Two Million Copies in Four Years: Why Do Chinese Readers Love *The Willpower Instinct* So Much? | The Stories of Six Book Editors, Part 4

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.

The staying power of The Willpower Instinct looks like a miracle.

Since it came out in Chinese in 2012, the book has sold 2 million copies. It still ranked fourth on Amazon China's 2015 annual bestseller list, its fourth year running in the top ten. Fast, me-too self-improvement titles keep pouring into the market, yet this four-year-old book still sits at the top of Amazon China's "emotional intelligence and emotions" category.

The Willpower Instinct grew out of "The Science of Willpower," a course that Stanford psychology professor Kelly McGonigal taught at the university. It explains how this feeling we call willpower works and how to "harness it to improve your health, happiness, and productivity." People who took the course, the book says, called it "life-changing."

Books that promise a better life and a better future through psychological self-improvement are hardly rare. Inspirational psychology titles are airport-bookshop staples, and they matter across the whole market. No one has measured the category precisely, but according to research on China's self-help industry by Eric Hendriks, a Dutch sociology postdoc, "supplementary education books" — most of them inspirational psychology — make up 34% of China's print book market.

Self-help books translated from English began pouring into China more than a decade ago. In 2001, Who Moved My Cheese? topped the year's charts. The United States has always been the world's great exporter of self-help, and after homegrown inspirational titles it is China's biggest source of imports (37% in 2011). In Europe the genre sits at the margins: self-help accounts for just 5.7% of the German market.

It is no accident that self-help sells in China and the United States alike. Where the welfare net is thin and the gap between rich and poor keeps widening, competition is fierce and sometimes cruel; workers who are not clever enough, hardworking enough, or tough enough can be discarded fast. The hope of changing your life falls on you alone.

That is the skill readers want from The Willpower Instinct. "In just 10 weeks, take control of your time and your life," the jacket copy promised — a line that likely landed with young people who dream of the kind of person whose life is always in perfect order, the real winner.

How a Category C Book Became a Bestseller

When The Willpower Instinct reached her, Wang Zeyang thought her own life was a mess.

In 2011 Wang, an editor at Xiron Books, twisted her ankle in high heels on the way to meet an author and spent three months at home. A colleague sent her a proposal: a popular Stanford course called "The Science of Willpower," and the book the psychologist McGonigal had written to go with it.

Five or six years into the job, Wang was at a low point. It was "so boring, one book after another," she felt, and she thought about leaving the industry. In 2012 the small team she led broke up in what she calls a "spectacular failure." Then she read the book's line about forgiving yourself when you fall short, felt released from her habit of self-blame, and decided to take the book on herself.

Neither she nor the publisher expected much of it at first, and the reason they bought it — a famous university's open course — had little to do with why it later sold. "At the time it didn't look like much to me either. I just thought open courses from big-name universities had been hot since 2009, so playing the open-course angle should be OK. We did it the way we do any ordinary book," Wang told QDaily.

Unlike Michael Sandel's Justice lectures at Harvard, then enormously popular in China, McGonigal's course had not been brought over and had not racked up 10 million views online. The odds of riding an open course to a bestseller were slim.

Xiron sorts books into categories A, B, and C before publication according to expected sales, and gives each level a different amount of marketing. A-list books, Wang says, are expected to sell 60,000 to 80,000 copies in their first six months; B-list books, 30,000 to 50,000. The Willpower Instinct landed in C, the least promising tier — an advance of five or six thousand US dollars and a first printing of 11,000 copies, against the 50,000 a publisher will print for a book it believes in.

It also had to face a near-identical rival.

In 2012 CITIC Press published Willpower, in which a psychology professor at Florida State University explained how to build willpower. The subject and much of the content overlapped with McGonigal's book — the sting being that the key word in her original English title, The Willpower Instinct, is willpower, the very word CITIC had taken, rather than the self-control that Xiron's Chinese title promised.

"That was a book a lot of people had been waiting for, because that expert is seriously impressive, a big name in American psychology. Theirs came out about a week before ours. It actually worked in our favor — we had a twin, so we decided to copy it. Whatever they did, we did," Wang said. McGonigal's book was selling decently at home as well, 12th among self-help titles in Amazon's time-management category.

Riding the rival's slipstream worked. "While neither book was in Amazon's top 100, they would put some resources behind a push and we would follow. Later they got into the 70s and we got into the 80s; they hit the 50s, we hit the 60s," Wang said.

