Why Has The Fault in Our Stars Been So Successful?

The Fault in Our Stars is my fourth (4.5th?) novel, and it has found a very wide readership. I often get questions asking what my secret is, or why the book has been successful, and then of course there are also lots of people out there speculating about the reasons for the book’s success.

So I thought I’d try to add what I can to the conversation. I’m interested in the question partly because I want to see more YA books find broad readerships and partly because I want to understand why this book has done so much better than my previous novels (although they are now, happily, riding on TFiOS’s coattails).

So:

1. The Fault in Our Stars is NOT successful primarily because I am famous on the Internet. I know this because I was famous on the Internet when Paper Towns was published, and also when Will Grayson, Will Grayson was published. (TFiOS has almost a million copies in print; Paper Towns sold perhaps 4% as much in its first year.) Having the built-in audience of nerdfighteria is tremendously important to me and to my work, but both Paper Towns and WGWG sold less in hardcover than Looking for Alaska, which was published when I was entirely unknown online. 

For many reasons—partly because I’d built a readership over the past six years, partly because I signed the entire first print run—TFiOS had far more preorders than my previous novels. But when you have the kind of regular relationship with your audience that I do, pretty much 100% of that built-in fan base buys your book within the first month.* It’s not something they find browsing at a bookstore three months later, as shown by the huge drop-off in sales for Paper Towns and WGWG. Why did this not happen with TFiOS? I think for a few reasons, which I’ll discuss below.

(Some people will say that I have a broader audience online now than I did in 2008 or 2010. True, but social media is generally much more crowded and fractured. Like, the video I made announcing the cover of Paper Towns got more views than the video I made announcing the cover of TFiOS, for instance.)

I do think the initial goodwill that nerdfighters showed the book—streaming onto amazon and goodreads to give the book positive reviews—probably helped the book begin to reach outside the community. But this also raises a critical point, which is that on average nerdfighters seem to like The Fault in Our Stars almost exactly as much as what I will call for lack of a better term “regular people.” We have pretty good data here thanks to goodreads, where more than 130,000 people have now rated The Fault in Our Stars. The average rating of the first 50,000 goodreads raters (who are more likely to be nerdfighters) is almost identical to the average rating of the most reading 50,000 goodreads raters (who are less likely to be nerdfighters). The same is true on amazon, where the book’s average rating has actually gone up a bit in the past six months (although not in a statistically significant way).

So while the enthusiasm of early readers, who tended to be nerdfighters, gave the book tremendous activation energy, it could’ve gone the way of Paper Towns and WGWG—books that did well and found wonderful readerships but almost immediately fell off bestseller lists. Instead, 72 weeks after publication, it’s still at #1.

2. The Fault in Our Stars has not been successful because I am male. I hear this a lot, and I just don’t think it’s true, except insofar as I have a bunch of privileges. (I am also cisgendered and heterosexual and grew up in the United States and write in English and graduated from college without debt and so on.) I think there is sexism in the critical discourse surrounding YA books and in many cases with how books are marketed. (The marketing problem is I think largely born from two incorrect beliefs still widely held in some corners of YA publishing: first, that young men do not purchase books and can never be convinced to, and second, that young women enjoy being condescended to.)

For one thing, I was also male when I wrote my other novels, none of which came close to the commercial or critical success of The Fault in Our Stars. Also, the other breakout non-series, realistic children’s titles of 2012 were Wonder and Out of My Mind, both written by women.

The truth is, no YA novel has ever been chosen as the best fiction book of the year by TIME Magazine**, or appeared on so many adult-oriented best-of-the-year lists (Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, etc.). Did this happen because TFiOS is the best YA book ever? No. It means that someone got a bunch of adult literary critics to read a YA novel that those adult literary critics really liked. This someone is named Elyse Marshall. (More on her in a moment.)

The other oft-repeated line here is that The Fault in Our Stars got a cool, literary cover because I’m a guy, and if I’d been female it would’ve had a pink cover with a decpitated girl head. And it might have, if I’d been a female first novelist with someone other than Julie Strauss-Gabel as my editor. (More on her in a moment.)

SO WHY DO I THINK THE FAULT IN OUR STARS HAS BEEN SO EXTRAORDINARILY SUCCESSFUL?

