One of the most common questions we get at scribe is:
“How do I get my book on a bestseller list?”
You are reading: How many books does a bestseller sell
our standard response:
“it would be better to ignore them completely.”
We encourage our authors not to chase bestseller lists, but to focus on the business and personal goals of their book.
this confuses them at first (doesn’t having a best-selling book generate more business?), but once we explain the process and the advantages and disadvantages, the vast majority discard it and focus more on the objectives that are much more shocking to them. them.
In this comprehensive guide, I’ll cover everything you need to know about bestseller lists:
- how the bestseller lists lie (yes, they literally lie)
- how the bestseller lists really work
- why they are not what they seem
- why going after them is a losing proposition for most authors
- what authors should focus on
- and how to address them if you insist on going after them
Note: We’ve worked with over 2,000 authors, including bestsellers like David Goggins and Tiffany Haddish. If you really want to write and publish your book, schedule a consultation to speak with one of our author strategists.
why every “best seller” is always a lie
Bottom line: Every bestseller list is a lie because no bestseller list measures best-selling books.
Let me repeat it so you can understand the seriousness of what it means:
no best-seller list ever measures best-selling books.
Each list measures a limited number of sales in a few places, or worse, it’s a curated list and a small group of people decides what to include on their list. and they choose books based on what they think are “important” books, not based on what actually sells.
This is not my opinion. everyone admits it.
the most important bestseller list is the new york times bestseller list, and they are the worst culprits in this cured elitism. They readily admit that their list only “reflects” books sold at a certain number of bookstores and online retailers across the country, but is not an actual bestseller list.
do you know why they have to admit it publicly? they were sued for it.
for most of the 20th century, they claimed to use a scientific method to count book sales and claimed that their list was reliable and accurate.
and then william blatty wrote a novel called the exorcist (which sold 10 million copies and became a famous movie). it sold more than enough copies to rank high on the list for a long time, but it didn’t initially appear on it.
correctly claimed that the new york times was intentionally excluding him for editorial reasons (the book was considered highly controversial at the time) and claimed that his decision was costing him millions of dollars in sales.
He lost the case. why?
because the defense of the new york times was that “the list was not intended to be an object of compilation of information, but an editorial product”.
The New York Times won the case, in multiple rulings all the way to the Supreme Court, on the grounds that the list is not supposed to be accurate, but it reflects their judgment.
It is a valid legal argument…but it also means The New York Times admitted that their bestseller list is just a popularity contest, and not a list of best selling books.
Essentially, they select who they will and who they won’t put in the “cool kids” club. it’s like high school all over again.
I’ve seen this many times, as has everyone else in the post. You can see this clearly if you have access to Nielsen Bookscan, which is the database that tracks paid sales covering about 70-80% of book stores. i have access and can see how much the new york times list varies from the nielsen report of actual books sold (anyone at the publication can see this, and it’s a known fact).
The same is true, to varying degrees, of the other major national lists: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly.
why (most) authors are better off not looking at bestseller lists
Right now, you might be thinking, “Okay, even if it’s all true, being a bestselling author is still one of my goals and I want it, so I’ll keep trying.”
p>
ok, that’s fine. I’m not telling you it can’t be a goal.
but before you decide to do it anyway, you need to consider two things:
- how hard it is to do and the trade-offs involved (and they are big)
- why you’re so eager to get it
the prerequisites for a successful sales campaign
goals balance each other out in all aspects of life. You can’t dine on pizza, Mexican food, and Italian food. you have to choose one.
The objectives of your book act in the same way. you can’t get everything; you have to focus on one or two goals.
This is especially true for bestseller lists. To have a chance at making the New York Times Best Sellers list, you must do all of these things:
1. get a traditional publishing deal
With the exception of a few fiction genres like romance and horror, the new york times still won’t recognize any book that doesn’t come from one of the big new york publishers as eligible for their list (that’s why I said which is a high school clique mentality).
