What makes a book a bestseller?

Well, of course nobody really knows. Beyond, that is, the obvious and boring answer — by having lots of people buy it. Crusoe’s Books has a go at answering the question in a post entitled Sleepers. They use as a case in point John Williams’ Stoner. This book is a bit of a slow-burn phenomenon though it has never broken into truly astronomical bestsellerdom. “Published by Viking Press in 1965, Stoner sold somewhere in the region of two thousand copies before quietly slipping out of print.” Then forty years later, in 2006, New York Review Books published an edition. (It had been quietly reissued once or twice in the intervening years.) In a 2007 review of that edition in The New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein [not John McGahern as Crusoe’s has it] referred to it as “a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away”. Reviews generally don’t sell huge numbers of books — unless, that is, they do. And this review certainly got…