for the past few weeks, scandal has rocked the august institution of the new york times bestseller list. and it has happened not just once but twice.
On August 24, an unknown book by an unknown author and unknown publisher reached number one on the Young Adult Hardcover Best Sellers list. But as a rudimentary group of researchers congregating in the Twitter community discovered, it wasn’t because too many people were reading the book. Lani Sarem’s Handbook for Mortals bought its place on the list, they concluded, with the publisher and author strategically ordering large quantities of the book from stores that report their sales to the New York Times. shortly after, the times removed the book from its ranking.
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and on september 4, regnery books, the conservative imprint that publishes ann coulter and dinesh d’souza, among others, charged that the new york times bestseller list is biased against conservatives. why, he demanded, was d’souza’s new book the big lie: exposing the nazi roots of the american left ranked seventh on the times hardcover nonfiction list when data from nielsen bookscan, according to the Regnery’s interpretation, did you suggest that it should be the first? Regnery concluded that the New York Times was actively colluding against conservative headlines and announced that he would sever all ties with the Times.
to understand how any of this could happen: how different lists could contain different titles, in a different order, how an unknown book could make its way onto a best-seller list, how a best-seller list could have a political impact bias, and why any of these things matter, you need to understand how different bestseller lists work, what makes the new york times bestseller list unique, and the purpose of bestseller lists in the world of book publishing.
why is it so important for a book to be named a bestseller?
There are several bestseller lists out there, and most authors appreciate being named to any of them, but the new york times bestseller list is considered the most prestigious, and it’s certainly the best. better. -known.
Becoming a New York Times bestseller has a measurable effect on a book’s sales, especially for books by first-time authors. According to a 2004 study by economics professor Alan Sorensen, appearing on the New York Times bestseller list increased sales for first-time authors by 57 percent. on average, it increased sales by 13 to 14 percent.
In addition to the listing’s effect on sales, it offers prestige. if your book is listed in the new york times, even if only for a week in the last space of the tips, instructions and suggestions section; miscellaneous category: he can call himself a new york times bestseller for the rest of his life. you can put that honor on the cover of all your other books. if someone ever insults you, you can say, “well, have you written a new york times bestseller?” (Not recommended strategy if the person who insulted you was Danielle Steel.)
And for the rare book that manages to establish a sufficient presence on various bestseller lists, a self-sustaining momentum develops. Not everyone who bought a copy of Fifty Shades of Gray expected to like what they read, but Fifty Shades became such a ubiquitous cultural force that a lot of people wanted to have an opinion about it anyway. that inspired them to buy it and that meant the book stayed on the list.
However, the prestige of the list has its practical limits. “I guess I’d have to say it’s a little easier for me to get deals now.” new york times bestseller hillary monahan told the bnteen blog. “Which means it’s another gold star on my report card, but my work still holds up competitively against other mid-list authors.”
At the end of the day, bestseller lists work as shorthand for readers: “a lot of other people liked these books,” they say, “so chances are you’ll like them, too!” And in its most powerful form, bestseller rankings can make it easier to sell your book in a number of ways. The author and publisher of The Handbook for Mortals reportedly hoped that messing with the New York Times bestseller list would make it easier for them to sell the film rights to the book in the future, which is presumably why they were willing to spend the money to get the reserve listed.
what does it take to be named a bestseller?
The general consensus is that if you want to make it to a best-seller list, any best-seller list, you have to sell at least 5,000 books in a week, or maybe 10,000. Beyond that, things they get complicated depending on which list you’re looking to end up on.
That’s because not all different lists use the same data. No one has access to all the sales made by every book published in the United States in a given week. Publishers take months to collect that data; it’s impossible to have it all in time to post a weekly best-seller list. “At the end of the day, publishers will know 100 percent what sold,” says Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly, “but they won’t have it at the end of the week.”
so all the different bestseller lists have established their own methodologies for collecting sales data and once they get it, they break it down differently. they put the break between one week and another at different points (ending on Sunday versus Saturday, for example); they use different categories to order the lists; they weigh digital and print titles differently. Here’s a breakdown of how the top five lists work: Publishers Weekly, USA Today, Indiebound, Amazon, and New York Times.
publishersweekly, which regnery has cited as the “benchmark” it will follow going forward, pulls its data from nielsen’s bookscan service. bookscan is also the service most publishers use to keep track of their competitors’ sales, so it’s more or less the industry standard.