That’s why most of the self-published or hybrid books that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies over the last decade have never appeared on this list: they refuse to acknowledge them.
example: james altucher’s book, choose yourself. I helped him publish that through my publisher (who became a scribe). it has sold over 500k copies since it came out. It even made the wall street journal bestseller list, but it didn’t make the new york times bestseller list, even though it has sold more than 99% of the books that have appeared on that list since that came out.
Why? Because it’s not through a major New York publishing house, so they won’t count it.
2. have a realistic plan to get 10,000+ pre-orders
This cannot be a hope or a wish. If you don’t have at least 10,000 pre-ordered books, through sales channels that the New York Times considers valid, and count on your list, you probably won’t make the list.
That means books ordered or purchased from a bookstore that reports its sales to the New York Times, or through Amazon or iBooks, or some of the other major channels the New York Times counts. you can’t just order 10k copies from your publisher. they won’t count that.
See Also: The 9 Best Books On Adventure – The Explorer&039s Passage
even if you get a corporation to sponsor you and buy 10,000 copies, you have to route those sales through a channel that the new york times counts, or they’ll ignore them for the purposes of the list (yes, this is a racket total).
And even better, they often won’t count “bulk” sales, meaning those sales must be done individually.
Many “experts” will tell you that you only need to sell 5k books to make it to the bestseller list. that’s not bad, but it doesn’t work many times. in my experience helping dozens of authors work through this process, if you’re an unknown author, the bar is much higher than 5k. the 5k number applies to well-known authors and books that have already been on the list, but is very dangerous for first-time or non-established authors.
how do you get 10,000 pre-orders? There are two basic ways to do this:
- You already have an audience that is willing to reserve your book, or
- spend a lot of money to buy your way into the list. this is basically “cheating” and usually costs over $250k (I explain how it works at the end).
If you don’t have an audience or email list that’s used to buying from you but you think you’re “going to some podcasts and throwing out some tweets” and get that level of pre-orders, you’re delusional. That does not work. only a systematic plan that is very well executed will work.
3. get the general press to validate your book
this is not 100% necessary, but the more “mainstream” press you get, the more book editors at the new york times will consider your book “valid”. I was dead serious when I said that this is a popularity contest, and to be popular, you have to show up in the “right” places (at least the “right” places for them).
when i say “mainstream media” i mean any media source focused on new york city or that the coastal media elite reads and takes seriously. as I keep telling you, they are elitist snobs. they don’t count anything that isn’t in their universe, no matter how much you sell.
By the way, the conventional press hardly ever sells books. it’s just about getting the editors of the new york times to take it seriously, not about selling books.
what’s the trade-off of opting for a best-seller list?
the pros and cons of opting for a bestseller list:
- There’s no guarantee you’ll get a publishing deal: It’s a lot of effort to find an agent to represent you with a traditional publisher, and it’s very difficult to come up with a good book proposal that will attract a publisher. and then they have to offer you a book deal, which today, you’re not going to get without having a huge audience to sell to. many people put in all this work and don’t even offer them a deal.
- your book will take at least 18 months to publish: and that’s from the day you sign the deal, not the day you start to search (and it will probably take longer than that, honestly).
- You no longer own your book – you are literally selling them not only the profits from the book, but more importantly, you are selling them control of your intellectual property. once they have the book, they only care about selling copies. you can no longer do anything with that book that doesn’t involve paying them for the copies. if you want a book that will help you market yourself or your business, this greatly restricts your options.
- they will make you write a book you don’t want: you want to position yourself as an expert in something, and they don’t think it will attract to enough people? They don’t care about you or your business, they only care about selling copies of books, so they will make you go above and beyond. they will constantly make terrible aesthetic decisions that will ruin your content for their purposes, because publishers only care about selling books.
- you do all the work to sell it: they don’t do marketing. I can’t stress this enough: publishers expect you to do all the work of selling the book for them. they don’t have a plan to sell 10k copies of their book. that’s your job.
why these concessions hurt (most) authors
In a nutshell, these tradeoffs aren’t worth it for most authors.
