ALL AUTHORS write but some master the craft of building the compelling novels that appear on bestseller lists around the world. Chetan Bhagat like Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the successful Indian novelists to show you how to write a novel that might sell a million copies.

This was originally the exclusive right of the western authors. The commercial bestsellers have a special recipe of their own. Settings should be usually topical, trendy and sexy – either newsworthy hotspots or unchartered territory and the main characters should be larger than life. Like Hollywood blockbusters, mega books should be high concepts, with high stakes. There should be multiple characters – relationships, plotting, revision and especially outlining.

Every mega book, with which we are familiar in the Chetan world, was planned and re-planned. It is a grand thing in itself to write a successful blockbuster novel at the very beginning of a career, as Fitzgerald wrote in America his first bestseller, This Side Paradise at the beginning of his career. How can we forget our inimitable Dickens writing his best seller Pickwick Papers? To write a book with blockbuster potential may be difficult, but a bestseller with literary potential is rare. Of course, there are no guarantees here: the reading public is fickle, and, ultimately readers are the ones who make best sellers. Authors need to know where they are going, and a detailed outline will help them map a plan to bring together all the characters and plot lines. Best-selling novels by Follett, Goudge, Harold Robbins or Rowling can’t be compared with the classic writers like Dickens or Fitzgerald, but they know their copies will sell in huge numbers.  

Harold Robbins and J. K. Rowling are the best-selling American authors of all times. During his career, Robbins wrote over 25 best-sellers, selling over 750 million copies in 32 languages. Robbins was the playboy of his day and a master of publicity. He was a renowned novelist but tales of his own life contain even more fiction than his books. What is known is that with reported worldwide sales of 750 million, Harold Robbins sold more books than J.K. Rowling, earned and spent $50m during his lifetime, and was as much a part of the sexual and social revolution as the pill, Playboy and pot. In March 1965, he had three novels on the British paperback bestseller list - Where Love Has Gone at No.1, The Carpetbaggers at No.3 and The Dream Merchants in the sixth spot.

J.K. Rowling is the first self-made billionaire author in history. The series of books she created about a young wizard with a lightning bolt scar have sold more than 400 million copies worldwide and are currently available in 69 languages and 200 countries. While talking with the trillionaire Media Queen in the Oprah Winfrey Show, Rowling reminisced about the sudden success of the Harry Potter books, Rowling revealed the moment she knew her life had changed forever. On her second book tour: "There was this enormous Barnes & Noble and the serpentine queue snaked up the street, up the Barnes & Noble, up through four floors and the organizers took her the back entrance. Rowling also revealed to Winfrey how the best seller authors had to cope up with the pressures of sudden stardom. Chetan’s popularity is on the rise and his fans are multiplying in geometrical progression.

Bhagat’s first book has gone to continue to break book-selling records as some of the fastest-selling books of the period. The last one may also set records. His publishers will now become the highest-grossing movie franchise in Bollywood. The Three Idiots was history-shaking. The popularity of Rowling or Robbins is still beyond Bhagat’s reach. The film, Three Idiots sky-rocketed his fame. But with his Five Point Some One and his recent book Revolution 2020, Bhagat is already on his way to reach the top of the best seller lists of Indian English writers.