The Book Industry's Best-Seller Lists
These days, it seems as if
half the books in bookstores have the word "best seller" or some variant on the
cover or the flap copy, as in "the best-selling author of ..." But what does
that mean? About as much as the phrase "original recipe" does on a jar of
spaghetti sauce. Neither the government nor the publishing industry regulates
the use of the term, and besides, there are many different kinds of best-seller
lists published every week in the United States. There are the major national
lists (the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , USA
Today , and Publishers Weekly ) and the major regional lists (the
Washington Post , the San Francisco Chronicle , the Los Angeles
Times , the Boston Globe , and the Chicago Tribune ). There are
lists that compare sales at chain stores with sales at independent stores.
There are romance lists, business lists, African-American lists, religious
lists, health lists, and children's lists.
What is a
best-seller list? It is a ranking of the relative sales of particular kinds of
books at certain groups of stores within a one-week period. Best-seller lists
tell us not which books sell the most, in absolute terms, but which fiction,
nonfiction, or advice books sell the fastest at the bookstores list makers
think deserve attention. A how-to book that sells 20,000 copies in one week
will shoot to the top of the best-seller lists, whether or not those are the
only copies it ever sells. A novel that sells 200 copies a week for 10 years
will never appear on the lists, because each week it will be beaten by
faster-selling books.
Why do best-seller lists matter so much? Because they are
the most convincing form of publicity around, which gives them the quality of
self-fulfilling prophecies. If a book is a best seller, bookstore clerks will
be more likely to put it in the front of the store and readers to buy it.
Publishers will also be eager to publish more books like it, since best-seller
lists also stand in for industrywide sales data. (Most book publishing
companies are privately held and keep this information secret; even when the
companies are publicly traded, it is nearly impossible to find out the unit
sales of individual books.)
This helps
account for the uniformity in the books that top all these lists--books by
brand-name or celebrity authors, inspirational and self-help books. Some
authors will do anything to try to break this vicious cycle. In 1995,
Business Week ran a story about two authors who purchased 10,000 copies
of their own book, The Discipline of Market Leaders , and got their
corporate clients to buy 30,000 to 40,000 more, in a successful plot to get
onto the New York Times list. (Click to read about the legal tricks book
editors employ to try to place their books on the Times list.)
These days, what best-seller lists are most
likely to reflect is the amount of money spent to publicize the books that wind
up on them. Superstores now allow publishers to pay to place a book up front or
in the window or to display advertising. That, plus an author tour or
appearance on national TV shows, can propel readers into stores fast enough to
get a book on the list. Word-of-mouth or good reviews don't generate the
dramatic concentrated sales required.
Some
lists gather sales figures from more stores than others do. The New York
Times boasts the most stores reporting--4,000, plus wholesalers. The
Voice Literary Supplement list, which tells you what the serious
bohemians are reading, asks only about 25 high-end independent stores,
including San Francisco's City Lights; Washington, D.C.'s Politics and Prose;
and the Harvard Bookstore. Some list makers rely on statistical sampling and
extrapolation to provide an estimation of what is selling at the stores that do
not report; some don't. Some lists, such as the Wall Street Journal 's,
only track sales in big chain stores. Others, such as USA Today 's,
include online booksellers. Some follow only independent stores.
This may seem haphazard compared with the way the music
industry's main best-seller list--published in Billboard magazine--is
compiled: It tracks every single album sold at every single music store in the
United States. SoundScan Inc., the company that began tracking CD and tape
sales with a barcode system, has in fact tried to get booksellers to employ a
comparable system called BookScan but with little success. The problem is
partly that BookScan is too expensive for many booksellers. But the real issue
is that BookScan misses the point: Book industry people don't want a single
compilation of what's really selling best throughout the country; they want a
variety of lists that break down sales figures in ways beneficial to them.
Here are
some of the most closely watched lists in the publishing industry:
New
York Times
The New York Times
list is the industry standard. It's the most prestigious, appearing as it does
in the premier book review in the country. And it's the widest-reaching, based
on data from the largest number of stores. Many bookstores sell New York
Times best sellers at a discount, thereby generating even more sales for
New York Times best sellers. Publishers regularly write bonuses into
contracts to factor in the possibility that a book will makes the Times
list. This clause is typically phrased "$7,000 for positions 1-5, $5,000 for
positions 6-10, and $3,000 for positions 11-15."
