How to Make the New York Times Bestseller List in Five Easy Pieces

1. Formulate an idea that has broad appeal. Something you would want to read if you had a long plane trip ahead and not very much laptop battery. Failing that, something inspired by a massive best-seller.

2. Come up with a plotline full of twists. Make them daydream-realistic but not reality-realistic.

3. Come up with a cast of shallow characters whose purpose is to tell each other what's going on, serve as different reflections of your own personality, and experience occasional moments of easily-resolved self-doubt.

4. Write the damn thing. Don't think about it, just write it. Contrive tense moments in the action for the ends of chapters. Include irrelevant details of characters' private lives. Don't even think about writing well, just follow standard practice in sentence and paragraph structure. Have your characters swear just enough to seem normal but not enough to attract attention. Use lots of the same words over and over again because few of the huge audience you want will notice. Just shut up and really write the fucker all the way to completion. (This is the hard part.)

5. Shop it around to get it published. If no one buys, keep trying. If no one buys, keep trying. If no one buys, write something else while you keep trying.

I cleverly figured this out all by myself. I haven't tried all of it yet, but I expect within about fifty years I will. I figured it out last week after buying a book at an airport. I had a long flight (Chicago to London) and they were about to close the gate and I realized my laptop was good for about an hour and wondered what the hell I was going to do so I panicked and ran to a shop in the international terminal and grabbed The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury because of a fascinating conversation I had with a Scots gentleman on the train from London to Edinburgh in 2003 that culminated in the mysteries of what might be buried under Rosslyn Chapel ... and I'd read The Da Vinci Code and thought it was interesting if a wee bit contrived ... and I have a passing interest in the technical aspects of assembling a hundred thousand words or so into a marketable product that then nets me several million dollars. Sort of like what I really do for a living except in real life I am but a small part of a large fluid team, we assemble electronic, mechanical, thermal, various peripheral and software components instead of words, and someone else (i.e. several disparate corporations) gets the millions of dollars while I get my salary and benefits -- which is sufficient but hardly the stuff dreams are made of. Anyway, my entire point is that the author is making a mint off his book yet it's so bad I can't always force myself to keep reading it. How tough can writing such a thing be? Huh? Huh?