The Secret of the Blockbuster Novel: Healing, Healing, Healing | The Stories of Six Book Editors, Part 3

Part of our Shanghai Book Fair series. In a market that still looks healthy, watch the smartest minds chase the fads the internet manufactures.

In 2011, Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook data scientist, told Bloomberg Businessweek: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Publishing now works the same way. The best minds in the business are all thinking about how to get their books onto the internet's next wave.

The waves come in many shapes, and the ways of catching them differ just as much. We have collected the stories of six book editors, to see how smart minds keep an old industry thriving.

On Amazon China's annual bestseller list last year, half of the top ten were sunny, healing books of inspirational psychology. Alongside Secret Garden, the coloring-book phenomenon that fits no category, Keigo Higashino's The Miracles of the Namiya General Store and Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry filled out the top three.

Both are now firmly established blockbusters. The Miracles of the Namiya General Store has sold 3 million copies since it came out in 2014; The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry had sold 2 million by this June. In publishing, 50,000 copies in a year is already a good number.

At this year's Shanghai Book Fair, Zevin — 39, half Korean by descent, dressed like a teenager in a blue denim shirt and a white lace skirt, with blue-framed sunglasses — came to China for the first time to promote The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, and talked briskly. Of the eight novels she has published in the United States, this is the first to reach China. China, Zevin said, is also "the most enthusiastic" of the 25 countries the book has been translated into and sold in.

"Everyone has the hardest year of their life, and it is that year that draws out courage and potential you never knew you had, and makes life beautiful and vast from then on." In China, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry was sold as a "sunny healing novel." It became a bestseller in China, the United States and several other countries, but the reader it was aimed at and the way it was marketed changed sharply from market to market and publisher to publisher.

The English title, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, is a mouthful. That did not stop independent bookstores across the United States from embracing the story of a man running a small bookshop on a remote island. During the four and a half months Zevin spent touring with the book in 2014, many of her events came from independent bookstores that approached her themselves.

In Italy the title became La misura della felicità — the measure of happiness — moving the key word to happiness; the cover showed the silhouette of a father lifting a little girl, a stack of books beside them. Zevin did not like the title, but felt she knew too little about what Italian readers want and said nothing. Strong sales in Italy later proved the local publisher's instinct for remaking the book right.

Except that at the evening events Italian bookstores tend to hold, local reporters and readers kept putting the ultimate philosophical question to her: "What do you think happiness is?" The author was a little stumped. "I wasn't thinking in that direction at all when I wrote the book."

The Goal: No. 1 on the Overall Bestseller List

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry went on sale in China in May 2015, reached No. 1 on Amazon China's overall book chart in June, and shipped more than 500,000 copies in three months. A "three-nothings novel" — no film of the same name, no famous author, no celebrity endorsement — it was last year's dark horse in book sales.

That success was no accident. It was planned in detail by the book's publisher, Dook.

Dook bills itself as "the company that knows best how to sell books in China today." Its titles sell an average of more than 200,000 copies, 33 times the Chinese industry average. The Tibet Code (《藏地密码》), Hou Weidong's Notes from Officialdom (《侯卫东官场笔记》), Twenty Years of Gang Turmoil (《黑道风云 20 年》), These Years in Taiwan (《我们台湾这些年》), The Most Beautiful Chinese Fairy Tales (《最美最美的中国童话》), The Despicable Saint: Cao Cao (《卑鄙的圣人：曹操》) and Warring States Intrigue: Guiguzi's Gambit (《战国纵横：鬼谷子的局》) have each sold more than a million copies. (For more on Dook, see the piece we ran last year.)

Dook has a slogan well known in the trade: "Sell books the way you sell toothpaste" — that is, sell them like a fast-moving consumer good. The company makes no secret of that posture. You can follow its official WeChat account, "Panda the Book-Selling Maniac," or find the line "Look for the Dook panda, every title a bestseller" floating above the panda logo on the back of its books.

As for The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: according to Dook's own analysis of the book's success, published last year, the target — "a book that can reach No. 1 on the overall chart" — was fixed at the very start of planning.

Zhu Yihong, the book's editor, says that before taking on a book of this type they surveyed the titles that sat securely on the charts. Established authors and proven bestsellers never leave those lists; the wall is solid, and a new book rarely breaks through it.

A few books have broken through in the past several years. In 2012 came The Thief of Shadows (《偷影子的人》), the signature work of the established French author Marc Levy; in 2013, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a first novel by a new writer; in 2014, The Miracles of the Namiya General Store. "The texts of these three foreign novels carry some qualities in common: warmth, optimism, resilience, a sturdy vitality. These are qualities that millions of readers are willing to choose and to pass on," Dook wrote in its self-analysis article.

"So this book might have the potential Harold Fry had — warmth, humane concern," Zhu Yihong says.

