In the research above, I made some comments that caused at least one reader to say, "Whoa, are you sure about that?" In particular I pointed out that in the top 50 movies, although we often see the story told from multiple points of view, all of these movies tend to put most of their focus on the male characters' journey.

Does that mean that you have to focus on men? Really? More than half the people on this planet are women―about 51 percent of them.

So my reader pointed out that the data may be biased, and I agreed that she is absolutely right. In fact, while writing the article, I almost wanted to stop and give you a caveat, but I decided against it. You see, as someone who was trained as a scientist, I think that there is value in saying, "This is what I observe," regardless of whether I believe the observation will lead to valid conclusions.

At the same time, I want you to understand that I strongly believe that the data does tend to be biased. Here are a couple of reasons why: first, if you look at the list of the top 50 movies of all time, you'll note that they are predominantly special-effects heavy movies. The budgets on such movies are huge―$100 to 200 million.

Let's take one of bestselling movies of all time from this list: Titanic. The movie went way over budget and cost more than $200 million to make. The special-effects budget was huge. My good friend Grant Boucher created the digital ship used in the sinking scene and won an Oscar for it, so I know some of the effort that he put into that effect. Cameron had tried a couple of different ways to get the picture he wanted―creating a large model ship and then using a real ship. Neither delivered the image that he had hoped for, so Grant spent six months secretly building a 3-D model of the ship, and then slipped some footage with it into the mix. Add in a $6 million program to create digital water and―voila!―you're winning Oscars.

But in order to earn back the huge amounts of money spent on such a movie, the studio had to advertise heavily. In fact, the movie was released simultaneously in Europe, Asia, and England all on the same weekend in order to begin retrieving the profits.

On a normal movie that goes out for theatrical distribution the advertising often runs about $8 million. But that money can easily go up to $20 million, and of course if you've got $200 million into the film, you can easily spend $100 million on advertising.

So movies with huge budgets get heavy advertising―which then makes them into hits.

When you see Star Wars Episode VI on the list of top-selling films of all time, or Pirates of the Caribbean 3, what it really means is that the studios went on an all-out blitz on advertising in order to garner viewers.

Movies were filmed, but maybe books were written in conjunction with the film―as many as 27 different books were written to help hype Star Wars Episode I. These books then act as free advertisements for the film. Video games also get made, advertised, and unleashed on the public. Thus when the last Matrix film was made, a record $55 million was spent on the game tie in. On top of those forms of advertising, entire magazines maybe started in order to hype the coming films (an old friend of mine founded the company that initiated this form of advertising years ago by creating the first Star Wars magazine). T-shirts and toy lines are created so that you will see movie ads in clothing and toy stores―not to mention the other merchandise, such as key chains, hats, wallpaper, underwear, and so on. Then there are the cross-promotions―the free Star Wars toys at McDonalds, the Shrek ads displayed on Pepsi cans, the new cereal lines, and so on.

Given the hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisement, it's no wonder that the movie does well.

Of course, all of these ads and cross promotions are easily justifiable. If a movie has enough multimedia appeal it can pull in billions of dollars. The Star Wars movies, for example, might make the filmmakers a few hundred million, but the Star Wars merchandise tie-ins make Lucas $3 to 5 billion per film.

But what about films that don't have game tie-ins? If they had huge advertising budgets, would they make a lot of money? I suspect so. For example, lots of kids watched High School Musical over and over again. If Disney were to take High School Musical 4, release it in theaters, and give it the same promotional budget that they gave to Pirates of the Caribbean 3, the box office sales would likely go through the roof.

So the "bestseller" list is skewed toward big-budget films.

Other factors also lead to skewed information. For example, in most cases these movies are made by men for men. The producers, the studio execs, the directors―all of them are men. There might be a female director somewhere in the top 50 but I don't recall any. So men tend to create the kinds of movies that will appeal to other men. That's why, I believe, that even though the main plot line in each of the top 50 movies is slanted toward a hero-journey story, I strongly suspect that it doesn't have to be.

As evidence of that, look on the bestseller list for books recently. At the time that I'm writing this, USA Today has Stephenie Meyer at four of the ten top spots, and her books are definitely not slanted toward the male audience.

The same skew toward the male audience can be seen in the videogame industry. If you go to E3, you'll see thousands of games that are being developed by various companies―almost all of which are targeted toward the young male audience. Why? Because the guys who run the videogame companies are young men! But if you look at the games that really succeed hugely you'll note that the games are aimed at a much wider audience―male and female―and are skewed particularly to younger players.

