How to write a book that will last forever

One thing that readers can't ignore is the bestseller list, even if they patently avoid reading anything on it. After all, it seems to take up about half the New York Times Book Review these days. How can you miss it?

The first thing we learn about popularity is that it is no particular indicator of quality. (Anyone who doubts this can learn a quick lesson by consulting the Billboard 100 and trying to find the good music.) Nevertheless, the bestseller list looms as a weekly reminder that new books are always being written, mostly by the same people over and over again, and that someone is buying them in prodigious numbers, and, probably, we are not among them.

Then again, there is a game to be played by those in a Grinwoutian position of working in the publishing trade. Since we are in charge of a series of popular novels, often drawn from the bestseller lists, and because we read an inordinate amount of popular fiction, there is always the challenge of tallying how many bestseller notches one can actually carve into the one's Kindle. There are times when I've read virtually all of the books on the list, and as often, times when I've read virtually none. Usually this is a factor of series-dom, where all the books on the list are the 27th in some series of aliens versus Jane Austen or some such that wouldn't normally fall into my purview. Still, when I see I've read a whole bunch, if not the whole bunch, I find myself gloating a bit. I feel like I have my finger on the proverbial pulse. (I also feel like my brain is melting into nothingness, but we're not here to talk about the negative side effects of keeping up.)

Another game to play, in addition to "How Many Have I Read?" is "Where are They Now?" You do this by going back to a bestseller list some many years ago, and looking at the books and their authors, and asking yourself not if you've read any of them, but if any of them are even around anymore. How many bestsellers of the past have been tossed on the dustheaps of momentary popularity? Two million people read it the day it came out, and another ten million were champing at the bit waiting for the paperback, and today you can't even find it at Amazon.

Fame is fleeting.

But not all the books on the bestseller list are mere potboilers, that you'd expect to fade away with the passing of time. Some of them, in their day, were touted as literary art. Some were by people who won the Nobel prize. Some of them were even by (shudder) Ayn Rand. So the question arises, why do some books last and others not? Assuming an inherent quality—so much for Ayn Rand—what is it about that quality that lasts, or doesn't? Why is literary fame so unpredictable is a good essay on the subject from the New Yorker Page-Turner blog. If you're interested in this subject, check it out.
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