Thread: What makes a literary phenomenon?

So that's twenty times five is a hundred, add five noughts. I bet she never thought of that as she struggled to sell the first few to her friends and relations.

My personal opinion, and not an educated one. it's not marketing, at least for me, It's the passion of how real the characters are. What makes books popular to other people, well who knows. I am still learning to write...

I know many fictitious characters that are 'believable' and 'real', that do not spark a high interest in the general public (considering the general public are morons, doesn't count for much though). It really comes down to lucky word of mouth (in my opinion). If you can sell your thoughts to friends and family, they will do such the same. And thus you have a motion moving forward. Times this by a thousand, and you are really starting to get somewhere.

Obviously many books die in the starting few laps of their worldly freedom. But if your lucky, and own the 'gift of the gab'.
May-chance you might just become the next writer to be 'so fricken awesome, like yeah!"

Maybe Twilight sold so well because a very average teenage girl was thrown into very unusual circumstances. Obviosuly it's targeted to teenagers, who in general are trying to find their place in a world of 5 billion and they feel like, 'Hey, if this can happen to her than it can happen to me', so they continue to read on and live vicariously through the character. It becomes addicting.

What creates a runaway success and makes a writer into a millionaire?

Well, having given the matter some serious thought I reckon that the answer is complex but that fundamentally success comes from a team effort.
The creative writer as an individual has little chance of success.
The first task is to locate a genre which fits a vacant slot in the market place.
Personally I can readily identify a slot for a genre of book which I know I can write - indeed I have virtually written the chapters of it.
I recognise there is a need for an illustrator and a photographer but I know where to find them.
It would take the expertise of a good publishing house to pull together what has been written already. The book has to be printed and someone has to fund that production.
Eventually the book would have to be promoted within the trade and put in front of the prospective buyers. That calls for an experienced marketing and distribution system.
Finally the sales receipts must be collected.

To gain access to the world of publishing, is like trying to open a locked door without the key.
Long before one copy is sold, someone with influence and experience in publishing, has to believe that, for sure, more than 1000 copies will be sold of a book which has not yet been produced.

Seems as daunting to me as winning a Simon Cowell talent show. But someone always does.

What exactly is a 'literary phenomenon'? Harry Potter and Twilight could be considered literary phenomenon’s because those book were read, enjoyed, and thought about by a great many people. But I tend to think of a real literary phenomenon as something a little more long-lasting, something that continues to make a difference in some way years after the final finished work was published and distributed. Lord of the Rings is a literary phenomenon I think. Here we are years later still talking about it and making movies about it, even after the author has passed away. So in that way is Harry Potter or Twilight a literary phenomenon? I think its too soon really to tell.

Now if we are talking about all this based more on how much money was made that is a different matter. I agree with what has been said already in that I don’t think marketing should be so quickly discounted. I know that Walden’s Books (Borders) trains their employees to suggest specific books to the customers, and that these books are usually published by newly published authors, and their work is being groomed to get on bestseller lists and perhaps lure in some movie producers. By suggesting such books to the general unwashed masses Walden’s Booksellers can influence (in surprising ways) which books become successful. I worked at Walden’s myself so that is how I know about some of this.

Whether such grooming helped Harry Potter or Twilight become successful I’m not sure. Another thing that is a big factor is the cathartic value of the story being peddled. Successful books and stories tend to touch a feeling, desire, or anxiety common to a great many people. Twilight, for example, presents a tantalizing romantic situation attractive to many women for myriad psychological and sociological reasons. The writing doesn’t have to be stellar if the author is talking about something most other women want to hear about. Harry Potter is similar and I believe it has an appeal similar to X-Men (the more mainstream versions of that series anyway). It deals with a kid who does not really fit in in the regular world and has a hard time with bullies and adults who don’t really care. Then he gets whisked away to a magical place where he can learn magic, go on adventures, and eventually learn what we already suspected ourselves as the readers all along, that he is the only one who can save the world. Most kids feel awkward, they deal with a world that is hostile, they deal with bullies and adults who don’t care, and they just want to go somewhere else where they are the hero. Other books have tried to go with this same idea and Harry Potter succeeded because the author tackled the problem with a story that is, relatively, unique and approachable.

Of course there are many more layers of complexity when it comes to this issue. But generally I think this is the way it works.

A literary phenominom is something no ones seen yet, that changes language,a nd still succeeds during it's era.

I don't know much about Twilight, but HP wasn't an overnight success, and you can't write subsequent success off to marketing. It was picked up by a comparatively small publisher after several others had rejected it. It wasn't marketed particularly at the outset. What made HP a phenomenon initially was word of mouth. People read it, liked it, told their friends. As the phenomenon grew it made the press; adult reading HP on the train, for goodness sake! Whatever next!

To move the discussion more in the direction Ox would prefer, Ellis's American Psycho was a slow-burner. It was out for a couple of years, getting slow but steady sales, before it suddenly achieved cult status

Because children and young adults will spread a book's popularity hugely, exaggerating it's worth, and forcing their mummies and daddies to buy the more expensive editions, the first editions, the signed editions, the memorabilia, etc. and then the adults that hear about this get curious and want to give it a try. So they do. Word spreads. Royalties raise. Gets higher on the best seller list. Royalties raise.

