If you want to be a bestselling writer, get on the GCSE syllabus.
That's the message from the Bookseller magazine. It reports that the top-selling book on the syllabus is An Inspector Calls (1945) by J B Priestley, selling 123,059 copies this year that's £1,040,450 in sales. Over the past 25 years, the book has made £11.7m.
The book benefited from then Education Secretary Michael Gove's decision to remove American texts from GCSE set texts in 2014. In the last year before John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was dropped by English boards, it sold 150,000 copies. Over the last year, it has sold only 32,000.
Coming up behind J B Priestley on the gilded GCSE list are those reliable favourites A Christmas Carol (112,755 copies last year), Macbeth (98,055 copies) and Animal Farm (68,964).
It brings to mind Roald Dahl's wise advice to Kingsley Amis.
Dahl told him, ‘What you want to do is write a children's book. That's
