Check out the latest bestsellers lists from
USA Today,
Publisher's Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, and the grandaddy of them all,
the New York Times. This week (ending today, 1/7/10) nearly every list puts Dan Brown's
The Lost Symbol atop the nonfiction hardcover category. But after you move past that title, each list shows different results. Publisher's Weekly placed Mitch Albom's
Have a Little Faith atop its nonfiction hardcover list, while the Wall Street Journal has Sarah Palin's
Going Rogue in its top spot. By comparing USA Today, the New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, and the Wall Street Journal, you'll find only 7 out of 15 bestselling hardcover fiction titles in common on all four lists. Why the discrepancies?
As it turns out, bestseller lists are a bit of legerdemain. Each publication formulates its list based on its own criteria, and the information they receive from booksellers can be incomplete or inaccurate. As a result, most bestseller lists should be regarded with a grain of salt.
The most influential list, of course, comes from the New York Times, but Publisher's Weekly has plenty of clout, also. Their compilation process is biased before any books get counted. Here's how: Editors compile their lists based on information received from booksellers nationwide. But the process isn't as simple as retrieving sales records from each and every store or book chain or online retailer. The editors send out a list to each bookseller. The list contains up to 36 book titles that the editors prognosticate will be the week's bestsellers. They then rely on the retailers to send back the sales tallies about those 36 books. From that information, the bestsellers lists are formed. And, of course, publishing houses suggest to the NYT and Publisher's Weekly list editors what titles should be among the 36. But the booksellers have the opportunity to write in candidates for the bestseller lists based on their records. Unfortunately, most retailers never bother. The result is often lists comprised mostly of preordained bestsellers - decided by the publishing houses who have the most vested interest in their books' sales.
Amazon is different, however. Their sales figures are instantaneous and thorough. The problem, however, is that their bestsellers only reflect Amazon's own sales, not what gets sold at brick-and-mortar bookstores nationwide. Still, their figures are presumably untainted by publishers' input.
USA Today's bestseller list, by comparison, appears to be the most fair and accurate. They don't differentiate between hardcover and paperback or fiction and nonfiction. It's a bouillabaisse of all sales figures thrown together, beginning with the number one selling title of the week regardless of category and ending with number 50. If a hardcover cookbook outsells all fiction and all paperbacks and all other categories, it goes to USA Today's number one spot. In fact, on USA Today's Best-Selling Books Database for the first week of January 2010, Alice Sebold's
The Lovely Bones, reissued in paperback, has the number one spot. Dan Brown's
The Lost Symbol ranks number 6 over all, not number one, and it's not even first among USA Today's fiction hardcovers. That rank goes to Stephanie Meyer's
Breaking Dawn. USA Today claims to receive sales figures from a wider and deeper selection of booksellers nationwide than other lists. In fact, Publisher's Weekly doesn't divulge how its list is compiled. Instead, its website presents a snide explanation of
how their list is configured.
What few of these lists divulge is the actual number of units sold in any given week or the numerical difference between sales of bestseller number one and bestseller number eight. The difference in total sales could be negligible. In particularly slow weeks, selling a relative modicum of titles nationwide could project a book to, say, the number 50 spot on USA Today's list. The title could disappear from the list the very next week and never reappear. But because that book acquired a coveted spot on the list, it gets to be called a bestseller.
Here's the point: bestsellers lists, while generally well-intentioned, are inaccurate at best and manufactured at worst. They're sales tools. And as with all sales techniques you need to read the fine print… if its provided, which in the case of book sales often is not the case.
