Thanks so much for backing and sharing!

The Kickstarter hardcover (foil dust jacket, ribbon, printed endpapers) won't be sold in bookstores or on the big retail sites. If you've had your eye on it, today's the day. Thank you to everyone who has backed, shared, and cheered this book along. I'm so grateful. (3/4)

Thanks to y'all, both stretch rewards are unlocked, so every backer at every level gets: - A 90-minute live Zoom webinar on intensity graphs and story structure (Oct 27) - A pop-up Novel Study Book Club, Nov 16–Dec 20, on a novel backers vote on (2/4)

Final day! 📚 The Kickstarter for *Bestsellers: Excavating the Tools and Techniques of Successful Novels* closes today at 5pm PT. I took eight 2025 bestsellers across genres apart to see exactly how they work: 40 full-color charts, 95 takeaways for your own writing. 🧵 (1/4)

So glad it was helpful! It’s hard when you don’t connect with a book that is so lauded. You should also check out @wordstowriteby.bsky.social’s podcast series on the book. Try Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit – I think it should be much better known.

Thanks for the support, M!

The cover is fantastic! Love the diagonal title treatment

However, this is just one pattern and it’s not right for every book, especially one with a deliberately slow start. In my book *Bestsellers*, I cover a number of different patterns, so you can easily compare different shapes and consider what might work for your own story. (6/7)

Lowering the temperature in Act 2 is a classic move in action-focused genres: Readers are now hooked, and as a writer you can turn your attention backwards and inwards for a period. (5/7)

The graph for S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes is typical for a high-intensity thriller. Cosby draws readers in with two high-intensity spikes in Act 1, then lowers the external temperature through Act 2 to focus on internal character development. (4/7)

The graph shows you the pulse of the novel, and the pulse is what moves over to the reader. Using this tool during revision can help writers focus on how the reader experiences the story, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so valuable. (3/7)

I continued that practice in Novel Study Book 2 and have also started using the technique in my developmental editing work (in my full-scale content edits only, because it is time intensive!). (2/7)

*Bestsellers* is a toolbox, not a rulebook. It’s for writers and for my fellow fiction editors—anyone who has finished a fantastic novel and wondered *How did they pull that off?*

⭐️ 8 case studies, straight from the 2025 bestseller charts ⭐️ 40 full-color charts and graphs—because seeing a pattern is the first step to understanding it ⭐️ 95 takeaways, organized by topic, so you know exactly how to apply what you find