Erich Segal was an author, a classicist (the study of classical antiquity), and a professor at Yale, who took a sabbatical and wrote a screenplay titled “Love Story” - a sappy romance between a rich boy and a poor girl. When the screenplay didn’t sell, his agent recommended converting the screenplay into a book.
No one expected Segal’s book to sell well. The publisher published just 5000 copies, but one of the 5000 copies reached Barbara Walters - the famous TV host. She spoke about it on air and the book just took off. Paramount Pictures bought the screenplay and made the movie, and “Love Story” ended up being the sixth highest-grossing movie of all time.
The book helped the movie with its promotion and build a base of hardcore fans, and the movie helped the book sell a lot more copies.
Bill Grose, an editor at Dell Publishing, came up with the idea to replicate the success of Love Story.
The year was 1976 and Doubleday - one of the biggest book publishers - had just bought Dell publishing and given it the mandate to grow more aggressively.
Bill Grose’s solution was: “Let’s copy the playbook of Love Story.” Grose asked one of Doubleday’s existing writers, to help him with the project. And that's how Danielle Steel got her lucky break.
Universal Pictures was making a romance movie titled The Promise. Bill Grose tied up with Universal Pictures and got Danielle Steel to convert the screenplay into a book.
And then Grose spent $300,000 on TV, radio, and newspaper ads. He spent a lot of money on display boards that bookstores could use to prominently showcase the book. The result was a book that hit the bestseller lists, and Danielle Steel became a popular author.
The Promise wasn’t Danielle Steel’s first book. She had already published three books before - but none had sold as well. The Promise wasn’t even her original story. But she took the break that she got in life and built an empire on top of it.
Erich Segal on the other had said that the book ruined his life. He made a lot of money because of the Love Story but he lost his scholarly reputation. Critics and peers panned his book. Students stopped attending his classes because no one wanted to study classical literature from a professor who had written pulp romance. And finally, Yale denied his tenure.
To try to prove that he was scholarly, he published a lot of deep works in Latin and Greek literature. Nothing brought him the same kind of success. He remained unhappy for several years.
On the other hand, Danielle Steel faced the same criticism. She got a lot of flak. A lot of comments said that the quality of her book didn’t merit the sales it received.
But Steel’s reaction was the opposite. She studied what worked and went ahead to replicate it. She took that theme - rich protagonists face a crisis situation, but in the end, true love triumphs - turned it into a formula and churned out book after book after book.
And every book received poor critical reviews but sold a million copies. She started writing 5-7 books a year and was known to work 20-hour days, only sleeping for 4 hours. She became so prolific with her work that she won the record for the author who stayed on the New York Times Bestsellers list for the most number of weeks. Because as soon as one book title would start slipping, she would have a new book come out.
Erich Segal went on to write three more books The Class, Doctors, The Death of Comedy, and Man, Woman and Child which won him awards and became bestsellers.
Danielle Steel wrote 140 novels, sold over 800 million copies of her books, and became the fourth-bestselling fiction author of all time but never won an award.
Formula books don’t do anything to move the field of literature ahead but they do help bring a sense of satisfaction because readers like it when everything goes exactly as expected.
And Steel understood this. She didn’t write for people who wanted to be surprised. She wrote for people who wanted to escape the drama of their lives. And so, she gave them familiar stories with happy endings.
And it worked.
You don’t need the best product to do well. You just need to connect what you have with an existing human emotional need.
The real question is which type of books you would want to write?
Ones that win the awards or the ones that get read?
Would you do more of what works or would you listen to critics do what is expected of you?
Tip: Both answers will be correct.
Last week I asked you to help me choose a new name for the newsletter so that I can make it more focused. I asked the same question to my readers on LinkedIn with a different set of names.
The responses were all over the place:
Carol and Ilona said they like "Productive Writer" because that’s what they want to learn.
John and Amie opted for "Author's Corner."
Rodney and Kathi liked “The Write Flow: Mastering the Craft of Writing and Productivity.”
Dan and Shamila voted for “The Write Path: Finding Your Way to Writing Success and Productivity.”
Patricia went for “The Write Connection: Connecting with Other Productive Writers”
Many readers want me to continue with the variety of the stories I have been writing - a bit about self-development and a bit about writing. Should I stay with what’s working?
Rather than making a decision, I am going to hold. I think Universe is telling me something, and since it is not very clear at the moment I am going to stay put.
That’s all from me this week.
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