A Guide to Book Bestseller Lists

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In the publishing industry, and among the reading public, bestseller lists are the movie equivalent of box office receipts. One major difference, other than the type of media, is that with box office receipts, anyone can pretty much see the numbers, but with bestseller lists, the actual numbers of books sold (and revenues earned) is kept secret. One book at the top of, say, the New York Times bestseller list, may sell a lot more books or earn a lot more or less than some other book at the top of the list for some other week.
Bestseller Lists Logos

How does a book get on a bestseller list? Slate has an article from 1998 that explains it:

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.

Slate, “The Book Industry’s Best-Seller Lists
A better name for a bestseller would be fastseller. The Sacramento Bee reports

List-makers wield great power, certainly, but there are forces that can push a title toward the lists early in the game. Enthusiastic reviews are part of that, or a magical combination of buzz and timing (think “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson), or the attention of Hollywood, as in the cases of “Dragon Tattoo” and “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett.

Sacramento Bee, “Best-Seller Lists, How They Work and Who They (Mostly) Work For”

List of Lists: Best Selling Books Lists

  • The New York Times. The grandfather of them all, and the most prestigious among both readers and writers. Every writer wants to be on this list.
  • Publisher’s Weekly. In the publishing industry, this list is as important as the New York Times list because booksellers look to it in ordering books for retail sale. Its lists are well categorized for that reason, too.
  • Nielsen. Neilsen is not a widely known list, but along with the NYT and Publisher’s Weekly, book business insiders, especially publishers, look to their accurate detailing of sales figures in making manuscript purchasing decisions. They do at least give their top ten.
  • Wall Street Journal. With data from 2500 chain bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and Nielsen scans.
  • USA Today. This list is second to the New York Times list among readers, mainly because of its wide national reach and inclusiveness. USA Today’s list mixes fiction, nonfiction, hardcover, trade, and mass market paperbacks on one list and includes 50 books in its print list and 150 books in its online list.
  • IndieBound Independent Bookstore Bestsellers. Indie Bestsellers collect their data from the nation’s independent bookstores.
  • Barnes & Noble’s. This brick and mortar chain also sells eBooks on their Nook tablet, and mantains a list of their own bestselling titles.
  • Amazon.com. Amazon.com, that bozilla of online book ordering,  maintains a list of its top bestsellers.

Best Website for Readers and Writers

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Arts & Letters Daily

A List of the 1 Best Website for Readers and Writers:

May be the shortest list on the internet, but Arts & Letters Daily truly holds it’s place at the top.

This excellent website operates as a human, hands-on aggregator, culling the best essays, book reviews, and commentaries from the worlds of book publishing, periodicals, academia, and more.  Its sidebar links to magazines, newspapers, TV and online news shows, book reviews, columnists, blogs, and radio stations are comprehensive.

Arts & Letters Daily has been around since way before the advent of Web 2.0 and hasn’t changed their design, other than by moving the complete list of links to Middle Eastern news sources off the sidebar and onto the middle column a little down the page. I hope they never change it, even when Web 3.0, whatever that may be, dawns online. Arts & Letters Daily looked like the best of Web 1.0 in yonderyear and has aged so gracefully that it does not look one bit dated today. It could be a grid-based, minimalist, fresh, new design if you didn’t know better, thanks largely to a clean, light background, three neat and well-organized columns, a sharp red graphics and links color scheme, and the aforementioned hyperlinked sidebar.

All of which is well and good, but what makes A&L Daily the killer site it is is content. And even its content is minimal. Just a sentence or two or three per post, and short sentences they are at that. Where Arts & Letters Daily gets its power is from its daily posts, which are simply introductory comments to a link of the best material on the internet. Its three columns are titled “Articles of Note”, “Book Reviews”, and “Essays and Opinions”.

Articles of Note contains links to timely, fresh stories. Book Reviews keeps you up to date on the latest offerings from the publishing world. And Essays and Opinions links you to more thoughtful musings, points of view, and even rants (albeit keenly rhetorical and well written rants).