At scribe, most of the authors we work with are not professional writers. they are c-level executives, entrepreneurs, consultants, coaches, speakers and other types of successful people for whom their book is not the final goal: a book is a way to reach another goal.
your book will help them gain authority and credibility in their field, you can attract customers and drive them to your business, you can get them to participate as speakers; it essentially acts as an incredibly effective multi-purpose marketing tool to give them visibility. they don’t need to focus on selling copies, they need to focus on writing the best possible book for their target audience.
And before you ask the question, selling copies and making money off a book are not always the same thing. If you’re using your book as a marketing tool to gain something else (like authority and visibility in your field, or to attract customers to your business), then it’s not selling copies or getting on a list that matters, it’s the impact your book has with your target audience.
Do you want to understand the difference between best sellers and impact? Read this article about what writing a book for Melissa Gonzalez has done.
It tripled incoming leads to her business, doubled her revenue in two years, established her as a keynote speaker, and got her media in every important retail outlet. It was resounding success in all ways for her…and it did it while selling less than 1,000 copies.
Selling copies is important if book sales are your only source of income, which is only true for professional authors. For people in business, a book has an entirely different purpose that often has no correlation to selling copies.
who should try to get a bestselling book?
All of that being said, it makes a lot of sense for professional writers to focus on bestseller lists. professional writers see bestseller lists as a necessary evil in their industry, because they confer status and help them gain credibility.
so they get a smart long-term plan to hit them, they work through the steps and then once they’ve been in a few times, they ignore them. then they focus on selling books directly to fans (to make more money), not getting on best-seller lists (which often means less money).
but for authors whose main source of income is their business and use books as marketing tools, I can tell you: getting to the bestseller list generates very little tangible results for your book.
Your book doesn’t get much more attention. doesn’t mean much to his business. Doesn’t really help sales. it does not reach many more customers or help their marketing.
I’m not saying it has no effect. may have some effect.
Almost all of the impact of making it to a bestseller list is personal and social. there’s not much business or sales impact, and when you compare low impact with high compensation, it’s a poor decision. that’s why almost all of our authors don’t end up chasing it.
why try? for most authors, it’s usually about status
The people we see who are most obsessed with the bestseller lists are the authors who see them as a marker of status that they can achieve that will cause people to see them differently and therefore , feel different about themselves.
for these authors, fighting for a bestseller list is about making them feel important. there is no real business reason. The unstated implication when an author says “I want a bestseller” is usually something like “I want to brag to people about this and feel important about it.”
Look, I’m not judging anyone’s desire to improve their status by writing a best-selling book. My God, I put three books at number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. I am obviously guilty of this desire. my ego is fragile and needs recognition and validation, just like everyone else.
But understand this: A best-selling book may make you feel good for a while, but it won’t earn you any real respect or fill any voids in your soul.
I speak from experience.
And even if you acknowledge that status as the reason you care about being a bestselling author, the best thing you can do is admit it. if you admit it, you can fully focus on that goal, make a realistic plan, and give yourself a realistic chance of reaching it .
how to get on all bestseller lists
Now, if you’ve chosen to ignore my advice, I’ll describe the rules of each bestseller list and how to get your book on them.
Before we get into the best-seller lists and their particular rules, there are two principles that apply to all of them; 1) sales speed and 2) reports.
sales speed is key
in this case, sales velocity is defined as “amount of book sales within a specified period”.
Selling 5,000 books in a year is a pretty solid return, but it won’t land you on any of the big bestseller lists. however, concentrate those sales into one week, and now you’re looking at hitting a lot of those lists.
That’s the key concept to understand for bestseller lists: It’s not about how many books you sell, but how many you sell at any given time. the time frame changes based on this list, but the higher the speed of sales you generate, i.e. the more sales you include in a shorter period of time, the better.
