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Reader question: What does this sentence – This book has ‘best seller’ written all over it – mean? My comments: It means that the book has the potential to become a best seller. A best seller is a best selling book, i.e. one that sells the most copies in comparison to all other books on sale. That’s best seller done and dealt with. But the bigger question for us to grapple with is the phrase “have something written all over it”. This expression means something shows a certain quality expressly, as though it’s written in broad letters on its face or over its surface. A child, especially a baby, for instance, wear their innocent expressions on their face. When a baby first attempts to lie, for example, we often hear parents scold them thus: “That’s a lie. You have it written all over your face.” Babies being babies, they cannot hide their emotions. They may be learning to lie through the teeth for the first time but they haven’t mastered the art of deception just yet – their facial expression betrays them. Don’t scold them too hard, though. Parents who treat their children too harshly run the risk of hardening their baby’s tender feelings – both toward you and, possibly, later, toward others. If you scold your child too much for some wrong doing and for not even being able to successfully lie about it, for example, he’ll turn around and train harder. Before you know, he’ll have honed his lying skills and will be pretending that he is not lying when he speaks to you a lot better before he finishes grade school. | 
