read them all, so I need some method of sorting through.
'Captures' is the right word. But good writing is not what captures attention. Marketing is. Good marketing isn't everything, you also need some basics skills, and working hard. Stephen King can write, but there are far better writers. He also writes a lot, and quite quickly, and that helps. But quality is not what counts in his success. Lovecraft, and many other writers who have NOW captured the imagination, did not achieve success, because they didn't have millions to market their product. Poe did a slightly better job, but not much.
Being a bestseller works the same as the movie industry (books are also an industry). If a big budget Hollywood movie can make a big profit and still be trash, as they often do, then it demonstrates that quality is not what counts for success.
No. There are countless big marketing campaigns. Some of them succeed. Some of them fail. Whether you like it or not, part of what makes the difference is the product itself. Of course there are better writers than Stephen King. Stephen King himself absolutely admits that. But Stephen King captures the imagination of enough members of the reading public. It doesn't matter that his writing--the sentences, the paragraphs, the words and metaphors--isn't genius. People respond to his plots and characters and ideas and horrors and the way his stories feel. There are better writers than J. K. Rowling. But people respond to the lonely boy searching for a place in the world, and they respond to his friends. There are much better writers than Stephanie Meyers or E.L. James, but people for some reason respond to Twilight and 50 Shades. It's not about marketing. It's about the fact that no matter how much you may dislike it, people respond to certain ideas.
If it's the product that counts then why did Lovecraft and Poe and Robert Aickman not achieve much success in their lifetimes? And all the other artists; Bach and Mozart and Van Gogh and countless others? And do you think King would capture the imagination without marketing? He is described by S. T. Joshi as: "a mixture of cheap sentiment, naive moral polarizations between valiant heroes and wooden villains, hackneyed, implausible and ill-explained supernatural phenomena, a plain, bland, easy-to-read style with just the right number of sexual profanities to titillate the middle-class audience." Such writers don't have ideas any more than a thousand other writers, who no-one even knows about, because they can't afford to market as much as King. And it's easy to be traditionally published if you have lots of money.
I pay no attention to advice about 'what sells' because—while I would like my book to sell—that's not why I'm writing it. I like the freedom to write whatever I want, the way I want. I'm kind of a maverick in life, so why shouldn't my writing be non-mainstream? Doesn't bother me in the slightest, as I'm not trying to make a career out of being a published writer. I just want my book (s) to 'work.' If generating sales is of greater importance to you, then by all means DO pay attention to trends, etc. It's just not an important factor for my own writing. I pay attention to any writing advice that makes sense to me. I'm a voracious reader (have been all my life) and a holder of a BA in English, so I'm fairly competent in dealing with the written word. The tricks of the writing trade, however, I've had to learn as I go along. My attitude is 'learn something.' Don't just blindly follow 'rules,' adhere to formulas or automatically adopt everything a guru tells you. Instead, learn WHY a certain writing trick 'works.' Understand the positive and negative effects certain tools can have on your writing. Try out different approaches. If you read something written by a how-to guru, decide whether or not it inspires you. Does it give you ideas? Does it cut through a problem you've had with your writing and offer a path to a solution? Does it make you see a problem you might not have been aware of in your own work? I don't give a hoot whether this guru is a best-selling author or not. I have enough experience with reading and analysing authors and what they produce to make up my own mind. If what the guru says makes sense to me, I take it on board. If it points towards the kind of writing I have no desire to do myself, then I pass it by. There's that old saying "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." That's often used to denigrate teachers whom the coiner of that little homily views as wannabe failures. However, in real life, some of the best teachers are not people who are lauded producers of products or world record-holders. Teaching is a different skill. Teaching involves looking at a situation, analysing it, seeing what can be improved, comparing it to similar situations, looking at what seems to work and what doesn't—and figuring out why. Teaching involves taking a student from where they are now, and moving them closer to their goal. Teaching offers insight into what could make a story or writing style better. A writing guru who can do all that for other people gets my attention. These writing gurus aren't being creative, they are being analytical. In other words, they are coming from the perspective of a reader, rather than of a writer. That perspective is always valuable to a writer because it focuses less on the writing process and more on the finished result.
I didn't say that the product alone can produce success. The best book in the world, locked in a box in a file cabinet in a cellar, will have very little success. I said, in an earlier post in this thread, that marketing is necessary, but not sufficient. However, you seem to be conflating (1) quality in a literary, sophisticated-critic sense with (2) popular appeal. They are not remotely the same thing. The same product can have both, but very often a product is much more successful in one or the other. The finest caviar on the planet, praised with tears of joy by food critics, will still be unpopular compared to, say, a Krispy Kreme doughnut. However, Krispy Kreme doughnuts not popular purely because of marketing; they're popular because they taste good. The product still matters. Joshi probably likes caviar. You do realize, don't you, that King wasn't born famous? He was pretty near flat broke when he got a modest advance on Carrie. People bought the book. They bought the book. King wasn't famous. He wasn't rich. He wasn't anything. He became rich and famous based on the book. Some comments on Carrie, its content, its structure, King's characters, how it changed the horror genre, and a variety of other thoughts: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/04/carrie-stephen-king-horror If you have so much money that you can buy a publishing house, maybe. Otherwise, what are your grounds for this statement?