It’s hard to sell 5,000 books in a year. selling 5,000 in a week is ridiculously difficult, as evidenced by the fact that only a very small percentage of all books published each year make it.
In fact, barring some extreme stroke of luck, the only way I’ve seen first-time (or lesser-known) authors make it onto a major bestseller list is by first creating a huge platform with an installed audience that’s waiting for the book. and then sell it to that audience.
Bottom line: Building an audience of buyers for your book before it’s released is the best way to gain the speed of sales needed to make it to the bestseller list.
This is why setting a release date and concentrating your marketing around it is so important to making it to the bestseller list. Setting a launch date creates a separate and manageable window to focus your marketing efforts and use as a mechanism to create this sales velocity.
reporting sales is key
Not all book sales “count” for all lists, because there is no list that actually measures all book sales from all outlets. in the purest sense, there is no such thing as a “real” bestseller list.
See Also: Where to Donate Books When You&039re Ready to Clean Out Your Shelves
Each list has its own method of counting sales, and each list only counts a fraction of the places where books are sold. Amazon only counts books sold on Amazon. The New York Times only counts the physical bookstores it tracks (and some online vendors, but they weight them differently).
I’ll describe the methods of counting each list below, but the point is that you should be aware of how lists count sales, and then focus on creating sales velocity only that way.
bestseller rules matter
Even if the odds are stacked against you, it’s not impossible to do it. But if you want to have a shot at making a list, you need to understand how best-seller lists work, so you don’t accidentally do something that interferes with your chances of making the list.
For example, when Marc Ecko’s book, Unlabel, was published in 2013, it sold over 15,000 copies in its first week. This was more than enough to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, but the publisher had incorrectly listed Ecko’s book as an “art” book rather than a “business” book, and this decision by it alone kept the book off all bestseller lists (well, that’s combined with the fact that the new york times select their list and decided not to include it).
Know the rules of bestseller lists, as breaking them can keep your book off the list, even if it deserves to be there.
the new york times bestseller list
This is considered the most important bestseller list and the only one that people tend to talk about by name. If you make this list, you put “new york times bestseller” at the top of the books. all other charts generally get a “national bestseller” title.
methodology: weekly bestsellers are calculated from Monday to Monday. this is how they describe their methodology on their own site:
Let me explain this to you. the list of times is a list of surveys, not a tabulation of total sales. this means that they survey a selected selection of booksellers to estimate sales. they literally decide which bookstores and retail stores are “important” and then only count those sales, ignoring all other sales. they also have a great weight in the sales of independent bookstores.
This is because they think that the type of people who shop at independent bookstores are more “serious” readers and therefore their reading decisions deserve more attention. I’m serious, they’ve said it in public.
They also focus on individual sales and try not to include wholesale sales in their calculations. they do this to prevent people from buying their entry on the list (which we discuss next). if you sell 1000 copies to a company as part of a speaking engagement deal, this is a great way to move copies and make money, but it’s not very effective for getting listed, because they won’t count you.
And notice how they say they won’t count e-book sales from a single source? this is a direct take from amazon. they don’t like amazon, and they don’t believe ebooks are “real” books, and they don’t want to see their ebook list dominated by amazon’s kindle list.
make no mistake about it: this is all as elitist and snobbish as it sounds.
They recently started including e-books in their lists and still offer deep discounts on e-books that don’t have a print edition. yes, they track them, but they “count” their sales as less.
The reality is that, although the New York Times list is considered the most prestigious, in many ways it is the least related to the real reality of book sales.
tips & tricks:
- For the most part, self-published books don’t count. it must be through a traditional publisher to even have a chance on this list.
- Category and release window have a significant impact on the number of copies required to make it to the nyt bestseller list, but 5,000 copies over any one week period is the minimum. I would recommend 10,000 to be safe.
