The Worst Bestsellers Podcast Takes On Authors Like Stephen King, James Patterson and Jodi Picoult

Rachel Kramer Bussel: How did you get the idea for the podcast?

Kait: We had been talking about doing a podcast on and off for a little while. We met on the internet as teens and spent our friendship hopping around different social media platforms. This felt like a project we could do together even though we lived in different parts of the country. We’re both big book people, so doing something around books felt natural.

Renata: We’re both big fans of Mystery Science Theater, and we knew and enjoyed other “bad movie” podcasts like How Did This Get Made? and The Flop House. In fact, we kind of figured the market was glutted with bad movie podcasts. But we’re also big readers, and we didn’t think there were any other bad book podcasts. (It turns out that there are some others, some of which pre-dated Worst Bestsellers, but we didn’t know that in 2014.)

What does the phrase “Worst Bestsellers” mean to you? How do you quantify them as the “worst?”

Renata: It’s mostly a kind of cute wordplay. Fairly regularly we do read books that we enjoy—sometimes there are books that have really bad reputations, like the Twilight saga, that we actually end up thinking are pretty enjoyable, even though those books have plenty of one-star “worst book ever” reviews online. We also don’t always end up choosing books that are literal New York Times bestsellers, if we’re looking for something to be representative of a particular genre (like dinosaur erotica or movie novelizations). But in general, we’re looking for books that are fairly popular by someone’s standards, but also books that aren’t generally thought of as being very good.

Kait: We definitely picked the title because it was cute and catchy, which does lead to misunderstandings sometimes and makes us extra careful when we do a good book. I remember when we read Alyssa Cole’s excellent romance novel A Princess in Theory, I said about fifteen times before every tweet about it, “Worst Bestsellers is the name of our show, this is a Best Bestseller, it’s so good and we loved it, please don’t judge it based on our title!”

How do you select which books to post about?

Kait: We try to choose books and authors that are either really popular, really problematic, or really zeitgeisty. We don’t want to punch down, so we try to avoid midlist authors or people who aren’t very well known unless we know it’s going to be a positive episode. The point of the show is to try and examine what’s appealing about these books, so our goal is to choose something that’s either representative of a genre or at least vaguely in the cultural awareness.

Renata: We also get requests from our listeners and our guests, so again, as long as it doesn’t feel like punching down, we’re happy to follow a guest’s curiosity or passion. Sometimes we’ll decline requests if we don’t feel comfortable. We had a lot of requests for us to read The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump and we mostly just didn’t want to spend that much extracurricular time thinking about that guy.

Is there the one episode you’d have someone who’s never heard the show listen to, and why?

Kait: We’ve learned a lot about podcasting as we’ve gone along (we’re still learning!), so I tend to think our later episodes are stronger. That being said, our format hasn’t changed very much, so people frequently find it’s most fun to jump in with a book they’re already familiar with. Some of our most popular episodes are the ones on Modelland by Tyra Banks, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, Killing Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, Dark World by Zak Bagans and Kelly Crigger, and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

Renata: I agree that our recent episodes are better—of course it would be awful if we were somehow getting worse at this as we went along! Nevertheless, I truly enjoy all of our discussions of the Twilight saga. I think the Twilight saga really encapsulates a lot of what our podcast is going for: they’re books with bad reputations and bonkers premises, and in some cases truly problematic content, but also there’s a lot of real fun to be had with them.

Your description says the books you cover are “of questionable quality,” but you also cover books by authors you’re fans of, such as Nora Roberts. How do you balance the more positive episodes with the more critical?

Kait: I think for my own emotional and mental health it’s good to take breaks or throw in a couple books that we don’t hate every once in a while. There’s obviously a lot of negativity in what we do, even if 95% of it is fun and in fun, and doing two episodes a month basically halves my time to read for fun. It’s nice to reclaim that time during Nora Roberts Month or during Flashback Summer, where we read kids’ books we loved when we were younger. It also, I hope, keeps us from sounding too cynical.

Renata: Sometimes we’re genuinely surprised to like the books we read, which is always a delight. We really do try to approach every book we read with an open mind. Just because “everyone” says it’s bad doesn’t necessarily mean that it is bad. Or just because it’s “bad” doesn’t mean it’s not a fun read.