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bookscan reports that it tracks 80 to 85 percent of print book sales in the united states, and while that claim has been disputed, it certainly sources data from major sellers like amazon, barnes & noble, target and walmart, as well as several independent bookstores. (Bookscan estimates that it collects data from approximately 16,000 outlets each week.)
what it doesn’t track are books sold by independent bookstores using older systems incompatible with bookscan’s tracking, or books sold outside of the general bookstore ecosystem, at conferences, gift shops, or toy stores, or even sales to libraries. It also doesn’t track eBook sales, so anything you buy from Amazon’s Kindle Store doesn’t count.
publishers weekly divides its book scan data into categories by format (hardcover, trade paper, and mass market paperback), age category (adults and children), and gender. some of their genre lists appear every week, but others are published and updated more sporadically.
The publishers weekly week runs from Monday to Sunday, which can affect where a book finishes on your list. For example, whileregnery interpreted his book scan data to mean that d’souza’s big lie should have been the no. 1 best-seller in all published lists in the week of September 3, the book’s sales were distributed throughout the week in such a way that in the weekly editors’ list, it was no. 2 in hardcover nonfiction.
usa today, meanwhile, compiles its own data from a handful of independent bookstores and many of the usual suspect big sellers: amazon, barnes & noble, objective, etc. It doesn’t state what share of book sales it tracks, so it doesn’t claim to be exhaustive, but it does claim to bring together a broad sample of the books that are sold each week in different types of bookstores. (Again, like bookscan, it doesn’t track books that are sold outside of the bookstore ecosystem.) it doesn’t break its list down into any specific category, but instead reports the top 150 best-selling titles across all genres and in all formats except audio. On the USA Today list, D’Souza’s Big Lie has never risen above No. 17.
Then there’s the indiebound list, compiled by the American Booksellers Association, or ABA. The ABA uses sales data drawn from some 550 independent bookstores to create its list, but does not rank titles by total sales volume. instead, it weights the books on your list according to the sales rank each one achieves at each individual store.
“If a large store sold 30 copies of your no. 1 book, and a smaller store sold five copies of his no. 1 book, the fact that it is the no. 1 book is what is reflected”, explains aba ceo oren teicher. That means the indiebound list tends to reflect what independent booksellers are excited about and aggressively recommend to their customers, which, Teicher says, “is often something from the middle list that’s less well known.” d’souza’s big lie is currently not appearing on the independent bestseller list.
amazon offers two different bestseller lists: amazon charts and amazon bestsellers. The charts are released once a week and track the books that have sold the most copies in any format (on Amazon and in your Kindle Store, Audi Store, and physical stores) and the most read or listened to books. on kindle and audible. It is not broken down by category or format, and only reflects what is happening at Amazon and its subsidiaries. (Given Amazon has a 65 percent market share, that’s actually a pretty decent showing.)
Amazon Best Sellers, by contrast, are updated once an hour and broken down by category. on september 7, d’souza’s big lie was ranked no. 21 in politics & Amazon Best Sellers in the Social Studies category, and nothing on the Amazon charts. On September 12, it dropped to No. 37 on the best-seller list (what happened to Hillary Clinton, who debuted that day, knocked it down significantly) and was still nowhere to be found on the charts. (update: the big lie appeared on the amazon charts before, however, it was ranked number 6 on the best sellers list on August 6 and stayed there for four weeks).
All of this brings us to the new york times and a process that is notoriously shrouded in secrecy.
what we know for sure is that the new york times draws its sales data from a sample of independent bookstores (although we don’t know which stores) and presumably also from the big players like amazon and barnes & noble. we know your numbers don’t exactly match the numbers on bookscan, because there are usually discrepancies between what the times publishes and what publishers see on bookscan from week to week.
The New York Times tracks sales of both print books (on its own list) and e-books (combined with print on a different list; there is no digital-only list). Like Bookscan and USA Today, it does not track sales from channels outside of traditional bookstore markets. their week runs from Sunday to Saturday.
Like weekly publishers, the times divides its list by format (hardcover, paperback, e-book, and combined sales across all formats), by age (adults, children, and young adults), and by genre (fiction , nonfiction, business, science, sports, and counseling). following a major restructuring earlier this year, it eliminated some of the more niche lists it used to maintain, such as those for mass-market paperbacks, e-books, and graphic novels.
“The times best-seller lists are based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers that give us specific and confidential context of their sales each week,” said the spokesman for the new york times, jordan cohen, in a statement. to vox. “These standards are applied consistently, across the board, in order to provide times readers with our best assessment of which books are currently most popular.”
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What we don’t know is how many bookstores the New York Times targets, how it weights different types of sales, or how it interprets its data. Independent bookstore sales are widely rumored to outweigh sales from Walmart, for example, but the Times has never confirmed this. Some observers have also suggested that print sales from traditional publishers outweigh digital sales from digital publishers or self-publishers, because books that do very well on Amazon’s in-house editions rarely appear on the Times: Tables list. from amazon no. 1 bestsellers like Under a Scarlet Sky may never make it to the New York Times list.
