What Makes a Bestseller?
"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor." Matthew 13:57 I find myself facing a fascinating, if not frustrating conundrum. How can it be that my long-languishing mystery-thriller about the Shakespeare authorship (writing as John Underwood) has been published in six different languages variously titled The Shakespeare Chronicles, A Thief for All Time , and A Tiger's Heart and yet not in my own native language or country? Salmon Rushdie comes to mind, of course, as well as Solzhenitsyn. And for that matter Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo weren't exactly rock stars in Rome either. But now, it seems, I am. Well, not quite a rock star, but pretty close. I now have a bestseller in Italy, a book that has been rejected for nearly a decade in my home country. So what's up with that? Just as the Shakespeare academics always dismiss those who doubt the Bard's credentials (or, actually, lack thereof) as cranks or merely uninformed, so h