The Da Vinci Code code: what's the formula for a bestselling book?

Steve Berry could be forgiven for asking himself every day what it takes to make a book a global bestseller. Back in 2003, the former lawyer published a novel that placed well-known myths in a conspiracy web to create a page-turning thriller.

Sound familiar? It should, except you’re thinking of Dan Brown and his flagellating priests in the multimillion seller The Da Vinci Code – not Berry’s tale of Nazis hunting Russian treasure in the barely known The Amber Room.

Published in the same year, with a male-female double act tracking down artefacts in a global conspiracy – why would one book sell so many copies and not the other? There is a cryptological tool that might help Berry find an answer: the list of books that have sold more than one million copies since the turn of the century, produced for the Specsavers bestseller awards later this week.

The data collated since 1998 by Nielsen BookScan, which monitors sales through bookshops, supermarkets and online, offers many clues to what makes a bestseller.

A curious mix of unrelated titles, it ranges from bonking and bondage in EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey – the only “sextuple platinum” bestseller, having sold 6.5m copies – to Eric Carle’s ravenous larva in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, placing Arthur Golden’s The Memoirs of a Geisha alongside Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea. There are only two Booker prize winners – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – sitting alongside the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, The Atkins Diet and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. All that unites them is that each has sold more than one million copies, with all of them set to be honoured with the publishing world’s new equivalent of silver, gold and platinum discs.

Are there any trends among the top few? To sell a million, it helps to be a woman – with a man’s name. Though more men have sold more than 250,000 copies of their books, women dominate the biggest sellers: EL James’s debut whipped up sales of 6.5m, seeing off stiff competition from JK Rowling’s multimillion selling Harry Potter series. Not far behind are Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

It must be observed that James and Rowling both rendered their names gender-neutral – a lesson not lost on thriller writer Alex Marwood, who used to write under her real name Serena Mackesy.

Mackesy’s writing career had been grinding to a halt, and The Darkest Secret author faced the loss of her home. Drastic action was needed and that meant a name change. “Books by women get less coverage and fewer prizes than those by men and, as we all know, a lot of men won’t read books by women,” Mackesy explains. She needed a name that wouldn’t cause sniggers among snotty booksellers each time a customer asked for her books. “Booksellers were spending more time correcting people’s pronunciation of Mackesy than they were selling my books,” she adds.

Using her grandmother’s surname and an androgynous, classless first name, she moved publishers and unleashed The Wicked Girls. The book topped bestseller lists and earned a nod from Stephen King, who chose it as one of his books of the year.

There may be less speculative ways of earning a living than writing a novel, but it seems clear that those who make it to the top of the bestseller lists write because they have a passion for the story they are working on, not because it will make them rich.

Kate Mosse, whose breakout grail novel Labyrinth is among the Specsavers bestsellers, said that writing it felt as if “I put my hands on the keyboard and burned my fingers”. The founder of the Baileys women’s prize for fiction adds: “I really felt the story mattered and that I had to do it justice. I had no expectations for it, I just felt it had to be written.” She would wake in the middle of the night teasing over plot points in the novel, which slips between medieval Carcassonne and present day.

But Labyrinth was not powered solely by Mosse’s desire to write, it was aided by a large slice of luck, she admits. “I know that you can do everything right, but in the end there is that piece of luck that plays for or against you.” The novel arrived in time to pick up the insatiable appetite for Templar novels following The Da Vinci Code, whereas Steve Berry broke cover too early.

But there is something more in the list waiting to be revealed: enthusiasm. Every book on the list was powered by an excitement that began in the imagination of the author and made evangelists of everyone who read it whether they were agents, editors, booksellers or readers.

“How do publishers know that they have a potential breakout bestseller from an author?” asks Jane Johnson, George RR Martin’s publisher at HarperCollins. “Experience and ‘editor’s itch’.”

This is a potentially infectious condition – the unique excitement that makes the hair on her neck stand on end when she reads a manuscript with the potential to go gangbusters.

So being a bestseller doesn’t come down to the quality of the writing alone, but more often when a writer hits on something in the air that signals the start of a trend. Agent Lizzy Kremer, who represents Paula Hawkins of The Girl on a Train fame, says she knows it when she finds it. “As soon as we started talking about the idea for The Girl on the Train, we both knew it had huge potential,” she says.

What would give Kremer a frisson of excitement now? Suburban noir: “It won’t be the first thriller set in the suburbs,” she says. “But it will somehow redefine the suburbs in our imagination, and hit the nail on the head harder than it has ever been hit before.”

So luck, timing and the eye of a keen agent are very useful things to acquire if you want to get rich. At least Steve Berry doesn’t need to adjust his name.