What Makes THAT Book a Bestseller (While Readers Pass On Yours)?

How To Attract Readers Using Universal Pleasure

You open the popular romance page on Goodreads and find a book about vampires and werewolves just made the top ten. Meanwhile, your vampire-werewolf series barely sells two copies a month.

If you don’t write paranormal romance, replace vampires and werewolves with hockey. Or summer love. Or whatever it is you write. The point is, another book just like yours is getting all this attention, and you’re pulling your hair out trying to figure out what they did right, and you did wrong.

Sound familiar?

And, let me guess….your next stop is the 1- & 2-star reviews on your book’s page. 

If so, congratulations! You just bought a one-way ticket to feeling like trash about your capabilities as a writer.

Worse, it won’t tell you why the other book became a bestseller, and yours flopped. For one thing, those negative nellies aren’t your target audience. Whatever they didn’t like about your book is not the thing it’s missing. For another, these are people who actually read your book — they have no idea why other people aren’t picking it up.

So walk away from the unkind reviews.

Ask This Instead: What Do Romance Readers Want?

According to Theodora Taylor, author of 7-Figure Fiction: How to Use Universal Fantasy to SELL Your Books to ANYONE, the answer is Butter. 

Just like butter makes food taste good, Universal Fantasy makes readers connect with and enjoy books. “It’s that special, often uncredited thing that turns nutritious stuff like craft and structure into something readers actually want to consume,” she says in Chapter 3.

At the 20Books Vegas conference I attended in 2022 and 2023, bestselling authors like Angel Lawson and Reese Rivers credited the conscious inclusion of ‘Butter’ in their stories as the key to their success.

Does your book have Butter? Does it have enough?

In 7-Figure Fiction, Taylor goes on to walk through familiar fairytales to show that the same themes we loved as kids still resonate with us adults. Fantasies like being forcibly removed from ‘this provincial life’ (Beauty and the Beast), and meeting your true love match (Cinderella) are universal.

Then, she points out the Butter in modern books and television. Things like competition, comebacks, and falling for the boss (who also falls for you) from Grey’s Anatomy. 

The idea is that we should learn to do this ourselves, with the media we consume. But Taylor does this so intuitively that her process is hard to replicate. How do I know if something’s a universal fantasy and not just one of mine? 

And so, we ask for a list. 

The Quick Reference list at the end of 7-Figure Fiction is a great start. But what we’re really longing for at the end of the book is a comprehensive inventory of things we can pull in to make readers love our books.

I’m not sure it’s even possible to create an all-encompassing list, but if you did, it would fill volumes. And because each Universal Fantasy is shared by many, but not all of us, there’ll be things in those volumes that you hate. 

That doesn’t mean you have to put a bunch of stuff you don’t like into your novel. But before we look at what to do instead, we have to ask another question.

An Even Better Question: Why Do People Read Romance?

Why do people read fiction at all? Why spend six hours with a made-up story about people who aren’t real?

 Cognitive psychologists have put forth multiple theories, and I suspect there’s truth to all of them. In The Mind’s Eye, Steven Pinker suggests that our affinity for literature is pleasure-seeking. Fiction allows us to hit our evolutionary pleasure-buttons without actually taking action.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a bestselling fiction author with a Ph.D in Psychology, calls this Pleasure Theory. When she discusses the Psychology of Fiction, she talks about 6 things that give humans a dopamine rush across time and cultures: 

• Touch - Includes sex, but also non-sexual things like petting a dog

• Danger, experienced safely - Why I love both reading and rollercoasters. 

• Wealth - Billionaire romance continues to be popular, but stories that highlight and vilify wealth disparity also seem to hit this button.

• Power/Status - Power can be explicit, like a king or CEO, or a magical ability. Or it can be implicit, like popularity or the fact that people listen to you. Knowledge is power, too, especially when you know something others don’t (like a secret).

• Competition - This explains why my husband (and millions of others) love sports so much.

• Beauty - Beautiful people, glow-ups and makeovers all hit the beauty button. I imagine cute creatures and beautiful settings would, too.

If people read fiction to experience all of the above from the safety of their favorite reading chair, it stands to reason that they’d favor books that hit all of these buttons as often as possible. Which sounds a lot like what Theodora Taylor says about Butter. 

Could the Barnes’ six pleasure buttons be the “Universal Fantasy List” we’re all looking for? A (very unscientific) reread of 7-Figure Fiction confirmed that most of Taylor’s Universal Fantasy examples fit into one of the above categories. But not all. Taylor includes another category: Found Family/Belonging, and a quick perusal of popular fiction tells me she’s right to do so. [1]

Use Pleasure Buttons To Uncover Universal Fantasies and Write Books That Sell

Boiling a near-infinite list of Universal Fantasies down to seven Pleasure Buttons gives us an objective way to look at bestselling books, whether or not we enjoyed them ourselves. 

If a successful book uses a trope you hate, ask yourself what button that trope is pressing. Then find a different way to hit it in yours. Take the Bullying trope, for example. You don’t have to love this trope to see that it hits the power button (and sometimes wealth, belonging, and competition, too). That doesn’t mean you have to go write a bully romance. Look for other ways to hit those buttons instead. 

Next time you watch a television show you can’t get enough of, ask yourself how it uses touch, beauty, wealth, power, danger, competition, and belonging to draw you in. Add those to your own pleasure/fantasy list — and come back for inspiration when you need it.

As you write your next book, find a way to hit all seven pleasure buttons. Challenge yourself to include one in every scene. Stuff your book with dopamine, and the readers will come. 

References & Further Reading

• Use psychology to write a best seller, with Jennifer Lynn Barnes, PhD | Speaking of Psychology

• Pinker, S. (2009). How the Mind Works. W. W. Norton.

• Taylor, T. (2021). 7 Figure Fiction: How to Use Universal Fantasy to Sell Your Books to Anyone. Theodora Taylor.

[1] Note: Barnes didn’t miss this category. She talks about Belonging/Found Family as part of another theory: Fiction as Social Surrogacy.