Disappointing Bestsellers

[LittlleMy]

Hello everyone 🙂

I just wondered if anyone else has bought a ‘bestseller’ that otherwise wouldn’t have appealed without that status only to be hugely disappointed?

So I realise I’m slightly late to the party but I just finished ‘The Housemaid’ by Freida McFadden and it was such a struggle to get through! It felt more like it was written for the Young Adult market. Barely any descriptive text, always telling rather than showing, ridiculous coincidences, underdeveloped characters, juvenile writing especially sentences like ‘’there was something about that room that was very scary” “his expression sent a chill down my spine”. Highly predictable in parts, silly in others and just so very average!

Don’t come after me if you loved it, this is just my opinion of a recent book that really shocked me that it was able to reach the dizzying heights of becoming a bestseller.

I thought it might be fun to hear from any fellow disgruntled readers if they’ve had similar experiences! With Autumn just round the corner, and me needing a new list of books to read, this post may help some of us avoid similar disappointments!

Love the Life of Pi - a beautiful book and so thought provoking.

But very true we can't all like the same thing.

Has anyone read the Patrick Melrose trilogy by Edward St Aubyn? Not a single likeable character in the whole saga.

Edward St A had a traumatic childhood, and they’re partly autobiographical, but even so.

Yes the family upstairs - what a pile of crap!

Yes, books about arrogant arseholes. I’m glad I read them but I’ll never read them again.

I loved Yellowface and The List. I’ve read The Thursday Murder Club and it was fine but I’ve also not rushed to read any of the sequels. I’ll get to them eventually and I’m looking forward to watching the film but there’s too many other books I want to read first.

The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer was just ok. Probably didn’t help that I read the whole thing with his voice in my head.

There are four published Thursday Murder club books by Richard Osman and another on its way . So I suppose Netflix will do all the books.
I may just watch these instead of reading them

Found the second book - Bad News- absolutely hysterically funny but it may have been the age I read it at. The mother willing to overlook Patrick’s drug addled appearance because his family ‘saw the Norman conquest from the winning side’ remains with me still.

Before the coffee gets cold. Probably my fault as I had an idea of how I wanted it to be and it wasn't like I'd imagined at all.

OH My God How Boring Was The Goldfinch!

Just finished Lucy Foley's Midnight Feast - loved it!

It promised extreme profundity and wisdom…and was 3 x as long as it needed to be.

Basically it was about art being a powerful consolation in human life…who could have guessed that🤔?

I think she writes well but she struggles to find something really meaningful to say.

Does anyone else find that if you take 3 books to read on holiday you’re almost always surprised at the one you enjoy most? It’s never the one I think.

The Slap, and that idiotic book with the monkey sister, it was years ago and I still haven't forgiven MN for getting me to read that utter shit.

An excellent point. As someone who works in publishing I am always torn between being disheartened to see Yet Another Celebrity Author (naming no names) getting all the marketing and press attention, and knowing that their profits are paying for the meagre marketing budget that's going behind ten other far better titles. It's a balancing act!

Yes - but in the past those bestselling authors would have been … authors. Not slebs knocking out a kids book that sucks up all the marketing spend.

Agree that the big authors subsidise the rest but big authors still has to start at the bottom, unlike celebrities.

Must confess I love Freida McFadden's books, I don't love books that go on and on with description so I like that Freida just gets to the point 😅

Not sure if bestsellers but my disappointments:
Convenience Store Woman - described as hilarious but actually found it really sad? Luckily it was quite short.

Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson - as someone who grew up OBSESSED with her books I was so excited to hear she was releasing an adult novel about Ellie. Who the hell let her write this drivel? Page after page about the stupid teacher, would've much rather read about her relationship with her daughter or more about Nadine and Magda or about that girl she kept meeting up. It's made me incredibly worried about her adult sequel to 'The Illustrated Mum'. I liked 'My Mum Tracy Beaker' but I suppose they were kids books which she's still good at but the adult one was so disappointing.

Agree re Jodi Picoult's books, I hated her ending to 'My Sisters Keeper' and much preferred the movie version.

Stephen King books are overrated for me. I managed to make it through Carrie, did he really need to describe her nipples? Was that relevant?

Love Christmas so bought a bunch of Christmas novels, most of them were pretty bad but the worst was 'The Chocolate Lovers' Christmas' by Carole Matthews - by the end none of the plots were concluded, it was like she'd written the book then went back through and made references to snow and other random things just so she could market it as a Christmas book and the main character was INSUFFERABLE. You want me to believe this character is running a business but can't even use her mobile phone? Okay...

