The Author Tells You Why He Wrote this Book When I wanted to write a bestselling novel of my own I consulted many of the popular books on writing technique and found that, although they all seemed to contain useful advice, none of them provided any proof to show that the techniques they so eloquently expounded had been used in bestsellers. This made the alarm bells go off in my head and I wondered if they were in fact giving useful advice or just passing over their own personal opinion. So I decided that if I wanted to learn about writing a bestseller then the best thing would be to forget about the how-to books and go to the source, that is to the bestsellers themselves, and study them for clues on technique. Afterwards I compiled the results of my study as my own guidebook for writing a novel, something I could actually use and consult on a daily basis as I wrote. The results of my analysis, the techniques I had uncovered in the bestsellers, with a lot of supporting statistics and examples from the bestsellers, are in the Explanation section in each chapter of this guidebook. But as well I had created many fill-in-the-blanks guides from these techniques to help myself or any other writer in preparing a successful novel. These fill-in-the-blanks guides are in the Exercise section of each chapter. But, since my guidebook was meant to be a step-by-step daily guide that I could consult as I wrote a novel, all the material was naturally divided into several distinct stages or steps during the writing process. This naturally suggested an organization of the material in the book as steps and, in fact I call the chapters steps rather than the more conventional chapter. But the chapter titles, or titles to each step, are not really long enough to adequately describe what took place at each step. So I put in a "purpose" section as a sort of subtitle to the steps, to elaborate on the title of the step and explain why the step was so important.