You cover a mix of fiction and nonfiction, children’s books and adult books. What are the common factors among the genres and categories you cover?

Renata: I suppose everything we read has some factor that leads some segment of the population to assume it’s a bad book, whether that factor is a celebrity author, an absurd premise, or a basis in fanfiction. Something we’re aware of is that books by men are much more likely to be taken seriously in the mainstream. We’ve read some really terrible mystery/thriller/action books written by men but none of them have been met with the widespread cultural derision of things like Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, or pretty much any romance novel.

Kait: It’s hard to find something that ties them all together aside from being on our show. I guess I’d say that they’re all things that the public at large have preconceived notions about, even without reading them. Sometimes, in reading them, we confirm those suspicions, but just as often we discover that a book wasn’t what we expected at all.

Is there a typical listener profile?

Kait: Librarians? Book types in general, and largely Millennial and Gen X women, I would wager.

Renata: Yeah, we really do think of ourselves as being kind of a public service for librarians, booksellers, and teachers who might be curious about books but don’t have the time/desire to actually read them. We also hear from a lot of pet owners that their pets react strongly to hearing Duarte’s Corner, when my cat gets to weigh in. I bet we have more cats listening to our show than the average podcast.

You allow listeners to suggest a title for you to cover. Have you done episodes about books based on listener suggestions?

Kait: We have a suggestion form on our website that we mine for suggestions while scheduling, and whenever people tweet at us to cover something, we note it, especially if multiple people are asking us to do the same book. We’ve done a lot of episodes based on those suggestions.

Renata: We have used a lot of listener suggestions! Mostly we will turn down suggestions if we feel that the book/author in question is not well-known enough, or if we are uncomfortable making light of the book’s subject material. (There have been a lot of bad books written about the Holocaust, but it feels wrong to do a humorous podcast episode about any of them.)

What’s been the most fun episode you’ve done, and why?

Kait: My memory is terrible and we’ve been doing this for almost five years, so it’s hard to pick just one! Any episode where we like the book is fun, because we get genuinely excited about it. And any episode we do with our editor Becca as the guest, because I think she’s hilarious and the three of us have a pre-existing rapport that makes doing the episode really easy and natural.

Renata: Yes, episodes when our guest are Becca or other close friends are a blast. I also have enjoyed all of the crossovers we’ve done with hosts of other book-themed podcasts like By the Book (on Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray), I Don’t Even Own a Television (on Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson), and Overdue (on How The Secret Changed My Life by Rhonda Byrne), because it’s fun to compare the different vibes all of us bring to the table.

But maybe the all-time most fun I’ve had on the show was the special anniversary episode we did where our friend Danielle created a Twilight-themed D&D game for us to play. It had been our tradition to read a book from the Twilight saga each year on our anniversary, but as we entered our fifth year of the podcast, we were out of new Twilight content so we had to create our own.

Have you ever gotten feedback directly from the authors whose books you’ve discussed?

Renata: The guy who wrote Hope Never Dies, the Obama/Biden mystery novel, tweeted a sad face emoji at us. Other than that, mostly by design we’re reading books by authors who we hope are too popular to ever notice that we’ve discussed them.

Kait: I think the lady who did the Outlander cookbook tweeted about us too? But without actually listening to the episode, which was largely positive, so that was kind of funny.

Renata: Although I just remembered that in that episode I kept accidentally calling her Colonel Sanders so maybe she did listen and was mad about that. Sorry, ma’am.

Do you have anything else to add?

Renata: I’d like to encourage people to try reading books outside their usual comfort zone. Get them from the library so you can return them if it turns out they’re not your cup of tea, but who knows what gems you might find. Also, please do not tell any of the authors of books we’ve read about our podcast. This isn’t for them!

Kait: I’d also say to take a moment to think critically about why everyone is dunking on something before you jump on the bandwagon. Sometimes they deserve it, but even if they do, a lot of the mocking or concern trolling boils down to “This a thing that women like, so it must be silly and/or dangerous for them.” Just think for a moment about why it’s cool to mock Twilight but not James Bond.