The
Times divides its best sellers into hardcover and paperback lists and
then divides each of these into fiction, nonfiction, and a third category
called "Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous." This last category has led some to
accuse the straight nonfiction list of being a "useful fiction," designed to
give publicity to books that would otherwise fail.
One significant but little-known fact about the
Times best-seller list is that it does not follow every single book
published each year. Instead, the Times sends a list to bookstores
indicating which books they are "tracking" as potential future best sellers and
asks for sales information on those books (and any others the bookstores want
to report on). The Times says this tracking list is drawn up from
information from bookstores, but publishers say they routinely call up the
Times to tip them off to books selling with increasing momentum so that
they can be added to the tracking list.
The
Times Web site publishes another list: "Chains vs. Independents," which
compares how books in all three categories are selling in these two different
types of outlets. This list was a concession to independent bookstores, many of
which were outraged when the Times created hot links between every
single book on its Internet best-seller list and Barnes & Noble's online
bookstore, which then gave a 30 percent discount to all the listed books. Some
independent bookstores were so angry about this that they boycotted the list
and, early in 1998, about 100 bookstores in Northern California refused to
report their sales to the New York Times list. The Times claimed
that the number boycotting never reached a "critical mass" that would have
threatened the integrity of its list.
San
Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco
Chronicle best-seller list tracks sales at about 50 stores in the Bay Area,
gathering data from a larger percentage of independent stores than the New
York Times list does. This doesn't mean the Chronicle list doesn't
contain traditional, mainstream commercial titles--it does--but it includes
books too esoteric for the chains and books that people are willing to pay full
price for. Occasionally, books thought of as backlist titles or classics will
pop up on this list, and many less flashy books that are quality reads start
out on the independent-heavy lists such as the Chronicle 's.
The
Chronicle list is most valued by publishers for what is considered its
predictive value. Recent national best sellers such as Snow Falling on
Cedars , Cold Mountain , and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya
Sisterhood appeared on the Chronicle list long before they made it
to the New York Times '. A.S. Byatt's Possession was on the
Chronicle list for six weeks before it appeared on the Times
list.
USA
Today
USA Today 's list is
the most inclusive one around. It lists 50 books (150 on its Web site) and
mixes all categories: fiction, nonfiction, hardcover, trade, and mass market
paperbacks. Its authors gather data in a straightforward fashion: They record
actual sales (no statistical sampling) at 3,000 bookstores and include online
booksellers, which many other lists don't. This results in an unusual list that
pits the paperbacks of successful literary novels such as Arundhati Roy's
The God of Small Things against hardcover celebrity health books such as
Marilu Henner's Total Health Makeover and inspirational titles such as
Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul . The list even includes the
occasional children's title. Literary books rarely appear in the first 20
positions.
USA
Today 's list shows how different types of books that are separated on other
lists rank against one another. For example, Ron Chernow's Titan , a
biography of John D. Rockefeller Sr., held the ninth position on the New
York Times nonfiction list the week of Aug. 17. On the USA Today
list, it was not even in the top 150. The often ignored murky bottom of the
USA Today list also makes interesting reading. It is peppered with
literary books such as The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a
Mockingbird , which are probably selling well because of their inclusion on
every high-school English syllabus. The week after the movie version of
Nabokov's Lolita aired on Showtime, the book jumped from 204 to make a
surprise appearance at 121. Continuing publicity from its publisher pushed it
to 85 for the week starting Aug. 17.
Publishers Weekly
These nine lists are
designed for people in the book industry: booksellers, libraries, literary
agents, and domestic and international publishing houses. Thus PW 's
lists are divided into subcategories relevant only to people in the publishing
world. Fiction and nonfiction are kept separate for hardcover books but mixed
for trade paperback and mass market. Also listed separately are children's,
religious, computer, and audio books. These lists are compiled at 3,000 chains
and independents and are enhanced by statistical sampling. Nora Rawlinson,
editor in chief of Publishers Weekly , sees the proliferation of lists as
a way to give publishers information on the different types of books they
specialize in. But she also admits the plethora of lists gives more books
"best-seller opportunities."