- have your editor choose a downtime on the post; the fewer big books you have to compete with, the better.
wall street journal bestseller list
This list is not as prestigious as the New York Times list, but at least for business books, it has almost as much social capital. and most of the quirks and elitism of the nyt list don’t apply to the wsj list.
methodology:
how they describe their methodology, from their site:
this is as fair and reasonable as possible, quite contrary to the new york times list.
tips & tricks:
- It usually takes 3,000-5,000 sales to make it to the wsj bestseller list.
- You can absolutely get non-traditional publishers on this list. we did it with james altucher’s choice of yourself, josh turner’s connection and many others.
- not much of a gimmick here. just get the sales and you can get on this list. the important thing is to make sure that all the sales come from different people and are during the opening week. wholesale sales are not counted.
usa today best sellers list
this list used to be pulled directly from nielsen bookscan, but recently they changed and started making it a curated list, more like nyt than wsj. instead of separating the categories of books, use today puts them all in one category.
methodology:
of your website:
tips & tricks:
- this list is not really considered a prestigious list. If you get it right, great, but I’ve rarely seen a book on this bestseller list that isn’t also on the nyt or wsj lists.
- what makes this list so weird is that you’ll see all sorts of things that don’t show up on the other lists (sudoku books, cookbooks, maps, stuff like that) even though they’ve started pulling them out for focus more on “real” books. thus the curatorship.
amazon best sellers list
Personally, I don’t think amazon has a best seller list. what they do is rank the sales of their books. even on the page they call their “best sellers” page, it says “our most popular products based on sales. updated every hour.“
So it’s not really a bestseller list, it’s just the top 100 sellers from their site.
why does this matter?
Well, it’s an essential question if you want to call your book a bestseller. the rules for calling yourself a bestseller in any of the above media are clear.
what are the rules for calling your book an amazon bestseller? is an open question, and many people abuse it.
To show how ridiculous this “best seller list” status is, one of the brightest sellers I know, brent underwood, took a picture of his foot, published it as a book, and hit #1 with she. he detailed everything here, called the whole group of people selling this, and it’s a great read. pull back the curtain on this meaningless status symbol.
methodology: pure sale, only on your platform. updated every hour. It seems they have an algorithm that ranks the books based on a sales pattern. for example, if you sell 10 books in one hour and then none in the next, you don’t drop off your list that hour. drop a few points and keep falling, unless you start selling more books.
nobody knows what amazon’s algorithm is, and anyone who says they know for sure is probably lying (unless they work for amazon). what most people see is that the last 8 hours of sales are weighted evenly, making it a tracking algorithm.
tips & tricks:
- if you want to rank on amazon, focus all your marketing efforts on one day: your launch date, for example.
- on an average launch day, it should take around 500 sales to be in the top 100 of amazon.
- It usually takes about 2,000 sales in a day to reach the top 10 on amazon.
- It takes very few sales to reach #1 in a subcategory. usually 10, depending on the category.
- don’t try to cheat! amazon is in a better position than anyone (by tracking ip addresses and credit cards) to know if you are gaming the system. it won’t get on your list without legitimate sales, so focus your energy there instead of messing with the process. buying 1,000 books yourself will not work. amazon absolutely watches this and will punish you.
the cheat code: buying your list entry
There are services that will guarantee, for a hefty fee, that you get listed. they are very expensive, and for the most part, if you read the fine print, your results are not really guaranteed (despite what they claim in their ads).
I’ve never used one directly, but I’m well acquainted with the top three companies, because we’ve had clients use them and the results have been mixed. sometimes they work fine, other times they don’t.
I reckon you buy a lot of books that make it to the bestseller list. at least 50-100 per year, on average over the last decade.
And as I said before, buying a spot on the list is a pure ego game. If spending $200,000 (yes, that’s what it costs, at least) to see your name on the NY Times Best Seller list is worth it, then go for it. just be honest with yourself about what you’re doing and why.
if you want to learn more about buying your way to the bestseller list, the wsj has a good article here and forbes writes about it here.