How does a best-seller happen, anyway?

This post is brought to you by several overlapping sets of ripples in the Discourse, obviously, but it’s not a response to any of them—it’s just an orthogonal direction that my brain went off in.

As far as I can tell, the single thing that contributes most to the success of a trad-published book is that somebody inside the publishing house gets really enthusiastic about your book, and pushing everybody else to read it, and if they love it they get enthusiastic, and this chain has to repeat all down the fractal tree to booksellers and readers and influencers, and if it happens enough a virtuous cycle is established that we call going viral.