I'm a Thriller Author Who Figured Out the Secret to Actually Selling Books

And it’s not ideal—because it’s all about the things you can’t control

USA TODAY bestselling author Rob Hart, author of thrillers Assassins Anonymous and newly released The Medusa Protocol, shares the lessons he’s learned about hitting the bestseller list

In June 2024, my novel, Assassins Anonymous, hit stores. Imagine John Wick getting into a recovery program for killers. As elevator pitches go, I may have peaked; that one is pretty good.

The book got some great reviews, but not a ton of press. It sold 1,800 copies in the first week, landing at 144 on the USA TODAY bestseller list. This was the first time I ever hit a list, so I was pretty psyched.

The paperback was scheduled to come out this past May 27, and I figured it’d be like any paperback release: I might see a small spike in sales before things settled back down.

But the metrics flipped when my editor reached out to let me know Barnes & Noble had chosen the paperback as their June 2025 mystery and thriller pick.

That meant a massive print order, and prime placement in every single Barnes & Noble in the United States. Google tells me there are 667 locations. That’s a lot. Employees would be handselling it and posting about it on social media.

It would come with an added bonus, too: in the back of the book would be a teaser for the sequel, The Medusa Protocol, which comes out June 24.

From a marketing perspective, the timing could not be better, and it created a seismic shift in expectations.

Penguin Random House has an author portal where you can log in to see how many copies you’ve sold of a given book. It breaks things down by print, audio, and ebook, and it updates every Monday morning, so I tend to start my week by logging in and looking at my sales numbers.

This is not a healthy thing to do. I don’t recommend it.

So, Assassins Anonymous came out a year ago. Between June 2024 and May 2025, it sold about 12,000 copies.

The following number probably isn’t exact, because there’s some lag in the reporting, but as of June 16, thanks to the Barnes & Noble promotion, Assassins sold more than 14,000 copies.

In June. In two weeks.

I sold more copies in two weeks than I did in a year.

The first week of the promotion, Assassins hit the USA TODAY bestseller list again, coming in at 18.

In response to some of this, a reporter for a publishing newsletter reached out to ask me about what makes a bestseller. They asked me what I would tell other authors hoping to hit the list.

And the best I’ve got is: get Barnes & Noble to pick it for a promotion.

I’m not even entirely sure how that happened. It’s not like I lobbied for it. The right people read it, decided they wanted to highlight it, and here we find ourselves.

Which has got me thinking about how hard we work, as authors, to move the sales needle. And how goddamn hard it is.

Social media doesn’t sell books. Neither does going to conventions, speaking gigs, teaching—all of these things can sell a few books, but they don’t help you make that leap to mass consumption, spreading through the public consciousness like a virus.

Based on my years working in publishing—currently as an author and formerly as the head of a small press—there are only a handful of things I can think of that ensure bestseller status:

o Get picked for a major bookstore promotion, or a book club, like Oprah’s or Reese Witherspoon’s

o Hope the media anoints your book, granting it so much placement and chatter, people feel left out if they don’t get it

o See it move quickly through the Hollywood crucible to a finished product (which is rare)

o Scandals work; see also: American Dirt, or whatever “literary outlaw” James Frey is currently selling

o Try already being a celebrity

o Get BookTok to make it a thing (I’ve got nothing on that, I don’t understand BookTok)

There are other pathways, for sure, but these seem to be the best bets.

And the thing they all have in common is: you can’t control them. All you can do is buy a bottle and run around on a sunny day, hoping to catch lightning.

Some folks say publishers ultimately decide which books get coverage and which don’t. And there’s some truth to that. Sometimes publishers will shift resources away from a book that isn’t tracking too well, over to something that looks like more of a sure thing.

But if you read the last piece I wrote for Open Secrets, my novel The Warehouse was supposed to be a bestseller. I did TV interviews, everyone covered it, the reviews were glowing.

And it didn’t click with readers.

Everything was right, it just didn’t make that final, imperceptible leap. I wrote another book after that, then got dropped by my publisher (which also happens to be my current publisher, so if you want the full story on that, go read that piece).

How did I turn things around?

How did I go from bomb to bestseller?

I kept writing; it was the only thing I could control.

The Medusa Protocol is my tenth book. That doesn’t count collaborations and other projects. Because I kept showing up, I’ve slowly built a small semblance of an audience. Among that audience have been some incredible sales reps and reviewers who have gone to bat for me.

Which is why I tell people—students of mine, other writers, anyone who will listen—that the common denominator among successful authors is not whether you have an MFA, it’s not who you know. It’s who kept showing up and doing the work.

There’s this saying that luck happens with preparation meets opportunity. But there’s another phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s Latin: Inveniam viam aut faciam. “I will find a way, or make one.”

For the last few years I feel like I’ve been holding on by my fingertips, and one sharp turn would send me flying. But I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. This is all I want. I almost quit a few times after major setbacks—but then I got back to work.

Seeing Assassins Anonymous find a bevy of new readers, knowing that the sequel will probably sell at a decent clip, I feel some degree of serenity, for the first time in a long time. I feel like I can breathe. I can take fewer editorial gigs, I can say no to projects and reclaim some of my free time, I can write the kind of stuff I want to write.

It took eleven years to get here.

But even though I feel good today, that doesn’t mean I’ll still feel this way tomorrow.

Last week, a Barnes & Noble in New Jersey asked me to come out and sit at a table and sign stock. I’ve done that dance before, and it’s usually a pretty lonely endeavor. I feel a bit like a dancing monkey, awkwardly sitting there, smiling and saying hi to people walking by who don’t really seem to want to engage. But my philosophy has always been that this is a game of inches, and if I sell one more book than I would have, then it’s worth the investment.

I ultimately signed four books over the course of an hour and a half.

Two things happened I want to tell you about:

The first is a young man picked up the book, read the first chapter while standing next to me, completely in silence. Then he asked me, “Do you kill people?” He said the first chapter felt very intimate in its detail. I said no, but I do fight train. He nodded, put the book down, and walked out of the store.

No matter how good things get, there will always be moments that humble you. This is a good thing.

But also, a young woman told me she’d just completed her MFA and was working on an Afro-gothic horror novel. I suggested a few authors she might want to check out, and we talked a little about writing, and I asked her if I could offer some advice.

She consented, so I told her some of what I wrote about here. I told her to be stubborn. I told her to keep at it no matter what, because this business will burn the heart out of you. Not intentionally, that’s just what happens when art meets shareholders.

I told her about that common denominator—the successful authors are the ones who keep showing up through failure.

And there will be a lot of failures.

I told her I hoped that wasn’t too heavy to hear, but she seemed relieved, and she thanked me for telling her that.

Which is why I keep saying this stuff. Social media is a lie—when all you see are the deal memos and the option announcements in Variety, it’s easy to think you’re the only one having a hard time.

The truth is, we all are.

Tomorrow, the day after, sometime later this week—something’s going to happen to fuck with my current state of serenity.

But over a long enough timeline, another good thing will happen to lift me up.

All this is to say: just keep going, and good luck out there.

Rob Hart is the USA TODAY bestselling author of the Assassins Anonymous series. The latest installment, The Medusa Protocol, is in stores now. He also wrote The Warehouse, The Paradox Hotel, the Ash McKenna crime series, the short story collection Take-Out, the novella Scott Free with James Patterson, the comic book Blood Oath with Alex Segura, and the novel Dark Space, also with Segura. His next book, available in January, is Detour, co-written with Jeff Rake, the creator and showrunner of TV’s Manifest. He’s also a freelance editor and a writing mentor in Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA. Find more at www.robwhart.com.