Om bestsellers

Tess Gerritsen (amerikansk bestsellerförfattare) berättar i sin blogg om hur litteräre agenten Donald Maass definierar en bestseller:
" He read off the titles on the current New York Times fiction bestsellers list and challenged the audience to list what those bestsellers had in common. The result? Not a lot. There were thrillers and literary novels, books with heroes and books with heroines, a book set in Afghanistan and a book set in Jersey, books with high stakes and books with quietly personal stakes. As he pointed out, you can’t predict which topic or which plot will hit the list.But you can find certain things that bestsellers have in common: characters you care about, stakes that matter to them, and what he referred to as continuous “microtension” – a story with a high level of conflict, an underlying sense that something important is always about to happen, or could happen. He also said something that I myself have concluded (and in fact blogged about sometime ago): action, in and of itself, is not tension. In fact, it can be downright boring."