With that judgment fixed — a warm, healing novel of the emotions — they went looking for a text to match. When the English original came out in April 2014, several publishing companies competed for the mainland Chinese rights, and Dook won. "We were evaluating the project at the time, and we made the best offer," Zhu Yihong says.

The translation was finished in November 2014. In the fourth quarter of that year, aiming squarely at "a book that can reach No. 1 on the overall chart," Dook picked The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry out of the novels whose rights it already held, made it the lead title for 2015, and began a year of saturation promotion.

Repackaging

On Douban, readers split in two. The book scores 7.7 overall. The most-liked short review reads: "Have I gone so long without reading a novel that my taste has broken? This feels so mediocre…" — 1,098 people marked it helpful. Another — "Utterly mediocre. The suffering doesn't cut into the flesh, the heartbreak isn't bone-deep, the love of books doesn't move you, the mystery doesn't grip you" — drew more than 200 endorsements.

But another group of readers were moved enough to give it five stars: "It settles the heart; reading it at a low point was like getting help exactly when I needed it." Those are precisely the people Dook set out to hit with this textbook healing novel, the kind you finish in one sitting — people "between 15 and 30" who have been through a rough stretch, or are in one, and who want something better.

Inside Dook, the marketing keyword was argued over. Should it be "bestseller," "the hardest year," or "book lover"?

"At Dook, marketing means communicating a reason to buy, so which line you choose to market with matters enormously. At the pre-launch marketing meeting there was a sharp split over the direction for The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: some thought we should lead with the point that it hit bestseller lists in 30 countries within a year; some wanted to push the line 'Everyone has the hardest year of their life, and it makes life beautiful and vast'; one person even argued that we should sell it hard to book lovers," Xing Xiaoying, Dook's marketing director, said in an interview.

In the end they decided to distil it into one line "capable of moving readers emotionally." Hua Nan, Dook's chairman, had earlier described the approach to QDaily: "We call this a foreign emotional novel. Genre fiction is the biggest block of the domestic market. You have to distil the emotion out and move people with a single sentence. That is what this market is like. We can't sell the story."

"Everyone has the hardest year of their life, and it makes life beautiful and vast." That line, the one that ended up on the cover, was rewritten "34 times"; the copy for the belly band went through "hundreds of rounds of polishing."

Zhu Yihong wrote the first half of the sentence. "Then a few of us discussed it over and over and wrote the second half together — we wrote it hundreds of times. Whether one word should be 'life' or 'a lifetime,' whether it should be 'beautiful' or 'vast.' We adjusted every single spot many times over. We'd sit together and tune it ourselves — mainly my immediate supervisor, the boss and me, the three of us talking it through — and as we polished the copy again and again we fell into a kind of mania for perfection."

On that positioning, using the same text, the Chinese edition of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry aimed at a market far larger than the book lovers the English original mainly drew. "The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is a bookstore on a beautiful little island — judge it that way and you conclude the first printing can only be 3,000 copies. But make it about getting through the hardest moment of your life and you can print 100,000," Hua Nan says.

"The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is about the life of one bookseller, but what it really tells is the reading, the living and the loving of all humanity." The back-cover copy and the promotional material everywhere stressed how widely the book applied.

Both the author and her protagonist are attached to paper books. Zevin recalled in an interview with QDaily: "Both my parents worked at IBM, and one year my mother gave me and everyone else in the family exactly the same present — a Kindle." The book's hero goes through the same story. She did not blow up at her mother the way the bookseller does — "because I'm more polite" — but she admits she is the sort who prefers paper, and the plot of the book shows it again and again.

The title "No. 1 pick of America's independent booksellers" owes something to that. Bookstore owners loved a "book written for them," and loved the figure of the bookseller with the sour temper and the picky taste; they put it in the front of their shops and told the author, "We have an A. J. Fikry right here."

In China, though, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry skipped the traditional, faintly nostalgic approach used in the United States. The pitch here was far younger and more upbeat — and many of the book's aphorisms work as captions for social media posts.

In 2015, under the theme "Tell us about the hardest year of your life," Dook asked readers on Douban, Weibo and WeChat how they got through the worst stretch of their lives. More than 1,300 took part on Douban, more than 20,000 replies came in through WeChat, and 100 copies were given away.

Zhu Yihong says that with dozens of media outlets pushing them, the campaigns were opened millions of times each. "We were thinking about how to make 'the hardest time' resonate, so we'd find the emotional journeys and stories of real celebrities and work them into our press releases — how much training Jackie Chan went through before he was famous, how poor his family was, that sort of thing… We wanted to touch the days and the memories readers really identify with, and build the marketing on that."

Building word of mouth with content and posts is Dook's standard method. They mailed the book to dozens of Douban influencers and asked them to write reviews: "Somewhere between a dozen and thirty-odd actually did it," Zhu Yihong says.

