The common advice for new writers is to read good books. But while this is always a good idea, when it comes to learning from example, I'd posit you actually learn far more from a BAD book than a good one.

Here's why:

1) Successful execution is often invisible. If a writer has done their job really well, everything will flow together flawless. This is precisely how it ought to be. A story shouldn't draw attention to its moving parts.

But this same success works against you if you're reading to learn. It's hard to see the work when really good writing often looks like there's been no work at all. In a bad book, though, the bumps and flaws are painfully clear.

Basically, it's way easier to look at a bad book and see what went wrong than to look at a good book and see what went right.

2) Not messing up is easier than achieving brilliance.

This might sound like damning with false praise, and I'm sure I'll get pilloried for this, but...not every part of your novel has to be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

I love reading the great works as much as anyone, and obviously you should always strive to do your best, but it is critical to your sanity to remember that every writer has different strengths and weaknesses.

It is perfectly okay to have a serviceable plot that doesn't get in the way, or to have description that just tells us what stuff looks like You don't have to do everything brilliantly to have a beloved book, you just have to not get in your own way.

Every writer has stuff they're good at and stuff they struggle with. This is a duh, but the non-obvious side of this truth is that if you are not naturally good at an element of storytelling, chances are you're going to have a hard time understanding it on the level you need.

This is why I hate the classic "oh, go read the greats!" advice when it comes to getting better at characterization or tension or whatever. It's really hard to learn from the greats!! They make everything look easy! But if it was ACTUALLY easy, I wouldn't be struggling with it!

But if you go and read someone doing something you struggle with REALLY badly, it's amazing how much will suddenly become clear.

I can explain horrible cardboard characters until I'm blue in the face and still not make someone understand. But show that same person a movie with truly awful characters and suddenly the lights come on.

True, this method of understanding won't help you write a GOOD character, but it can help keep you from writing a BAD one, and the first step to being awesome is not to suck.

So if you dream of being a writer & you're looking for reading material specifically to improve your skills, my advice would be to go back to the last book you hated enough to put down and pick it up again with the specific intention of discovering WHY. Why was this book so bad?

Go find one star books in your genre, read them. See if you can figure out what made people hate them so much, and then ask yourself what YOU would do to fix the problems and make the book good. Why learn from your own suffering when you can learn from others?

This is a fun exercise to do with both indie & NY titles. Since selfpub has no barrier to entry, it can be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. New York published books are often trickier and more frustrating because it means the work was good enough to pass at least one editor.

But don't be fooled: there are LOTS of terrible books that get published by major houses. Many of these have redeeming qualities that some editor clearly thought outweighed the bad, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from them. Sometimes you can even learn more!

A solidly terrible book is easy, but a mixed bag is trickier--and thus more challenging--to dissect. I always try to find what the editor saw in the thing and then ask myself do I agree? What made the good parts good enough to outweigh the bad?

Even if I don't agree, there's always a lot to learn from dissecting these decisions, particularly if the "terrible" book in question was a hit. Everyone loves to rag on Twilight and 50 Shades, but these books were massive successes. Clearly, SOMETHING was there.

Challenging yourself to find that "something" in a book you hate will teach you a lot. No one's saying you have to change your style to match what sells, but readers are why we write. Understanding what makes audiences fall in love is part of the art of fiction.