Week 35: What is a bestseller, anyway?

It is week thirty-five of 2026. How’s the writing going? The season is shifting—do you feel it? In San Francisco, we’re still muffled in the chill gray of Fogust, but there have been brief glimpses of the blue skies and mellow sunshine that mean fall has arrived.

A friend and colleague in Florence reports hints of fall in the air there too—and that planning is underway for Florence Publishing Day on November 7. Check it out if you are in Europe or the UK—or you want a tax-deductible excuse to go to Florence!

Here at the garret, I’ve been working on a developmental edit for a spec fic novella with a premise I can’t stop thinking about, and I’ve been doing a final pass through Novel Study Book 2, Bestsellers: Excavating the Tools and Techniques of Successful Novels. I’ve got a preview for you below of one of the new graphs, which I’ve been spending a lot of time staring at, tweaking, printing, and staring at some more. Also below is another new recurring feature: Sentence Study! I’d love to know what you think—hit reply to tell me.

The theme of Novel Study Book 2 is bestsellers, and the case studies are all drawn from the 2025 bestseller charts. In the intro, I answer the question What is a bestseller? As many of you likely know, the answer isn’t as straightforward as you might think. There isn’t one bestseller list but several, and no two are compiled in the same way. But I did assemble statistics for the eight books I study, which represent a wide range of positions on the charts. Actual numbers are hard to come by (if you do not work for a publisher), but we can get a snapshot via the Publishers Weekly bestseller list, which includes sales data for books on that week’s list. The book’s Fig. 1: Highest weekly sales for five 2025 bestsellers, makes that data visual.

Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life, her sixth novel in a row to hit the bestseller lists, dwarfs the rest of the books—so much so that I had to magnify the other four on the graph to make them visible. And even sales of Henry’s book would have appeared tiny if I had included the weekly numbers for one of 2025’s mega-bestsellers, like Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros, which reportedly sold 1.3 million print copies in its first week, or Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, which sold 715,000 print copies in its first week. Three of the books I studied appeared on various bestseller lists but not on the Publishers Weekly list. As indie authors know, these lists are based on very incomplete data: for example, they don’t include audiobooks or purchases at conventions or made directly from an author’s website.

So why study them then, if the bestseller label is an arbitrary one? Well, despite the questionable numbers, the bestseller lists do provide one snapshot of what is currently popular—what real readers are buying and reading. Popularity is not the same as quality, but it is one marker of success. If our goal is to create artistically and commercially successful novels, then let’s study those that seem to be hitting the mark. And I can tell you, after having spent nearly two years immersed in this project, these eight novels are worth studying. That’s exactly what Bestsellers: Excavating the Tools and Techniques of Successful Novels does. I hope you’ll check out the Kickstarter prelaunch page, click Notify me on launch, and share with fellow writers and editors you think might be interested.

This is the very first installment of a new Blue Garret newsletter segment: the sentence study! It’s like Novel Study, but bite-sized and focused on a single sentence or, as in this case, a group of sentences. Hit reply to let me know what you think or to suggest a sentence you’d like me to study in an upcoming newsletter.

Our inaugural sentence study is from chapter one of Tana French’s 2024 novel The Hunter, her follow up to The Searcher from 2020. I’m glad to report that it’s as good, if not even better, than The Searcher. (The third and final book in the series, The Keeper, just came out this spring). Like The Searcher, this novel moves slowly, but there is much to enjoy along the way, especially French’s wonderful prose.

The protagonist of The Hunter is once again Cal Hooper, a retired cop from Chicago who has moved to a remote village in West Ireland. In scene two, Cal’s dog Rip is taunted by some rooks who imitate the bark of another dog. Here’s the passage I want to study:

I highlighted this passage because I think it's an excellent example of what we mean when we talk about voice. The Hunter has two other POV characters—Lena, a village native around Cal’s age, and Trey, a village teenager. French doesn’t use title labels to identify which POV character narrates which scene, and she doesn’t need to because she’s established such distinctive voices for each of them. In addition, there are multiple secondary characters who get distinctive voices in their dialogue lines.

Voice is hard to define, but the place to look for it is in word choice and syntax, the order in which words are placed in a sentence. What words do you notice in this passage? A few jump out to me. To start, the frequent use of adverbs: “isn’t exactly,” “definitely,” and “mainly.” In terms of voice, they lend the sentences a casual feel that sounds distinctly American. The phrases “some Disney idea” and “fucking with him” add to the effect. Compare this snippet from Lena’s POV: “Today, his clothes are shiny-new right down to the shoes, and not cheap shite either.” The phrase “cheap shite” is distinctively Irish, and the syntax and rhythm of “shiny-new right down to the shoes” feels Irish to me as well.

Returning to Cal’s passage, I also want to call attention to the last two sentences, which add detail to the “fucking with him” phrase. The second-to-last sentence starts with a subordinate clause, then follows a pleasing parallel structure, anchored by three strong verbs: “yell,” “drop,” and “bang.” The short last sentence could have been folded into the previous one: “When they get bored, they yell down his chimney, drop rocks into his fireplace, bang on his windows, or—today’s new trick—bark at his back door.” But the previous two sentences are longer, so the short sentence adds contrast while also giving more emphasis to the detail that this is new behavior. It’s sharp and funny, underscoring the humorous picture we saw before this passage of Rip running expectantly to the door only to be disappointed to find the rooks, who squawk at him and fly into the trees.

French opened The Searcher with a sentence about rooks too. As in that book, the rooks here are a metaphorical foreshadowing of the plot of the novel. Cal’s relationship with them is quite similar to his relationship to the villagers of Ardnakelty, who sometimes treat him as an asset and sometimes like fucking with him. Read my post about the opening of The Searcher on my website or in Novel Study Book One.

Not a book birthday, but also worthy of celebration: Congrats to Christine Knapp! Murder on the Green was 1st runner-up for Best Cozy Mystery of 2026 / Silver Falchion Category at Killer Nashville. Learn more and buy the book here.

I love speaking to writers and editors—check out my Speaking page and get in touch if you are interested in having me speak to your group.

Our Thing of Joy this week is bittersweet. We lost Dolly Parton far too soon, but we were lucky to have her light and joy and love as long as we did. I was ambivalent to Dolly Parton for many years. I stopped listening to country music entirely in the ’80s and ’90s—part of my ambivalence about my own Southern roots. But I rediscovered it in the early ’00s when Americana and roots music emerged. Dolly recorded two bluegrass-focused albums during this period that I loved, and that brought me back to her earlier music. Of course, in the last decade she has quietly become an icon—beloved by multiple communities for her love, advocacy, and financial support. Here’s a collection of my favorite links, new and old:

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights and having the good cries.

Kristen