Real Examples of Bestselling Garbage

I've railed before about the crap that is on bookshelves today, the garbage that the American public is hungrily consuming, thinking they are literate, since they are "reading" a book.  But there's hardly anything literary at all about most of these bestsellers.

Adding to that, a friend and colleague pointed me to a hugely successful new self-published author on the scene who is selling hundreds of thousands of copies of her book, and, well, why didn't I just do some of that?

So I looked into Amanda Hocking and her books.  First of all, hitting the USA Today Bestseller list is an accomplishment in itself. She's also a terrific self-promoter: she's a self-professed "obsessive Tweeter" and on ONE of her four blogs last year she did 182 posts! So she is all in when it comes to social media.

I'm pretty sure she does her own social media posts and I 'm also pretty sure that James Joyce or Hemingway or Faulkner or Flaubert would not have time for that.

The genre she writes in is "urban fantasy" and "paranormal adult romance" or whatever you want to call vampire fantasy romance.  It's not something I would ever get into, but there's a big audience for it.  A different audience. Mostly teenagers and young 20's.

It seems that most of her "books" are sold as 99 cent downloads, but some are as much as $2.99.  She stated that she uses iTunes a lot so the pricing made sense to her, and, quite smartly, she has grown her audience, and the "books" are serial, so when she gets a reader they can get another and another and another, reading about the same characters.

 Now, let's take a look at a sample of her writing. I previewed the first book that came up on Amazon.com and here's some from the opening page.

The summer air slid in through the windows, filling the car with the green scent of the park, and the frightening sound of highway traffic.

Not bad.  Some imagery, good rhythm, but perhaps a bit overdone at the end. Let's keep going:

The mid-afternoon sun shined brightly above us. Ordinarily, that sounds like the best time to drive, but sunlight made Jack groggy. He'd already started to yawn.

I'm yawning, in fact I'm nearly puking.

Jack is not like everyone else. I really like him, more than I should. He's attractive in his own right, with dancing blue eyes, perpetually disheveled sandy hair, and flawless tan skin, but he's not what I would call drop dead gorgeous.

Really?  At this point I feel sullied and need to shower after typing those terrible sentences.  This is so bad it sounds like a diary entry by a fawning teen, and it sells like crazy!  Too many adjectives, too trite. I wonder how much effort she put into polishing those colossal sentences.  Did she toil? Push the limits, find exactly the right words and arrange them lyrically with excruciating effort? I doubt it.

So, yeah, you can sell first-draft teen diary entry vampire crap for 99 cents and thousands will buy it.

Sorry, it's not my audience, and it's not exactly the direction I want to take.

Now, let's look at another example, and this is from New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn.  My brother and millions of others apparently read his books. I borrowed "Pursuit of Honor" a counterterrorism blockbuster featuring "elite operative" Mitch Rapp.  Bear in mind he's written a dozen bestsellers and has a contract for at least 10 more.  Glen Beck says it is, "FANTASTIC" and Rush Limbaugh says it is "JUST FABULOUS" and Bill O'Reilly says, "Every American should read this book."

So it must be good, right?

Let's take a looksee.

On page 4 toward the end of the first paragraph:

The other man was a concern, to be sure, but Rapp was not in the habit of killing private citizens simply because they were witnesses...

And the beginning of paragraph three, same page:

Bad form, to be sure, but nothing had risen to the level of outright sedition.

All I can say is that using "to be sure" is trite, boring, and unnecessary, and using it twice on the same page is just plain lazy.  He should be shot.  And he's got an army of editors!  Garbage, pure garbage.

Maybe that was just overlooked.  Surely this "writer" is outstanding, since Dan Brown (Charlatan #1) says, he is "The king of high-concept political intrigue."  So I forced myself to read the next page, which felt like being fed through a tube.

Rapp casually took another drag from the cigarette and watched as the waiter placed two snifters of cognac in front of the men.  A few minutes earlier, Rapp had listened as the other man tried to pass on the after-dinner drink.  Rapp's coworker, however, insisted that they both have a drink.....

Now, with the rain softly pelting his umbrella, Rapp watched the waiter place two snifters on the table.....


Wait a minute!  The waiter placed the snifters down twice?  Four Rapp's in four sentences?  That is just lazy, lazy writing, pure garbage. I could not read another word.


And now, I just feel completely filthy and disgusted and I need a shower.

See why I am not impressed with contemporary best-selling writers?