1. People like it. This tends to be underappreciated, I think. As noted above, in the last few years we’ve gotten access to really rich data about readers’ tastes and opinions, which can be tremendously useful. With more than 233,000 ratings, TFiOS’s average rating of 4.52 is very high compared to comparable titles. (It’s worth noting that other breakout nonseries fiction titles—from Wonder to The Book Thief to Out of My Mind almost always have average ratings above 4.30, which is very high for goodreads.)

I don’t know why people like The Fault in Our Stars, but they do, and they seem to like it enough to recommend it to their friends and family.

2. I have the best editor in YA publishing and have been working with her for nine years. 

Obviously I’m biased, but I think Julie Strauss-Gabel is the best editor and publisher in young adult lit today. In the past 12 months, she has published New York Times bestsellers by Adam Gidwitz, Gayle Foreman, John Grisham, Ally Condie, and me. Her books are also critically acclaimed; in fact, I don’t know the last time she published a book that didn’t get any starred reviews. (2009, maybe?)

This is not because Julie has great taste; it is because she is a great editor who makes the books she works on far better than they would otherwise be. And because we’ve worked together for nine years, we have a great deal of trust in each other’s judgement. This is true when it comes to editorial decisions within the book; it’s also true when it comes to publishing decisions.

For instance, when I said, “Julie, I want to sign the whole first printing,” she didn’t say, “That will be expensive and very complicated” (although it was both). She said, “Yes.”

And when she said, “I think we should publish the book in January,” even though that defied all the conventional wisdom about when to publish a Big Book, I said yes.

And about that cover: Many people wanted TFiOS to have a broadly commercial YA-ish, girl-oriented cover. Julie really believed in something graphic and minimalist that would look different from other books on the YA shelf and would also lend itself to visual remixes and fan-driven creations. Although the brilliant sales and marketing team at Penguin were hesitant, they trusted Julie’s judgement. That’s why the cover exists.

3. My entire backlist is with the same publishing house.

This largely goes down to good luck, but since everything I’ve ever written was published by Dutton, it’s easier to work with bookstores and bookselling web sites to create displays and package deals and stuff. This sounds like a small matter, but in fact it has been critically important (and the biggest reason why the sales of TFiOS have lifted the sales of my other books so much). It has been much harder, for instance, for Scholastic, which published Markus Zusak’s brilliant I Am the Messenger to capitalize on the success of The Book Thief, which was published by Random House.

4. Elyse Marshall is my publicist. 

So I assume the reason TIME Magazine and USA Today and Entertainment Weekly chose The Fault in Our Stars as one of the best books of the year is because critics there did think very highly of the book. But Elyse is the reason they read it in the first place. If they don’t read it, they don’t review it. Thousands of books come out every year; as a reviewer, it’s very hard to figure out what to read and review, and it’s easy to dismiss YA novels, particularly if you are  Serious Real Book Reviewer. Elyse did an amazingly good job of convincing people to read TFiOS.

She also organized an improbably successful book tour by working with many of the best independent bookstores in the country. The tour sold more than 11,000 copies of The Fault in Our Stars and Elyse was able to do this while still adhering to my annoying restriction that we do the entire thing without flying.

5. Penguin just happens to the best right now. 

Power shifts quickly in publishing, but there’s little question that under the leadership of Don Weisberg, Felicia Frazier, and Jennifer Loja, Penguin has emerged as the most effective publishing house in YA. I also think Penguin has the best sales team, and it helps that I’ve known most of those people personally for eight years. Penguin has always been very good at facilitating relationships and collaborations between authors and employees. 

6. My readers are evangelists.

I don’t know why, but if you scroll through the Looking for Alaska or TFiOS tags on tumblr, you see a lot of people screaming at their friends to read my books, and making art about the books, and animating quotations from them, and so on. I am just really lucky in this respect. I do not understand this, and I wish I did, because I’d like to see it happen more often with more books. 

So that’s why I think The Fault in Our Stars has had such an extraordinary year, but I’m interested to know what you think.


* I can more or less prove this, because we tracked clickthroughs on affiliate links. We know exactly how many people clicked through to the TFiOS page on Amazon, indiebound, or B&N and ended up buying a book. Within two weeks of the book’s publication, the numbers dropped to literally single digits, which meant that almost none of the people who follow me on YouTube or twitter or tumblr were buying the book from my link. This continued until Hank and I just stopped linking to the book in mid-February.

** It’s worth noting that among TIME’s Top 10 was Catherynne Valente’s brilliant The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There. To me this kind of stuff is just good news for children’s and YA publishing, no matter who it happens to, because it allows us to expand our reach both to adults and to teens who think they dislike YA books because they don’t yet realize the breadth of contemporary YA lit.

Identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. … Lenin did not willing endure the suffering of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure. … When Wordsworth decided that “there had passed away a glory from the earth,” he felt no compulsion to pass away with it, and the Fiery Particle Keats never ceased his struggle against t.b., nor in his last moments relinquished his hope of being among the English poets.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “The Crack-Up,” discussing what is heroic—and what is cowardly—about writers’ complex and unsettling relationships with their subjects (human and otherwise).

Q:Hey, some people on tumblr are wondering if writers feel upset or get a thrill when they kill their characters. Care to enlighten us?

Anonymous

I get a version of this question dozens of times every day, so let me just answer it in the most direct way I know how to:

I have never killed anyone, fictional or otherwise. I have no idea what it’s like to kill someone, but it seems like it would be horrible. One of my biggest goals in life is to get through it without knowing anything of what it’s like to kill another human being.

People die. That’s true in novels, and it’s true in life. Dying is one of the very few things we all do. To deny or ignore the omnipresent reality of death seems to me a disservice to human beings. That said, acknowledging in my novels that death exists does not make me a murderer any more than acknowledging that cancer can be treated makes me an oncologist.

On Self-Publishing and Amazon

From Amy: “Seeing your facebook posts in relation to self-publishing today, i’m very curious as to why you seem to be so upset when continuously you encourage self publishing of other media. Just look at Vlogbrothers itself. In fact, you addressed this in Hitler and Sex. What about all of the amazing musicians that DFTBA Records picked up. The internet enabled these people to get out there and start something big. Why are books not okay?”

I haven’t sorted my feelings out, and I may be inconsistent/wrong. But to be clear: I did not intend to attack or criticize self-publishing itself. Many great books are being self-published, and that has been the case for centuries.

I wanted to criticize Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, because I felt that in his introduction of the new kindles, Bezos repeatedly peddled the lie that a book is created by one person, and that therefore a book’s author should be the sole entity to profit from the sale of the book. (Aside, of course, from Amazon itself.)

Bezos and Amazon are consistent in their promotion of this lie, because it encourages the idea that the publishing landscape today is bloated and inefficient and that there is a better, cheaper way to do it—a way where all books can cost $1.99 with most of that $1.99 going to the author. Readers and writers both win then, right?

Well, no. Because the truth is, most good books are NOT created solely by one person: Editors and publishers play a tremendously important role not just in the distribution of books, but in the creation of them. Without my editor, there would be no great perhaps in Looking for Alaska, no Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars, and no Agloe, New York in Paper Towns. Without copyeditors and proofreaders, my books would be riddled with factual and grammatical errors that would pull you out of the story and give you a less immersive reading experience. This is true not only for traditional/legacy publishing but also for self-published books. Authors are not islands.

But I do believe that without publishers, the overall quality and diversity of books will suffer.

There is lots of room in this world for indie publishing, and I’m excited about all the reading opportunities that the Internet has given us, from blogs to fan fiction to direct-to-ereader novels. But comparing publishing to music or TV is really troubling to me, because people listen to a lot of music: In an average week, I probably listen to 200 songs. I probably watch 5 hours of television or YouTube. But in an average week, I read one book (and that puts me on the far end of the reading bell curve among Americans). Given how few books are read—perhaps 500 million a year—the current publishing landscape does an astonishingly good job of making sure there are plenty of books available to a wide variety of audiences. There are books about little people who survived the Holocaust and the Islamization of the Uzbeks and how to swing a golf club. 

My fear is that if there are only two or three voices in the publishing retail landscape—say, Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon—that diversity will dramatically decrease. Only a few dozen books a year will be available at large retailers like Wal-Mart; the rest of literature will exist only in the kindle store. Those books will have difficulty being discovered, because there are so few readers and so many titles. (You are starting to see a similar phenomenon on YouTube right now, actually, but in publishing it will be far worse, because it usually only takes a few minutes to watch a YouTube video.)

Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (Toni Morrison may be America’s greatest living writer, but she’ll never have a broad enough audience to support her writing if her books sell for $1.99 in the kindle store.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.

So my issue is not with self-publishing. My issue is with Bezos profiting from this false narrative that an Amazon monopoly will benefit both readers and writers. In truth, I don’t think it will benefit anyone. In the long run, I don’t even think it will benefit Amazon, because if they succeed in destroying publishers, the quality of the books they sell will suffer, and even fewer people will be inclined to spend their evenings reading.