So, if you want your book to be a bestseller, you should aim to sell at least 5,000 copies in a week, Monday through Sunday if you want to be a publishers weekly bestseller, and Sunday through Saturday. If you want to be a New York Times bestseller. You need to make sure your book falls into a very specific category if you want it to be an Amazon bestseller, and that people actually engage with it on Kindle if you want it to appear on the Amazon bestseller lists. You need to make sure that independent booksellers are truly passionate about your book and ready to sell it personally if you want to become an independent bestseller.
But more importantly, you need to make sure your sales are coming through the channels tracked by the best-seller list you’re looking at. that’s where every list lives and dies, and it’s the biggest vulnerability to every list’s reputation. especially in the new york times.
is it really possible to play with the new york times bestseller list?
Buying your spot on the New York Times best-seller list isn’t all that difficult, although it is, as noted beacon of morality Tucker Max points out, “basically ‘cheating’.” the most accepted version of this work. is to identify independent bookstores that you think are reporting to the new york times and go to those specific stores on tours. A bit more rudely, Mitt Romney unapologetically boosted the sales figures for his 2010 book: The Case for American Greatness by requiring his book tour hosts to purchase between $25,000 and $50,000 worth of copies of his book.
The publishers of Handbook for Mortals worked their way to the top of the New York Times list by the convenient move of calling several independent bookstores and asking if they would report to the New York Times. if the stores said yes, the publishers would place a large order for copies of the manual for mortals with the knowledge that the order would go directly toward the book’s ranking on the time list. (update: lani sarem, the author of the manual for mortals, insists that her sales were valid and that she intended to resell all the books she bought at the events, but as the luncheon of the industry publishing publishers, booksellers have traditional mechanisms that allow you to generate pre-orders from existing sellers (the only advantage to placing your own pre-orders and then reselling the books is that it allows you to artificially increase your sales numbers).
the new york times is aware of this vulnerability in its methodology and has systems in place to counteract it. If a book’s sales appear to be artificially inflated by bulk orders, the Times will usually place a cross next to the book’s appearance on the list to alert readers to the fact that something fishy might be going on. Sometimes it will remove books from the list altogether if it thinks there is reason to doubt that a book’s sales are legitimate.
In the case of the Handbook for Mortals, the book’s publisher seems to have circumvented the protections of the times by always placing an order a little too small to count as a bulk order. at independent stores, it’s 80 books, so the publisher placed orders for 78 or 79. at barnes & noble, that’s 30 books, so the publisher placed orders for 27 and 28. that’s how long it took the handbook for mortals to fly under the new york times radar to the top of the cover bestseller list tough, until readers began to investigate.
It’s possible to play with most best-seller lists this way, since most of them make the list of stores they track publicly available. It’s even possible to access Amazon Charts’ “most read” list by buying a bot that will constantly read your book on Kindle, increasing your engagement numbers: Amazon has just filed a series of arbitration lawsuits against companies it claims , they are doing just that. .
is the new york times bestseller list really skewed?
All major bestseller lists have blind spots that don’t serve certain genres well, especially genres that don’t thrive in the traditional trade book market: gift shop books and toy store books. In that sense, all the major best-seller lists are skewed, including the New York Times.
however, the figures don’t support regnery’s claim that the new york times has crafted its bestseller list to penalize conservative books. According to data provided by the New York Times, of the 137 books that have reached No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction List since 2008, 16 hail from Regnery, or about 11 percent of the list. for a publisher that doesn’t belong to one of the big five publishing houses that dominate the industry, that’s a lot of best-sellers. and conservative authors who do not publish in Regnery, such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Dick Cheney, and George W. bush, also appear frequently on the list.
and as callum borchers and kevin uhrmacher point out in the washington post, the times list is sometimes kinder to reginry than the editors’ weekly list. D’Souza’s 2016 book Hillary’s America made it to No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction List, but peaked at No. 2 for weekly editors.
It’s fair to say that the New York Times bestseller list is skewed against books that do best outside of traditional sales channels, but those don’t include conservative books. Conservative books are doing very, very well in traditional sales channels, and the Times list reflects that fact.
the times list also reflects the fact that, like all best-seller lists, it is a desperate attempt to impose order and meaning on an amorphous and chaotic system. everyone who works in the publishing industry agrees that it is physically impossible to account for all the books sold in the united states in a single week, yet we demand that major publications try to do just that, week after week, and then we use the results to decide which books to buy and turn into movies and turn into big cultural events.
All bestseller lists are compromises, guesses, and interpretations of confusing data, including the New York Times bestseller list. they are simply very important, very prestigious and highly debated commitments.
update: this article has been updated to include links to the opinions of the author of the manual for mortals, lani sarem, and with more information about the classification of the amazon table of the big lie .
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