I'm aware that novels are sold and purchased. That said (and I'm not sure why it needed to be said) if an author can satisfy a substantial portion of their intended audience I consider them a good writer.
The whole idea of popular success being less valuable than critical success requires some kind of heaven of ideals we can look to in order to find out what good taste is. Industry people consume an insane amount of media in a critical way, causing many tropes accepted by casual audiences (and writers) to seem cliche. Creating approved content for high level critique is a huge hurdle for mainstream creators who aren’t interested in avoiding or subverting tropes they actually like.
King is one of the best writers still working today. English teachers may not like him, but vast numbers of actual readers do. And I'm guessing that similar complaints were made in the past about writers who English teachers now consider masters of the art. A Victorian critic would have said pretty much the same things about Dickens that that person (whoever they might be) said about King. He also did the whole Bachman thing to prove he could at least be moderately successful without using his own name or having any real marketing behind it. I'm pretty sure I read at least one of those books before I knew it was King.
I don't look much anymore. Right now I'm more into studying my favorite authors. Also I'm not big on success being a driving factor as to who can give the best advice I think it depends more on genre and what advice you're specifically looking for. I wouldn't ask E.L. James for writing advice but I would definitely want to know her marketing strategies. And I also wouldn't ask an amateur author things that I feel may be above there heads i.e complicated techniques or themes from what I've read a lot give standard answers I've found in Writer's Digest. For the heavy stuff I simply go to authors I like and see if any literature has been written on their techniques and read that. That's mainly where I get my advice reading literature studies. And the great thing is it's not just the big names Pynchon or Nabokov, there's a great series called the Critical Companions to Popular Writers series that features writers from John Saul to V.C. Andrews to I think Danielle Steel.
I agree marketing is not sufficient, but that doesn't mean quality is necessary. And regarding critics, S T Joshi is not a literary critic, just an experienced reader. A good critic should be able to explain WHY a work is good quality, or not. My quotes above are not in the least difficult to understand. I agree that Stephen King is bland and full of holes etc. Those aren't literary criticisms at all. As for Carrie, when it was first published, it sold 13,000 copies. Then AFTER the movie was released, the paperback became a bestseller. Since the movie was a big budget movie, it was heavily marketed, and that certainly influenced sales of the book. It is also one of the most frequently banned books in United States schools. So you could say he became rich and famous based on the movie, the shocking material and the hype. Carrie, the book, is unbelievable, full of hackneyed stereotypes and written in a clumsy documentary style.
This disagrees with the dates in Wikipedia, which state that the paperback sold more than a million copies “a year later” than the hardback. The hardback was 1973. The movie was 1976. Can you point to your source that presumably contradicts this? Does it also explain why a major movie would be made from what you seem to be asserting was a failed novel? My source makes it clear that the novel was a major success, which makes the subsequent movie logical. You clearly want popular appeal to be a non-factor. But that doesn’t mean that the world is going to comply. People like Stephen King’s stories, so they buy them. Edited to add another link with the sequence of events: http://www.conceptualfiction.com/carrie.html And this might be the link that you misunderstood: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/lifetimes/kin-v-behind.html?scp=189&sq=king&st=Search Quote: "Hardcover sales were not spectacular, but the paperback sales — boosted by the film of the novel — were nearly 4,000,000 copies." Yes, the movie might be credited with turning sales of one million copies to four million, but you're incorrect in the idea that the sequence was hardback (13,000) -> movie -> bestselling paperback. And, again, it doesn't make sense to make a movie of a failed book. (Plus the movie doesn't help your argument--unless you consider it a critical masterpiece, it, too, appeals to popular culture.) Though I assume that you also have contempt for New York Times book reviews. ('But the New York Times, which carries a bit more clout, proclaimed Carrie "amazing" and declared that this impressive debut "was guaranteed to give you a chill."')
The Stand has one of the worst endings ever--a literal deus-ex-machina--and some characters who would be stereotypes in the hands of pretty much any other writer. But that didn't stop me putting my life on hold for two days to read the thing, because I literally couldn't put it down. Most writers would kill to be able to grab readers the way King can.
How do you know vast numbers of readers like him? So tell me how you found the Bachman books, if you had never heard of Bachman and it hadn't been marketed?
Because he's about a bazillionaire by now. The same way I find most books: someone I know recommended it to me because they liked it. There's no marketing like word-of-mouth from satisfied customers. (Edit: actually, I think my brother left the book lying around the house and I read it one day)
Apparently he got a $2,500 advance for the hardback, then another publisher bought the paperback rights for a six-figure sum.
"Hardcover sales were not spectacular, but the paperback sales — boosted by the film of the novel — were nearly 4,000,000 copies." “The movie made the book, and the book made me,” Mr. King says. (New York Times) https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/lifetimes/kin-v-behind.html?scp=189&sq=king&st=Search I didn't say it was a failed novel. You're confusing paperback with bestseller. It wasn't immediately a bestseller. It took at least another year.
