Steve Hely needed to know how to write very well in order to write as miserably as he does in “How I Became a Famous Novelist.” In a satirical novel that is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling fiction, Mr. Hely, who has been a writer for David Letterman and “American Dad,” takes aim at genre after genre and manages to savage them all. You are invited to trawl the mass-market fiction in your local bookstore if you think Mr. Hely is making much up.

Since he needs a pretext for this batch of dead-on parodies, Mr. Hely invents the calculating Pete Tarslaw, hack extraordinaire. And “How I Became a Famous Novelist” needs to give Pete some motivation. So in a rare show of genuine literary laziness, Mr. Hely jolts Pete with the news that his college girlfriend is getting married. This qualifies as instant, just-add-water motivation. Pete wants to be a hugely popular writer so he can make this girlfriend sorry she’s marrying somebody else.

With that, Mr. Hely is off to the races. He has Pete start analyzing popular books to see what makes them sell. That gives Mr. Hely a pretext to lard “How I Became a Famous Writer” with a wide array of supposedly viable titles, main characters, ad lines (“Blood is the new pink”) and crazy premises. Sample thriller plot: “A New York City cop discovers that some Hasidic Jews have found a long-lost 11th commandment that changes everything.”

Here are some sample titles from Mr. Hely’s version of the New York Times best-seller list, which is mimicked with particular glee: “Cumin: The Spice That Changed the World,” “Indict to Unnerve,” “The Jane Austen Women’s Investigators Club” and “Sageknights of Darkhorn.” The list also includes a sci-fi novel with the following synopsis: “In a post-nuclear future inhabited by intelligent cockroaches, Lieutenant Cccyxx discovers there was once a race of sentient humans.”