Whenever someone claims that to be popular, content needs to be good, I tell them the 'Naked Came the Stranger' story.
In 1969, sleazy authors like Harold Robbins were topping the bestseller charts.

A journalist named Mike McGrady wanted to prove that any book with enough sex in it would sell.
So he and 23 more, many colleagues at Newsday, wrote a chapter each of this work which they titled Naked Came the Stranger.

The brief was that every chapter had to have some sex in it, and the book had to be badly written, anything that looked well written was immediately edited out. The book was then sent to the publishers, with McGrady's sister-in-law, Penelope Ashe credited as the author. I

It became a bestseller, and even after revealing the hoax the sales of the book continued to soar.
The next year, after refusing to write a sequel McGrady instead wrote Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Book For Fun and Profit.

Of course, none of this made any difference to the sales of Harold Robbins or any of the other sleaze writers of the period.

The funniest story about this is in the book's Wiki entry. An adult movie appropriated the name, and though it had nothing to do with the book, a group of the authors decided to go see the film.
During an exciting scene, someone shouted 'Author, Author!' and 17 of them stood up!