On Having Figured Out the Twist

“Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening. Look at a point of land over which the sun is certain to rise, Coleridge said. If the moon rises there, so what? The senses are startled, that’s all. But if we know the point where the sun will rise as it has always risen and as it will rise tomorrow and the next day too, well, well! At the beginning of “Hamlet” there can be no doubt that by the play’s end, the prince will buy it. Between start and finish, then, we may concentrate on what he says and who he is, matters made more intense by our knowing he is doomed. In every piece of work, at one juncture or another, a writer has the choice of doing something weird or something true. The lesser writer will haul up the moon.” -Roger Rosenblatt, How to Write Great

There seems to be a feeling among readers these days that if they see an event coming, the book is less than it might’ve been. I couldn’t disagree more.

I stand with Rosenblatt in celebrating anticipation over surprise. Even when reading mystery novels, the pleasure for me is never in the feeling of, oh I didn’t see THAT coming. The pleasure is living with another’s dread and pain and yearning and hope. All of that is a hell of a lot more fulfilling than being surprised by the killer’s identity.

This is the whole reason foreshadowing exists. Foreshadowing, at its best, is not a trick demonstrated to brag about what a fancy writer you can be. It’s about building anticipation, so that the reader can more fully empathize with the characters in the story: I want s/he to battle and hope against the inevitable while reading just as we all do while living. When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable.

JOHN GREEN’S STARTED WORKING ON A NEW BOOK?!

noeyeinclare:

First off, I’m sorry about your ovaries.

Secondly, I like writing stories. It is pretty much my favorite thing to do. Hopefully I will write many, many more books—so many that you become tired of them and all become Hipster John Green Fans and say, “His early stuff was okay but after TFiOS he just became a hack.”

Percy Jackson and the Well-Attended Funeral Service

cassandraclare:

smokeandbone13 asked you:

I have a writing question but idk of you can answer this but here it goes when you write the ending of a series and the publishers or who ever has control of your books does not agree with the ending like it wont be “commercial acceptable” do you tell them no this is how it’s suppose to end or do you listen to them and change it to be “commercial friendly”? Like say you kill the main character and enrage ur readers do you change the ending to make them happy or go with how your story?

I like the idea that out there, there are secretly super debauched, evil versions of YA books where everything ends in a total bloodbath that have been suppressed by editors.

Editor: So, I see you’ve turned in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince …

JK Rowling: Did you like it?

Editor: All except the part where Harry is gored to death by unicorns at the end. That was … unexpected.

JKR: Exactly! No one will see it coming.

Editor: If Harry’s dead, what are you going to call the next book? His name is in all the titles.

JKR: Harry Potter and the People Who Remembered Him Fondly?

Editor: I really don’t think that’s going to sell.

* * * 

Ah, fantasy world of publishing, you are so much funnier than actual publishing.

The actual answer is, no one can make you change anything about your book you don’t want to. People spend a lot of time worrying that when they get published they will be “made to change” aspects of their books but this seems largely bootless to me: you are in a partnership with your editor, with the common goal of making the book good. It is not in your interest to fight their suggestions. That said, editors can’t make you do anything. Your name is on the book and you decide what goes between the covers.  

That doesn’t mean authors don’t ever take what’s commercial into account. Some do, some don’t, according to their personality. (Authors who ever admit they take what might or might not sell better into account, or are even imagined to have done so, are generally treated like dirt, because the idea that you might want to make a living off what you write is apparently a deeply evil one, an opinion I can only assume is held mainly by people who have never lived for any length of time with no health insurance. The intersection of art and commerce is a complicated one, and there may be a lot of crashes at said intersection, but Dickens got paid by the word.)

Anyway. I cannot imagine an editor ever saying “this will not be commercially friendly” to an author rather than “this ending doesn’t suit the book” or perhaps the blunt “nobody will like it.” That’s all your editor can do: express their opinion. You don’t have to take their advice. If I wanted to end my series with Jace having been turned into a chicken salad sandwich I could. It’s really the marketing department that would be the angriest.

Also, just because you kill off the main character or whatever doesn’t mean the book won’t sell. Look at The Amber Spyglass. Jesus, that ending is depressing. People don’t really know “what’s commercial” and what isn’t. If they did, every movie and every book would be a blockbuster. Publishers aren’t in the business of altruism, they’re in the business of publishing and making money, but they generally let authors do what they want, simply because no better method of producing books that are going to sell has yet been found. 

