Nilanjana S Roy: The secret's in the formula

SPEAKING VOLUMES

When Arthur Hailey died last week, aged 84, The Times carried an especially helpful box featuring the first lines from his bestselling novels.

They should be required reading for those who believe that they understand how the book business works, because they are terrible lines.

The opening line of Airport is one of the most boring sentences I've ever read: "At half-past six on a Friday evening in January, Lincoln International Airport, Illinois, was functioning, though with difficulty."

Wheels, written four years later, started off with the same bland briskness: "The president of General Motors was in a foul humor." And when Hailey tried, as he did with Overload in 1978, you wished he hadn't.

"Heat! Heat in stifling blanket layers. Heat that enveloped all of California from the arid Mexican border in the south to majestic Klamath Forest, elbowing northward into Oregon. Heat, oppressive and enervating."

The same lack of literary quality was evident through most of his books. If you read on""as many did, given that his eleven books sold 170 million copies worldwide""it was for the little factoids he sprinkled throughout his works.

Hotel, Airport and Wheels share an unusual distinction: these bestsellers became required reading in the industries they explored. Hailey's strength was the quality of his research""not, despite the odd Tom Clancy, a common selling point in the bestseller market.

A friend who works for a US publishing house says what really baffles her about Hailey is how he got published at all. "These days, when we read a synopsis and judge books on the first three chapters, Hailey might not have got past the gate. I know editors who would have looked at Hotel and Airport and said, nice idea, but make it more exciting."

But that's the dark secret of the publishing world: despite the lists and the surveys and the bright boys in marketing, no one really knows what makes a bestseller.

Every year, hundreds of books in the pulp fiction market will be sent out by editors with fingers crossed. One of them will be a future Dan Brown or Scott Turow, the rest will be remaindered""and no one knows exactly who's going to get the magic right.

It has nothing to do with skill: the worst of James Clavell and Stephen King is, in terms of writing quality, several notches above Dean Koontz, but they all sell like hell.

If there's a formula, no one knows what it is: ask Mills & Boon what makes some of their purple paeans to passion sell five times more than the other shlock, and they won't be able to pinpoint the difference accurately.

Or look at it another way: Shobhaa De's books work because they combine sex, gossip, sleaze, and scandal. This should be a recipe that's easy to imitate""but despite Kusum Sawhney and others of her ilk, no one else in India has cracked it.

If you think you can crack the formula, remember The Godfather. Mario Puzo got something right in that novel, and even he didn't know what it was.

It's not like he didn't try. The Sicilian, The Last Don, Omerta and The Family sold in relatively low numbers, on the back of The Godfather. Puzo had four cracks at replicating the magic of The Godfather""none of them worked, so we can presume that even he didn't know what the exact recipe is for a bestseller.

Mark Winegardner's publishers might have the answer: his book, The Godfather Returns, is doing very well""the cover is a replica of the more famous original. So maybe that's one way to make a bestseller franchise work: if you can't rewrite the original, replicate the jacket design.

Other writers have been luckier: the King and the Dean, for instance, seem to hit the jackpot with everything they write. (But King's never written a bestseller quite as good as Carrie or Christine; whatever magic worked in those two didn't spread to the rest of his pulp ouevre.)

Conventional wisdom has it that you can tell trash because it won't survive the test of time. I'm not convinced. Some pulp fiction artists fall by the wayside before too long: some, like the late Hailey, continue selling long after the books have dated and "the formula" is supposed to have changed.

To read Airport now, in the post September eleven nightmare we fondly call the "security check", is to take a nostalgia trip. It doesn't matter; Airport still sells. Some bestsellers do fade away: no one now remembers Irving Bacheller or Booth Tarkington, who lit up the bestseller lists in the 1920s and pre-war America.

But Zane Grey, star of the 1920s? Still in print. Irving Wallace, who ruled the sixties? Still selling. Sidney Sheldon is still the adolescent's Bible of improbable sex, 40 years after he first made the big numbers.

The only surefire way to write a bestseller was discovered by Mike McGrady, who decided to find out just how low artistic standards were. He commissioned 25 of his colleagues at Newsday to write a novel, the only proviso being that it had to have terrible writing and no redeeming features whatsoever.

Naked Came The Stranger was published under the pseudonym Penelope Ashe, and was a staggering success in 1969. It sold even more copies when the hoax was revealed, and it's still selling today.

So if you want to write a bestseller, should you deliberately set out to write the worst book that you can? Nope. McGrady and his colleagues followed up Naked Came The Stranger with a series of Naked ... books, most notably Naked Came The Phoenix.

They didn't do so badly, but none of them came anywhere close to the original hoax. Even when McGrady stumbled upon a formula, he couldn't get it to work again.

We're not the only ones with a Ma fixation: The British Council conducted a worldwide survey to see if they could The Seventy Most Beautiful Words in The English Language.

The winner was "mother"; father didn't make it to the list, though "whoops" did. Here are the seventy, in order of pulchritude: Mother, Passion, Smile, Love, Eternity, Fantastic, Destiny, Freedom, Liberty, Tranquillity, Peace, Blossom, Sunshine, Sweetheart, Gorgeous, Cherish, Enthusiasm, Hope, Grace, Rainbow, Blue, Sunflower, Twinkle, Serendipity, Bliss, Lullaby, Sophisticated, Renaissance, Cute, Cosy, Butterfly, Galaxy, Hilarious, Moment, Extravaganza, Aqua, Sentiment, Cosmopolitan, Bubble, Pumpkin, Banana, Lollipop, If, Bumblebee, Giggle, Paradox, Delicacy, Peekaboo, Umbrella, Kangaroo, Flabbergasted, Hippopotamus, Gothic, Coconut, Smashing, Whoops, Tickle, Loquacious, Flip-flop, Smithereens, Oi, Gazebo, Hiccup, Hodgepodge, Shipshape, Explosion, Fuselage, Zing, Gum, Hen night.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com