So one has to wonder just how valid the observations I made about the films are. The answer is that they're perfectly valid If you want to make a blockbuster movie. The studios are still run by men. The producers are mostly men. Most of the biggest directors are men, and the truth is that these guys in Hollywood tend to be very superstitious about films. If something has worked before, they think it will work again. So if they're going to back a film, it had better fit into the parameters set by other blockbusters.

But the observations aren't all necessarily valid for other mediums―such as books and television.

Given this, let's go to another medium and see if we can learn something from it. Here is a list of the current top 10 shows (at the time of my writing this).

Big Bang Theory

Person of Interest

Two and a Half Men

NCIS

Revolution

Voice

Chicago Fire

The Following

Carrie Diaries

Vegas

In this list, we see something interesting. The amazing thing to me is how this list of last week's top shows differs in content from our movies. In short, we don't have any alternate world science fiction television shows among the top 20, whereas the movie results would predict that we should have them.

Television tends to be cheap. The special effects needed to create an alternate world show are too costly to use. So the closest that we get in our list is a near-future science fiction piece. In the past few years, television shows like Heroes, Buffy, and The Sarah Conner Chronicles have been high in the top ten, but they also used minimal effects. But on this week, reality crime dramas seem to be the big ticket. It makes me wonder if I should be writing murder mysteries.

But the answer is no. I just gave you the results for last week, not for the entire year. The results for each week are skewed because we have more than one television "season" per year.

In short, if you study television, you'll notice that shows that get a lot of hype during the week tend to come out near the top of the polls at the week's end. Crime dramas, comedy, and reality television all top our charts.

As in the movies, advertising proves its worth.

Now, you can get lots of television ratings information over the web. You can get it sorted by viewers in various regions, by color, and so on. You can get lists of the best soap operas, the top crime dramas, or favorite game shows. You can even get lists that show the most popular science fiction and fantasy tales. Luckily, you can even get actual numbers that show how many viewers watch a particular show.

But beware: television seasons are short nowadays, running only for a few months. So American Idol will be at the top one week and off the charts the next simply because there is no new episode coming out.

So what good does it do you to understand that the vice presidential debate pulled in 30 million viewers? Well, it's great news if you're releasing a book on Mitt Romney that week. It means that you'll have 30 million people who might be curious to learn a little more about him. As a writer it can give you a hint at how large your potential audience might be and it can determine the date for when your book should be released. If you knew six weeks in advance when the debate was coming, you'd make sure to do some huge promotions at that time―speaking on Rush Limbaugh and whatnot.

More than that, knowing that a television show is huge can let you see if you have a ready-made audience. So in 2011 the Game of Thrones had the number one spot in fictive television if I recall, with 40 million viewers watching the opening episode.

So imagine that you wrote a book that would appeal to that audience. We know that only about 50 percent of the people in this country will read any book this year. Given that information you can estimate that your book has a potential audience of 20 million people. That's a huge audience. With enough advertising, you could make millions on that book. But of course you won't be able to reach all of your prospective buyers. After all, you don't own your own television network. You can't advertise to them in a manner that is cost-effective. But an audience that size does give you something to build on.

Let's go back to one of our bestselling authors in the U.S., Stephenie Meyer. She built her audience this way, whether she knows it or not.

You see, the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on May 20 of 2003. Buffy usually held a viewership of 4 to 6 million people per week, sometimes spiking much higher than that, and it ran for six years. What does that have to do with Stephenie Meyer?

Well, its departure created a void for fans of the show. But less than two weeks later, on June 2 of 2003, Stephenie Meyers records that she had a vivid dream that led her to begin writing Twilight. In her dream, a young woman was having an engrossing conversation with a vampire that loved her.

Stephenie's timing was excellent. Other marketing factors were also in play. A popular movie series based upon Anne Rice's tales had just finished with Queen of the Damned (2002), and so vampires were hot. Meanwhile, the movie Underworld―with the vampire versus werewolf conflict used by Meyer―was just beginning to advertise in the theaters for its September release. So when Stephenie sent her book in, it was precisely the kind of thing that plenty of readers were looking for.

In fact, when Stephenie took my writing class at BYU in 2001, we talked a bit about how she should approach the markets, and we discussed how the timing for this kind of novel would work well.

From time to time, we see a television series that has wide appeal and which gets canceled anyway (think Touched by an Angel, Heroes, or Buffy). When that happens, it leaves audiences wanting.

If you're an enterprising writer, you can step in and fill the void in the lives of the shows' fans.