Brian Hill and Dee Power, The Making of a Bestseller

In preparing their book The Making of a Bestseller, Brian Hill and Dee Power interviewed more than fifty authors, agents, editors, booksellers, and assorted publishing industry experts on the subject of bestsellers—how books attain that status, what it costs an author to remain on the bestseller lists, what role various parties play in the creation of a best-selling book. The responses Hill and Power received form the backbone of their book, in which interview snippets are arranged thematically and interspersed with explanatory or introductory narrative. The book's eighteen chapters are divided into three broad sections—The Bestseller, Publishing, and The Author. The topics covered are too numerous to mention here, but the authors have included discussions of, for example, the various best-selling lists and how they are compiled; the importance—or not—of print reviews to a book's success; the influence of agents and editors on a manuscript; how booksellers select the titles they stock; and the process of adapting bestsellers for the screen. 

The Making of a Bestseller is well written and clearly organized, and it is chock full of information about how the publishing industry works. Its authors, in interviewing so many subjects from throughout the publishing world, show readers a cross-section of the industry with its various strata, from author to bookseller, laid bare. The book should be of interest to would-be authors looking to scale the heights of bestsellerdom themselves as well as to industry insiders. Fans of the authors interviewed—among them Dan Brown, Peter Straub, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Nicholas Sparks—may also be interested in this behind-the-scenes look at their favorite books.