"True to his word, the author manages to spell it all out for us in down-to-earth detail with nary a hint of academia clogging up the process."�

It's a simple premise: take a dozen bestsellers from across the 20th century, turn them inside out and upside down to see what makes them tick, analyze all their similarities and, voila!, you have the recipe for writing a bestseller.

Or do you?

Author and literature professor James W. Hall decided to find out and with some smart forethought"”not least the title's clever play on the hugely popular "chick lit"� genre"”he may just nudge this albeit nonfiction book into selling quite a few copies itself.

The book's other clever hook, of course, is its inevitable appeal to the...