by Zoë Pollock
Michael Dirda calls for a cap on the best-seller list, so authors appear only once:
The best-seller list itself would be transformed into a showplace for the hot, the exciting, the deserving. Trade publishers would still pay reasonable advances to brand-name authors but would shy away from obscene amounts, given that a writer’s later books weren’t going to receive the boost of making the list. Instead, a house’s energies and funds would be directed to promoting work by worthy authors still eligible for best-sellerdom.
Nick Owchar plumbed a recent best-seller list for clues to success:
Three of the five have worked as journalists (the others were a poet and an ad exec). All of them hit the ground running, meaning their first books were well received. Four of the five published their first books in the 1990s, the last golden years of big publishing. All of their current books, with the exception of Brooks’, are mysteries.
The Dish 