The psychology behind Yesteryear

The first thing I thought when I heard the premise of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear was, “I have to read that.”

The next thing was, “Damn, that’s going to sell a lot of f*cking books.”

I was right.

Even before its release, Yesteryear caused a massive stir, gracing many “most anticipated of 2026” lists and spurring a bidding war for the screen rights between Anne Hathaway, Elizabeth Banks, and the production studios behind them.

As I counted down the days til I could pick up Yesteryear in my local Waterstones, I followed its momentum with interest.

It’s unusual for a debut novel to garner this much attention. Burke has a decent platform as a creator (including a podcast with tens of thousands of downloads per month and over 100k followers on TikTok) but most of the chatter I saw online was fairly agnostic of the author herself.

So why was this book suddenly everywhere?

The short answer, of course, is a well-funded and well-coordinated publicity campaign.

But many books have well-funded and well-coordinated publicity campaigns. I knew it had to be something more. As a writing teacher and aspiring debut novelist, I’m fascinated with why some books breakthrough and others don’t.

In watching Yesteryear’s meteoric rise to the top of the bestseller charts, I knew there was a lesson for authors here, one more helpful than, “Write a really good book.” There are plenty of great debut novels that don’t get anywhere near the attention that Yesteryear has.

From my vantage point, Yesteryear has succeeded not because it’s the next great American novel or because it’s a masterclass in craft. Yesteryear has succeeded because of how its marketing has tapped into human psychology.

My hypothesis is that one of the reasons Yesteryear has achieved such wide commercial success is because Yesteryear is a masterclass in the art of the logline.

For those unfamiliar, a logline is a one-to-two sentence summary of a book, film, or TV show. Think about it like an elevator pitch, if your elevator ride was one floor and less than ten seconds long. Or, better yet, like the single sentence you have to try to decide if a new Netflix show is worth watching.

In other words, the shorter, the better. An effective logline needs to convince you to press play (or add book to cart) as soon as you read it.

The formula for a logline is something like:

When [Inciting Incident] happens, [Protagonist] must [Objective] or [Stakes].

Here’s an example from the Nashville Film Institute for Star Wars: A New Hope: “A spirited farm boy joins a rebellion to save a princess from a sinister imperial enforcer — and the galaxy — from a planet-destroying weapon.”

In that sentence, we’ve got the protagonist (“spirited farm boy”), what he has to do (save a princess and the galaxy), and the stakes (he’s up against a planet-destroyed weapon).

Here’s how the NY Times bestseller’s list describes Yesteryear: “Natalie Heller Mills, a privileged tradwife social media influencer, wakes up to find she is living in the comparatively difficult reality of 1855.”

That version is even a bit long. Elsewhere, I’ve seen Yesteryear described with even fewer words: “Successful tradwife influencer wakes up one morning to find she’s really living in 1855.”

As far as loglines go, Yesteryear’s is one of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s short (under 20 words). It hints at a unique mystery (why is this woman suddenly in 1855?). And, even more impressively, it feeds directly into the human desire for gossip.

Why do humans love stories?

Dr. Paul Bloom, Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, suggests that our love for fiction evolved from a love for gossip.

In Bloom’s book How Pleasure Works, he suggests that humans developed a strong interest in stories about other people because paying attention to social information was crucial to survival.

Basically, we needed to be nosey to survive. It was materially important for us to track relationships and sex and hierarchies. To know who was on the advance, and who was on the retreat.

That evolved into a love for stories: gossip about people who do not exist. We seek out and crave stories about scandal, heroism, romance, wealth, destruction.

Yesteryear’s logline perfectly taps into that love for gossip.

As potential readers, we immediately see that the story is about someone with a high level of social clout: a successful tradwife influencer. And we learn, right away, that that person is going to face a steep collapse in circumstances: waking up in 1855.

“Yes,” we think when we read the logline, “I can’t wait to see how she falls.”

Yesteryear’s broader marketing campaign even goes one step further by aggressively winking at real-life influencers like Ballerina Farm and Ruby Franke.

As the audience, we see all of this packaging and think, “I’m going to get to peek behind the curtain. To watch something private that was never meant for me.” In other words, we’re going to get some excellent gossip.

The strength of that promise alone is enough to spur a potential reader to take action immediately, without learning anything else about the book or author.

So, as writers, what should we take from this?

Do we all need to write books about tradwives to hit the bestseller list?

No.

But we should look at Yesteryear and see what it’s done well: namely, that it’s come up with an impossibly effective marketing pitch in under 20 words.

A pitch that doesn’t just give potential readers the facts (protagonist, inciting incident, stakes) but promises a delicious front-row seat to the things we crave: stories about status, wealth, secrets, and the dramatic reversal of fortune.

The lesson of Yesteryear is not that we need to chase trends or write about controversial influencers.

It’s that the clearer and more psychologically compelling our premise, the easier it becomes for readers to say the four most important words in publishing: “I need to read this.”