Today’s edition of the page contains, across the columns, links to The Atlantic on whether music was discovered first by nonhumans, The London Review of Books on a biography of Caligula, and City Journal on the apocalyptic mindset among civic leaders. Recent posts link to Esquire on Robert Caro, the Lyndon Johnson chronicler, BookForum on a French feminist’s take on motherhood, and ArtNews on the mimicry of bad taste, a discussion stimulated by an exhibition of Damien Hirst. An article from Financial Times asks if it’s still possible to write philosophical novels.

If you were trapped in a deserted WiFi coffee shop on the edge of town and could only go to one page from which your only escape was to one other page and back again in sequence, you would choose Arts & Letters Daily. If you were trapped on a deserted island for a year and had only one hour after being rescued to catch up on events before attending a cocktail party among New York’s cognescenti of the philosophical, literary, and art worlds, you would choose Arts & Letters Daily. If you had an hour to kill and wondered what kind of thinking is going on lately, or even if you had all the time and modem speed in the world…well, you know…

…Arts & Letters Daily.

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The Door That Opens Both In and Out

Welcome to my world of fantasy and reality, of fiction and fact. Earth is a planet of readers. Some read little, some read a lot. Readers are distinguished in several ways in their preferences. Fiction or nonfiction? Mainstream or experimental? Romance or science fiction? Short or long? Funny or sad?

One at a time.

A stack of booksFirst, the big one. Fiction or nonfiction? Some readers like nothing better than to “get lost” in a novel or “taken away” by a short story. Others prefer what “actually happened”. A good history, or a book on current events or the newest scientific discoveries, or a memoir or biography. Nonfiction fans sometimes avoid fiction because they want to know “the truth”.  Just the facts, ma’am. Fiction readers sometimes avoid nonfiction because it’s “too dry” and doesn’t seem to have much of a plot.

Of course it shouldn’t be this way. Nonfiction should at least keep the reader’s interest if not outright entertain. Fiction should be more than escapist and present the kind of truth that can elude nonfiction of the most rigorous scholarly precison.

One of the wittiest books I’ve read is White and Summers’ hornbook on the Uniform Commercial Code while in the middle year of law school. Yes, I was surprised. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of dry material among the finer points of secured transactions, but every now and then the authors will comment wryly and outrageously at the outcome of a famous case or on the ironic vagaries to which failed legal strategies can lead. Why wasn’t the book on torts, so ripe with the grotesque and reparations and with title possibilities like The Carbolic Smoke Bomb Case, as funny?

I sold my old law books as I went along in professional school to buy new ones and beer. Years later, when my area of practice gravitated toward what I euphemistically like to call matrimonial law, I repurchased White and Summers purely for the fun of it.

On the other hand, as for fiction, I never got much more than thrills on a first reading of Ian Fleming. Sorry, Mr. Bond. Just seemed like standard good versus evil to me, good being the well established politics of British nationality and bad being the not so well established politics of whichever arch villain wanted to take over the world at the time. Read again, and one or two of the Big Questions popped out. Do the ends justify the means? Is violence ever warranted?

After all, what does it matter to you? When you’ve got a job to do, you’ve got to do it well. You’ve got to give the other fellow hell.

Moving on, there’s the perennial mainstream realist vs. avant-garde debate. Realist literature assails the avant garde, which in turn assaults realist literature. Deliberately, mind you. The nerve of those upstarts. Who do they think they are? Faulkner, for one, who today is considered, oh, about as mainstream as one can get. But the Joycean European techniques he brought to the American novel, then experimental (and I use that word like a gloved chemist toting a vial of nitroglycerin) brought fiction to the heady days of high modernism.

And what of genre? Some readers will devour the detective novel, whether in the form of a police procedural or a good, old-fashioned whodunit, but will eschew science fiction. Likewise, many SF fans never stray into the steamed and denuded land of romance. Nowadays cross-genres have gained in popularity. Kinky vampires in space, for example.

The fact is, facts entertain and fiction conveys truth, and the line between grows finer and finer with each new good book read. As well, the best fiction defies genre. In truth, “the text”, as the literary critics like to call it, has many doors. Some lead in to new ways of thinking. Some lead out to a more open, enlightened view of the world, and time and space, and what it means to be human.

At least if it’s done right. All the doors of good writing open both ways. It is the job of the gentle writer to see to it that the door doesn’t hit the gentle reader in the behind on her way out.

Or hit her on the head on her way in.