How To Write a Worst-Seller

A quick look around your local bookstore, gas station, or garbage can will make it pretty clear that any idiot can write a bestseller. In fact, any idiot can write bestsellers about how to write a bestseller. But relatively few idiots can tell you how to write a worst-seller, and we are those idiots. The basic idea is to subvert all the advice you're used to hearing; if someone tells you that you should cater to your audience, then you should cater to your enemies. If someone tells you that you can't call your novel Great Expectations because that title appears to be taken, then you should punch him right in the nose. This advice, as well as more tidbits you'll find below, will guarantee your novel a place of ignominy and shame for generations to come.

Start with an idea. No, wait: fifty ideas.
Publishing professionals will tell you that you should have an elevator pitch—a way to express your basic idea ("Boy Meets Girl," "Boy Versus Girl," "Everyone Versus Octopus") in a sound bite short enough for one elevator ride. Well, your pitch should be more like an elevator that jams between floors and then catches fire. It should be lengthy, exhausting, and ultimately hopeless. You should include every idea you've ever had, even ideas that contradict the other ideas. Anyone listening to your pitch should go from flatly uninterested to criminally hostile over the course of your description. "Oh hrm, I see, uh huh," they will mutter, angrily slurping their coffee. "BOY THAT'S FANTASTIC," they will eventually conclude, pouring coffee into their eyes to escape this conversation.
"Sam discovers that he knows magic and is adopted and his parents were from Atlantis but his grandparents were from Notlantis but that's not important because he's the only one that can surf into the volcano and save Futureopolis and and"

Write some uncompelling characters.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that all your characters have to want something, even if it's just a glass of water. He was, of course, only making a point. Well, make it your point that you can develop motivations so boring that your reader dies.
Will is a water salesman. He works at a water factory. His motivation is that he wants a glass of water, which he gets. His love interest, Beth, is a person. Her motivation is that she wants to go to sleep. She does.

Give them fatal flubs.
The idea of the fatal flaw was described by Aristotle, and literary historians are willing to murder each other over what exactly he meant by it, which is an example of a fatal flaw. Your goal is invent a fatal flaw so irrelevant that it will never factor into the story, or a flaw so common that it does not bear mentioning (e.g. a man who dislikes being shot with bullets, or a dinosaur who is illiterate).
Nimit is a Cambodian fisherman who is afraid of space stations.

Forget to describe anything.
A reader's sense of immersion comes from envisioning, with all of his senses, the world you have created. Screw your reader. He can go immerse himself in a lake for all you care.
Jane woke up in a room. Her boyfriend was there. She left for her job, which was at work. Outside, it was a day.

Describe everything.
This alternative approach involves describing everything you can, even the things that your reader already understands or couldn't possibly care about.
Jane's window was made of glass, which is a clear silicate solid that is used to make many things, such as windows. There was rain falling on the glass, because outside, it was raining, which is when liquid precipitation falls from the atmosphere in the form of raindrops. One of the raindrops that fell on Jane's window was composed primarily of water, or H20, which is a compound commonly found on Earth. In this way it was exactly like all the other raindrops.

Advance the plot relentlessly toward nothing.
If you are in danger of accidentally advancing the plot, throw in a bunch of pointless digressions that do not matter whatsoever. This is called "writing for television."
Kim Bauer got lost in the woods!

Rely on as many gimmicks as possible.
If your book is, against all odds, turning out not to be terrible, simply shoehorn in as many gimmicky twists as you can.
Jake woke up in his hotel room. He was dead. He mulled over the recent revelation that he was his own father, from the future. Then he woke up again. It had been the Matrix all along.

Any other advice?

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