The Bestseller Experiment Bestseller Experiment

We caught up with fantasy bestselling author and super nice dude Brandon Sanderson and in a jam-packed episode he answered our listeners’ questions and let us in on some of his inspirational top tips for productive writing…

We've reached a monumental episode – the 500th – on the Bestseller Experiment podcast! To celebrate, Mark Desvaux goes deeper than ever to uncover and countdown the most important, life-changing reasons why we write, drawn from seven and a half years and over 600 hours of interviews with bestselling authors.

Michael Connelly is one of the most successful crime authors in the world with over 60m book sales. Having just released his new Harry Bosch thriller, he shares secrets about developing characters & writing book series – in the back of a London cab!

Karen Storey's name has become synonymous with success in short story writing. With an impressive one-in-three win rate out of over 40 competitions last year, Karen exemplifies what it means to blend passion with strategy in writing. In this episode, Karen shares the secrets of her success, including the importance of great endings. In a final twist, we surprise Karen with the Bestseller Academy All-Star Award for her outstanding achievements.

Ben Aaronovitch started writing for Doctor Who and became the author of the bestselling Peter Grant series that started with Rivers Of London in 2011 and has been hugely successful, regularly hitting the Sunday Times bestsellers top ten. We were delighted to get Ben for a conversation full of fireworks.

Jacqueline O’Mahony was named Young Irish Writer of the Year by the Irish Examiner when she was fourteen. After a BA, MA and PhD she worked at Condé Nast, Vogue and Associated Newspapers as an arts editor. Her debut novel, A River in the Trees, was nominated for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Not the Booker Prize in 2020. Her latest book Sing, Wild Bird, Sing is set during the Irish Famine, and is a story about the indomitable will to survive—and to flourish—against nearly impossible odds. It sold over 40,000 copies in its first 5 days and has over 17,000 reviews on Amazon.