This.

I get asked a lot what my editor made me change, what the “original” versions of my novels looked like, etc. The truth is that novels are not written by one person. Novels are a collaboration—for almost a decade now, my closest collaborator has been Julie Strauss-Gabel, my editor at Dutton. But I also collaborate with copyeditors and proofreaders and with every single person who reads the book, because the reader chooses how to read a novel (which paragraphs to skim, which to reread, how to fill in a novel’s many blanks).

So please believe me when I say that you ARE reading the original version of The Fault in Our Stars or Looking for Alaska or whatever. And you are reading the only original version that will ever exist, because the book you read will not be quite the same as the book that anyone else reads.

Why Libraries Are Different From Piracy

Yesterday on twitter, I expressed annoyance with the hundreds of people who send me emails or tumblr messages or whatever to let me know that they illegally downloaded one of my books, as if they expect me to reply with my hearty congratulations that they are technologically sophisticated enough to use google or whatever. (I dislike it when people pirate my books. I know that not all authors feel this way, but I do. As I’ve discussed before, I think copyright law is disastrously stupid in the US, but I don’t think piracy is an appropriate response to that stupidity.*)

I then pointed out that my books are already available for free at thousands of public libraries not just in the US, but also in Europe, South America, Australia, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, the UK, etc., to which many people replied, What’s the difference between pirating a book and checking it out from the library?

1. Libraries are broadly collecting institutions curated by experts. The curation facet of a library is hugely important: We train these librarians to organize information based not solely on what is popular (which is what piracy does), but also on what is good. The truth is you can’t get “anything” via piracy; there are hundreds of thousands of books you can’t get, because they aren’t yet popular. American public and school libraries play a huge role in preserving the breadth of American literature by collecting and sharing books that are excellent but may not be written by YouTubers with large bulit-in audiences.

Libraries improve the quality of discourse in their communities in ways that piracy simply does not. And if it weren’t for the broad but carefully curated collection practices of libraries, the world of American literature would look a lot like the world of American film: Instead of hundreds of books being published every week, there would be four or five.

2. Libraries buy books. Lots of them. And there are tens of thousands of libraries around the country. That is good for me and good for my book. (Like, the average library copy of The Fault in Our Stars might get checked out 100 times, or even a thousand, butsingle files of Looking for Alaska have been illegally downloaded more than 50,000 times.)

3. For the more than 100 million Americans without Internet access at home, libraries are the only free places to use the web to search for jobs or connect with family or buy t-shirts at dftba.com. I am very happy if my books can help add value to institutions that facilitate such important services. I do not feel the same way about BitTorrent.

4. And this is the most important: I believe that creators of books should have control over how their work is distributed. If, for instance, a musician doesn’t want her songs played during Rick Santorum rallies, then Rick Santorum should not be allowed to use them. I don’t want my books to be available for free download (unless you borrow an e-copy from a library, that is). I just don’t. It’s not because I’m a greedy bastard or want to keep my books from people who might otherwise read them. It’s because I believe books are valuable. Right now, on Amazon, my brand new hardcover book costs about $10, which represents 1.2 hours of work at the federal minimum wage. I believe books are worth 1.2 hours of work. 

One last thing: A lot of people compare the world of books with the world of music. I think this comparison is unfair. For one thing, CDs were overpriced before Napster. I really don’t believe that books—at least my books—are currently overpriced**. More importantly, most musicians have a secondary source of income: They can charge for live performances. Writers—or at least the vast majority of writers—can’t do this. The book is The Thing. The book is all we have to offer.

And in my opinion, libraries preserve the integrity and the value of the book in ways that piracy simply does not.

Based on how many of you have already seen Season 2 of Sherlock, I realize that most of you disagree with me. And I’m happy to acknowledge that I might be wrong. I welcome your thoughts and responses on these complicated questions.

* The whole argument that piracy is some kind of civil disobedience in response to unfair copyright laws is ridiculous and indicates to me that not enough people are reading Civil Disobedience, or even the wikipedia article about it.

** As pointed out by no less an authority than John Darnielle, CDs weren’t overpriced by many independent record labels. Also, I should add that many books—particularly literary fiction hardcovers published for adults—are overpriced, sometimes dramatically. I think this is a bad and discouraging trend, which is one of the (many) reasons why I like publishing my books the way I do: It’s still possible for a hardcover to cost less than $20, and if you adjust for inflation, it always should be.