Stephen King books are overrated for me.

I’ve started and abandoned so many Stephen King books, I just don’t get in with them at all. I got through 11.22.63 and it was simply ok.

I think they're wonderful. I was agog that such amazing writing was still being turned out.
I've never got the "likeable" character criterion for liking a novel, it's either well-written or not (thanks Oscar).

Oh, I don't disagree (and am very grateful to work for a house that doesn't publish any celeb nonsense!) but it's a lot easier to throw your money behind a known name than it is to take a punt on something new. I suppose what has most surprised me about being in this side of the industry (I was on the other side previously!) is how precarious publishing really is, and how almost every indie is just one failed book away from oblivion. There's just no money in it any more unless you're a) Amazon or b) Richard Osmond. So I can understand why houses are reluctant to take the risks needed to launch new authors unless they have a sure thing on their hands, too.

This thread has been fascinating. Some of my most beloved books (eg Wolf Hall, Hamnet) have inspired such hatred in others! Makes me feel better about the occasional negative Goodreads review of my most recently-edited title (which has been otherwise fairly universally beloved, thank goodness). Perhaps good books are just more divisive.

I try not to dismiss books out of hand because I think most things have their own audience and just because I don't like something doesn't mean it's bad, it's just not for me... BUT that said, A Little Life was the most overwritten, overblown, ridiculous, offensively stereotyped, maudlin, poorly characterised pile of misery upon misery that I have ever had the misfortune to read. By the end I was only still going to see what other trauma she could inflict on her Manic Dream Pixie Boy main character and the levels of gleeful detail she would enjoy going into when she wrote about them. Hideous.

Limerick. But most people (including his own mother) objected to it on the grounds of it being largely fictional poverty porn, flogging alcoholism, indigence and a slew of dead babies to a rich US readership, and for that you didn't need to be from Limerick.

This is interesting. Does it not cut both ways, so the marketing budget and press attention for these celeb books eats up those things for 10 smaller books too?

My fear for the way uk publishing is going these days is that smaller, quieter books or the steady mid-list authors I've always enjoyed reading are just being squeezed out as their advances and marketing budgets get slashed to the point of unsustainability.

We're always being encouraged by the industry to avoid Amazon and support small independent bookshops, but no one ever talks about supporting real authors over celebrities. It feels a bit like double standards.

Marketing budget – to be honest, probably not. It's unlikely that a small book / debut would be given much of a marketing budget regardless. It simply isn't financially viable as to be honest, the profits from most books are just so tiny. To put it into perspective, I work for a fairly successful, though small, indie (we've won awards, we've had books in the Sunday Times Top 10 lists etc). By the time we've paid for production and royalties, we probably make about £1.20 per book sold. And that's not taking into account staffing, editorial costs, day to day running costs. Most of our books sell less than 2000 copies. Our most successful book – one of the ones that hit the Sunday Times Top 10 – has sold just over 10k copies to date. So you can see that there just isn't money to spend on marketing, unless you know you're going to get a guaranteed return.

Press attention – probably. It's very hard to get press for authors who aren't well known. But whether outlets would be willing to write about books if the authors weren't celebrities is hard to judge, really – I mean, they certainly wouldn't be getting a slot on The One Show! But perhaps they'd get more space on the reviews pages than they currently do. So it's difficult to say if celebrity authors are cannibalising press that would otherwise go to non-celeb authors or if they're simply the only authors who would ever get press. A bit of both, I suspect.

Of course more and more publishers are looking at an author's existing social following before taking them on – even if they're not celebrities, if they've got loads of followers on TikTok that's free PR right there. Another depressing facet of the industry!

You are quite right though. Mid-list and debut authors are finding it harder and harder to get their work published, and harder and harder to live on what it earns them. But publishing houses are having the same problem, as are bookshops. People simply aren't willing to pay enough for books these days to make it a sustainable model. And why would they? You can get hundreds of thousands of books on Kindle Unlimited for free. Hardly anyone is going to risk £20 on a hardback by someone they've never heard of when that option is available to them. I wish it wasn't that way, but it is, and for those of us in the midst of it, it's hard to see a way out.

No, you can also be from Glasgow....looking at you again Shuggie Bain.

Shuggie Bain, yes! I've tried to read it about 3 times and think I won't bother any more.