Then The Willpower Instinct left Willpower behind, far faster than its editor expected. It reached No. 1 on Amazon China and held the spot for the better part of seven or eight months. "We were selling a thousand, two thousand copies a day. We couldn't reprint fast enough. That's how hot it was."

Wang thinks luck had a hand in it. "Sometimes the explanation you give for a success isn't really fair," she says. She still cannot say what made the book sell.

Its edge may be that it simply fits the bestseller mold better — plain, easy, lively. "We found a translator and pushed for a translation that was easy to read," Wang said.

Reader responses suggest that next to Willpower, which is more theoretical and academic, The Willpower Instinct answered the urge to change right now. Every chapter ends with two kinds of homework, a short "a closer look" and a "willpower experiment," with the promise that "these strategies, grounded in scientific research or theory, will genuinely improve your willpower and prepare you for the challenges of real life."

The most-upvoted short review on Douban, by the site celebrity Shuimei Wuyu, is representative: "What I care about is that it comes with a real manual. However good the theory is, if it can't change my situation it's worthless."

The author being a woman, and a striking one, helped too. Xiron had her interview with the Canadian broadcaster TVO subtitled in Chinese, posted it on the Amazon product page, and pushed it on Weibo. Wang says they never planned to sell the book on the author's gender, which might have looked "not authoritative enough" — but an authoritative old professor was never what readers wanted. "A beauty like that looks like she really does have self-control," one reader wrote.

Once It Starts Selling, the Resources Come

This March, Xiron published the third book in the series, The Willpower Instinct: Making Friends With Stress. It was upgraded to the A list, which means the house would put real planning and marketing behind it.

The first book's success was a surprise, but once Xiron saw the sparks catch, the marketing moved fast. The house watches sales data every day, which lets its editors adjust as they go.

Wang and her team went after students cramming for the graduate school entrance exam. The Willpower Instinct came out in late July 2012, and "by early September its No. 1 spot would slowly get squeezed out by exam guides and revision books." So Wang found a way to tie exam prep to willpower. Writing in the voice of an exam candidate, her team posted on Renren, then still busy: my attention wanders, I can't keep myself in line, what do I do — and then I found this book, and its ideas helped. The post struck a nerve with other candidates and was shared widely.

With students and office workers as its readers, the book sold mainly online. Many people, Wang says, probably finished the post and went straight to an online store to buy it.

Another tactic: write the reading notes yourself. A classic American bestseller like this one is thick with anecdotes but simple at the spine; a few slides can lay out the argument. So a colleague of Wang's at Xiron posted a long set of notes on Douban to help readers get through it efficiently.

Six months in, Xiron wanted to press the advantage while the first book still had momentum. But it could not wait for the hen to lay the next egg.

Wang emailed McGonigal asking to sign her second book. McGonigal wrote back that she was still working out the idea. So Wang searched Amazon "to see if there was anything we could use in the meantime," and found that McGonigal had published a book on yoga back in 2009.

Apart from the author, the yoga guide had little to do with The Willpower Instinct, and the editors found the fit "awkward." But for the second book to sell, Wang believed, it had to be tied both to McGonigal and to self-control. How do you get from willpower to yoga? The Willpower Instinct has a chapter on yoga, exercise, and meditation, Wang reasoned — "so it's basically an extension of that." In the end Xiron welded the two together with a line: when her willpower runs low, she does three things — exercise, meditation, and yoga.

In May 2013 they published The Willpower Instinct 2: The Yoga Workbook (《自控力 2：瑜伽实操篇》), and this time they rolled up their sleeves and put it on the A list.

Two years later, in May 2015, McGonigal's new book, The Upside of Stress, came out in the United States. Xiron had kept up a correspondence with her since the first book, and signed the Chinese rights in early 2015.

Wang worried that leaning on the words "self-control" again would no longer move copies. The second book had sold only just past 100,000, and the market was tired of the genre: 2013 brought Emotional Self-Control and Super Self-Control, and by 2014 there were titles like Emotional Self-Control: The Power to Turn the Negative Into the Positive and A Little Super Self-Control Every Day.

Still, after "seven or eight months of arguing about the title," Wang and her team could not come up with a better hook. So the book about turning stress into an asset was pressed into service as another sequel and published this March as The Willpower Instinct: Making Friends With Stress.

