Ce este un bestseller? Scriitorul și succesul

Abstract

In the history of literature, the best-selling phenomenon is relatively new, it appeared with the modernization of printing, the cheapening of paper, the development of the middle class and the expansion of the reader market in the nineteenth century. In his book, Frédéric Rouvillois concludes that a bestseller is rather a socio-economic phenomenon: it tells us what interests a society at a given time, draws our attention to marketing campaigns orchestrated by publishers and to networks and conjunctures. The bestseller has been influenced, over time, by the advent of cinema and television, and by the existence of the internet. Although there are charts with the most read books and recipes on how to write a bestseller, publishers have not yet been able to answer the question of what determines the success of a book. There is, as Rouvillois believed, a certain mystery surrounding the appearance of a bestseller, and this is because literary success escapes rational explanation, it is technically unrepeatable and unpredictable.