= Rich author.

i agree that it's all marketing...just get it out there, and people will buy it.

if you look at 'the girl with the dragon tattoo,' i bet jillions of people bought the book solely because of its cool name. and the author's name is pretty cool, too.

just get that name out, have it follow some escapist literary formula, use cool fonts and pictures, and you got yourself a hit i think

Well, the thing about the three books that you mentioned is that none of them are particularly "high-brow" fiction. However what links them is a thorough understanding of their audience, and the kind of storytelling techniques that each story requires.

Harry Potter is a straight up Heroes Journey tale, packaged as a Magical Revenge trick. The entertainment comes in the likeable characters, and for the immersion of the world that is seen.

Da Vinci is a conspiracy tale, one that taps, quite effectively, in the belief amongst society that the "elites" secretly control everything.

Twilight is porn, for teenage girls mind, but porn nonetheless. It taps into feelings of sexual frustration for underage girls, something which really isn't offered by many other books, and even amongst the books that it is, it isn't done as well.

A literary phenomenon, I like that expression. For me I believe that for this to happen marketing plays a role, however as we see with movies marketing can only get you so far. I am sure we all remember the phenomenal success Snakes on a Plane was, and there was a large marketing campaign and viral marketing behind this. In order to be a success the product still needs to have a level of quality in writing for the reader. The reader today I believe also wants more of the visuals in the book provided with relative ease, we seem to have hit a point where we like simpler books. We want more escapism and emotional validation / escape immediately, but when has the mass market not wanted this?

This phenomenon I believe is as much governed much as it has been since books became as commercially viable as they are now. A good story, well developed characters, a good plot line and a hook. we will see some variations in this, but the basic tenants of writing are as valid now as before. I now believe I have contributed very little here and is nice to meet you all.

There seem to be two questions being asked by the OP: One is, as the subject line says, simply "what constitutes a literary phenomenon?" The second, and what seems to be the more overriding, question is: "What has caused these particular works (Harry Potter, Twilight, daVinci Code) to become regarded as literary phenomena?"

To a novice writer, why ANYONE gets published is pretty much a big mystery, as there seem to be so many "bad" books that sell into the millions and so many "good" books that never make it past the slush pile. There must be some sort of secret formula involved, right? Push the right buttons, and you've got a hit, even if what you started with was a puddle of lukewarm dishwater.

There may indeed be some sort of secret cabal or formula involved. I mean, who knows?

But do consider this: If there was some process of absolute certainty by which a work of substandard or average quality could be rendered into a marketable, salable, successful, wildly popular smash hit, don't you think that whoever controlled that secret would be, let's say, kinda POSSESSIVE of it...?

If there was such a gimmick, it's is extremely doubtful that anyone would just cough it right up here on a free internet discussion forum.

Trying to analyze what made one or another work popular over all its peers is always going to be an analysis of what happened in the past, and will not really provide useful data regarding how to proceed in the future--we're talking about entertainment here, i.e., literature. Trends in entertainment are subject to tremendous flux, and do not necessarily run in cycles; in fact they seldom do. Innovation is essential to any sort of entertainment trend.

What that means, in short, is that try as you might to analyze exactly what caused the insane popularity of the Harry Potter series, at your most successful you'll only succeed in analyzing what one group of people were willing to spend money on for entertainment at one point in the past; the data you obtain from your research in that regard will in no way enable you to duplicate the astounding success of that series.

Yeah, you think the writing sucks in "Twilight", you don't see what all the fuss is about in "DaVinci Code", but here these guys are rolling in dough and you, with your great ideas and enormous talent, you're sitting at the local laundromat every Tuesday night because your apartment isn't big enough for a washing machine.

You're right: It's not fair.

But with the secret of how to turn crappy writing into a smash hit being so very, um, SECRET--maybe it's better all in all just to write because you enjoy it, to make your writing as excellent as you can because that's how you are, you do everything as well as possible; to have a great time in the planning and writing of your stories, to take pride in the amount of lore you have, in your talent, and your awesome ideas, and to get as much as you can out of the experience of writing--because ultimately it is the chronicle of your life, your thought, and your ideal of beauty and grandeur, that is the important thing in all that writing that you do.

Anyone that tries to suggest to you that there's some easy way to get to the "phenomenon" part of your writing is j3rking you 0ff, and, knowing how badly you want to be published and read, probably has some designs on what little money you do have.

"If you market your bad writing properly, you too can be a literary phenomenon."

Riiiiiiight.... :\ Do yourself and everyone you know a favor: Save your money and just keep writing.

A lot of it is sheer luck. Maybe the book hit the shelves at the opportune time and had a neat cover design/title that prompted a lot of the target demographic to buy the book. And then they liked it and told their friends and from their it snowballed into a sensation, pushed onward by clever marketing.

what makes a literary phenomenon? two things. First, a fresh idea. But i bet we have all read books that are so great, but are not hits. That's the second part-- pure luck.