For mass-market popular fiction, though, she thinks the influencers matter less. "It doesn't need to be dissected the way an expert would dissect it. It's more a resonance of feeling. It needs someone whose taste and station are close to the general public's, who can put it in their own words, write beautifully, explain the thing clearly. That's what makes a good review."

Keigo Higashino's Turn to Warmth

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store is also an emotional healing novel of about 200,000 Chinese characters, and it was planned in an entirely different way.

Higashino made his name in Japan and in China with dark suspense. The Miracles of the Namiya General Store carries that name, but it is considered his "least Higashino" book. A general store turns into a consulting room for troubles: write your worry down, drop it through the slot in the shutter door, and the next morning the answer is waiting in the milk crate out back. No chapter's story escapes the warm keywords — family, love, home, dreams.

Next to earlier work like Journey Under the Midnight Sun and The Devotion of Suspect X, The Miracles of the Namiya General Store has a relatively simple structure: sunny and light, without the usual deduction, scheming and despair.

The book's success caught Thinkingdom Culture, its publisher, off guard. It came out in 2014 with a first printing of 50,000 copies; it has since sold 3 million, and "even now it's still in an unusually strong selling period." Li Yao, editor-in-chief of Thinkingdom's foreign literature division, says they treated it at first as a small book, a standard-format release: "When this book was published we had no confidence it was a book of several million copies. If we'd known, we probably wouldn't have gone about it the way we did."

"This book was simmered over a low flame, which is why it lasts. We didn't scheme our way into making it a hit," he says. The marketing was fairly conventional: they asked Zhi An and a few other well-known names to write reviews, and put in no extraordinary effort. "It simmered slowly, and slowly it grew."

Li Yao stresses that they did little marketing, but Thinkingdom did get one crucial step right in working out how to handle an unconventional Higashino — settling on a marketing direction unlike the ones before.

In spring 2014, before The Miracles of the Namiya General Store came out, an editor saw the traditional-character edition in Taiwan, published three months ahead of the mainland one. "Looking at that book, I thought they'd done a good job, pitched it exactly right." The mainland translation borrowed from the Taiwanese one and added to the title the idea of dissolving your worries, which is not in the Japanese original, The Miracle of the Namiya General Store; the marketing likewise went after the emptiness felt by young people in the cities — "what modern life has drained out of you, this general store can help you find again."

Li Yao calls it a moment when everything came clear. "The text had been finished for a long time, and something still felt wrong. We shelved it for six months, and realized we had the direction wrong. We kept thinking about Higashino's existing fans, when the bigger direction was to move away from Higashino."

Handling this "lukewarm," "low-proof" novel, the publisher tried many different covers. "The marketing point changed, so of course the cover design changed with it." They ended up with a cover almost identical to the Taiwanese one, covered in nostalgic old objects.

In 2008, Thinkingdom's edition of The Devotion of Suspect X set China's mystery market alight; the Chinese translation passed 100,000 copies within a week of going on sale, easily. According to a Beijing News report, 67 Higashino titles were published in the Chinese market between 2007 and 2014, 41 of them from Thinkingdom Culture, the company that first brought Higashino to China. Over those seven years those 41 titles sold 8 million copies. Thinkingdom built Higashino single-handedly into a superstar bestselling author in China, and grew a loyal fan base along the way.

But a famous author who changes style also has to face the question of whether the old fans will accept it. Another line used for The Miracles of the Namiya General Store, "not a mystery," warned Higashino's old readers to expect something different. "We deliberately wanted to steer this book toward readers who weren't Higashino readers. As we prepared on every front, we made a point of telling people in advance, so old fans looking for a Higashino mystery wouldn't feel let down," Li Yao says.

With the mystery-suspense label peeled off, The Miracles of the Namiya General Store carried Higashino's name into third- and fourth-tier cities. "Overall, Higashino sells more in big cities than small ones, more in first-tier cities than second-tier ones. But with this book, from what we can see, quite a lot of people in small cities are reading it, and in very large numbers," Li Yao says.

Thinkingdom has signed most of Higashino's work through his rights agency; his agency fee has risen from 10,000 yuan at the start to 800,000 yuan by 2010. Li Yao says: "Higashino has written a great many books, seventy or eighty of them. We've signed several dozen, and they're all with us. We're putting them out slowly, one after another — we can't publish all fifty at once."

This may also be the logic by which Thinkingdom, holding a large stock of good rights, handles the work of established writers whose quality is steady and whose names pull an audience: how to avoid ruining a book that has every natural advantage.

"Translation, editing, marketing, distribution, design — don't ruin it, don't get it wrong. Even the minor ingredients, the soy sauce, have to be good, and then the dish comes out right," Li Yao says.

Images: Gabrielle Zevin's website, Amazon

Cover image: a still from the Japanese stage adaptation of The Miracles of the Namiya General Store, icimizdekikarnaval