By this August it had sold more than 170,000 copies. That is a good result for an ordinary book, and far below the first one.

Every Book Can Be Turned Into a Course

Even a lasting bestseller has not cured Wang Zeyang, an editor of mass-market books, of her boredom with the job.

She has worked on mass-market titles since 2007 — the "very, very commercial" kind, the ones that "make money off the general public." She joined Xiron in 2009 and produced her first million-copy bestseller, Tear Down the Wall in Your Mind (《拆掉思维里的墙》).

Now, she says, "there has never been such a thing as a mass market." Readers' tastes blow in and out like wind: "Someone near you reads a book, and then everybody reads that book." The two later Willpower Instinct volumes, unable to repeat the first one's run, make the point. You can run surveys, or try to spot the next trend, but knowing what readers actually want is close to impossible. She has also noticed that the giant bestseller now comes along less and less often. "A few years ago you'd get several books a year that sold a million without much trouble. The past two years, maybe one a year. You can count the million-copy books on your fingers."

Wang is not entirely right about this. Since 2014 the market has produced The Miracles of the Namiya General Store, There, There, Pat Your Head (《乖，摸摸头》), Zero to One, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, Everything I Never Told You, and Yu Zui (《余罪》), all of which have sold a million copies or several million; the giants have not stopped coming. But every editor QDaily interviewed did say the same thing: the book market has grown more varied and more finely sliced.

Some editors argue that the better move now is to publish for a particular group of people rather than for the public. Such readers are more loyal, their tastes easier to read, and word of mouth inside the group travels further — which makes it easier for an editor to keep a career in perfect order. Wang agrees: "It's hard to point to one big trend that describes the whole market... it's all small markets, small trends."

Following the Willpower Instinct line, Wang has gone on to commission practical, skills-based books, among them This Strange Life (《奇特的一生》) and Two Awesome Hours. These, she says, are aimed at people who procrastinate, who always stay up too late, who need to manage their time, who want to grow.

In that territory she has also found a new role for herself. Taking self-improvement junkies as her users, she has gone from book editor to "product manager." "What I want to try next may not be only books — courses, communities, other spin-offs. Pull all of it into one complete value chain, and be the person running it," Wang said.

The shift has already started. Wang put a QR code on the back cover of The Willpower Instinct; scanning it brought seven or eight hundred readers into a willpower group on WeChat. She had meant to use it for honest reader research — "sometimes the readers we see, or the surveys we run, give you exactly the answer you wanted, which is really a survey that deceives itself." The right approach, she believes, is "to go to any length to actually be friends with your readers."

The WeChat group is also a channel for pushing new books to loyal readers. When The Willpower Instinct: Making Friends With Stress came out, Wang gave copies away to the group as gifts. "Everybody's reading it."

The community business is no longer only about selling books. In 2015 she helped start a WeChat official account called Willpower Lab, inviting readers to "start with self-control and, through reading and writing, meditation, and exercise boot camps, grow together into better versions of ourselves." The account now has 13,000 followers.

Willpower Lab runs two kinds of groups, a core group and a free group. The difference, in short, is that the core group charges, and comes with "teachers who lecture and coach, and group leaders who keep you honest." It currently offers three courses — meditation, exercise, and reading and writing — each running 10 weeks at 399 yuan. The lab's online shop also sells an advanced reading-and-writing course for 999 yuan; finish every assignment in the group and 200 yuan comes back.

The core group's "teachers" are mostly Wang and her friends. The "group leaders" are students who have done well. Students check in and hand in homework on a schedule. "Did you work out today? If not, send everyone a red envelope," Wang said.

In the free group there are no teachers or leaders watching, but members post the day's plan and a short summary each morning.

A user calling himself Hand Me That Deuterium listed today's plan as "K3 fat-burning," "start Lai Shixiong's American English," and "draft a personal study plan," among other items. He has kept it up for 50 days. He found Willpower Lab through an official account about self-improvement, likes the format, and says it has taken some of the edge off his procrastination.

Turning an open course into a book, then, can run in reverse, and Wang likes the prospects for turning books into reading communities. "One of our product managers told me he thinks every book could become a Willpower Lab, or a set of lectures. Every book really can be developed into a course. Editors just haven't noticed," she said.

Internet entrepreneurs, Luogic Show among them, plainly have.

Images: Amazon, Douban, Kelly McGonigal's website