Christmas Best Sellers

I do love "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" Here is how she did it. From today's Telegraph.

"I wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves to entertain myself, to explain things to myself, and to sort out some ideas," Truss says. "I had a wonderful time." She saw it more as "a book that would look good on my CV" than a bestseller, and the initial print run in 2003 was a modest 15,000. "But it turned out there were hundreds of thousands of people who, every day, were frustrated to see punctuation misused. All these people had umpteen relatives desperate to buy them something nice for Christmas. As sales neared half a million, I was extremely worried that each pedant in the country would receive 25 copies, and would return 24 of them on Boxing Day."
Ben Schott was equally taken aback by the runaway success of Schott's Original Miscellany, his 2002 almanac of "essential trivia". "People are often saying to me, 'What you did was so clever', as if my first Miscellany was a considered marketing thing - but it really was done as a labour of love."
If you lack both knowledge and originality when it comes to writing your own Christmas bestseller, don't despair. There is a Third Way: the Excremental - a case of where there's muck, there's brass. Put a naughty word on the cover and watch it fly out of the shops. Crap Towns - a skewed appreciation of the 50 worst places to live in the UK - was followed by Crap Cars, Crap Towns II (which should presumably be called Slightly Less Crap Towns) and Crap Cycle Lanes. On my desk at the moment sits The Book of Poo: A Spotter's Guide, which is exactly that.
One of last year's most successful stocking fillers, Is It Just Me, or Is Everything S***?, has spawned a response called It Is Just You - Everything's Not S***, the opening salvo in a philosophical ping-pong game that will doubtless continue for many Christmases yet