Before I was a librarian, I worked in a bookstore. I always wondered how books were declared best sellers. We would put New York Times bestsellers on our display walls – putting discount stickers on every weekend, and taking stickers off the books that came off the list. I had heard several times that it was only the pre-orders of big bookstore chains that were the entire list. Apparently the USA Today list was more in touch with the actual sales.
As book people we are in touch with the popular books around us, because that is often what people will ask for in the library. They know about the books they hear about; and what books they hear about tends to be pretty limited.
Check out this article excerpt, and read the whole thing here:
What Counts as a Bestseller?
“It turns out, then, that “bestseller” is a more complicated category than you might at first think. Though its name seems to refer to something very straightforward, there are all sorts of weird historical factors and counting choices that affect whether a book might make the cut. Given the influence of the Times list, it’s worth examining the effects of the choices made when assembling it, and what they can tell us about the kinds of information about books we consider valuable.
The occasion for this analysis is the recent publication of a dataset I compiled that records every book that made it onto the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list between 1931 and 2020. The dataset allows one to ask aggregate questions about the history of popular literature in the United States. For example, the following visualization shows which genres have appeared on the list most frequently (among those bestsellers for which a library record could be identified).2 As can be seen, over nearly a century, the lists’ two biggest genres are “historical” and “detective and mystery,” by a fairly large margin.
The distribution of these genres over time isn’t static, however. Some fell out of popularity, while others became more popular. For instance, historical fiction has declined in popularity; its peak was in the 1940s (when about 24 percent of novels in the data were historical), but the genre then dropped to a low in the 2000s (when it made up only 10 percent of listed novels). Meanwhile, “thriller and suspense” fiction and “detective and mystery” fiction have become much more prominent, with particularly rapid growth between 1980 and 2000.
What changed? To answer this question, it’s important to understand what exactly this particular list tracks: specifically, it is a list of hardcover bestsellers. It does not consider paperback sales, either trade or mass market. Importantly, the Times did not begin regular weekly paperback coverage until 1976 (although it began irregular publication of a monthly paperback list in 1965).3
In publishing history, the distinction between paperback and hardcover formats is also a distinction between markets. In the early days of the New York Times list, hardcover novels were primarily sold at bookstores, which catered to relatively wealthier and more urban customers. Paperbacks, meanwhile, were sold at a variety of different outlets, including newsstands, drugstores, and, eventually, supermarkets. These books were accessible to a much wider audience, due to both their more affordable prices and their greater geographic availability.
But, for decades, those more accessible books were not tracked by the New York Times. The fact that this list exclusively tracks hardcover sales at bookstores means it necessarily won’t reflect the popularity of other books: that is, those that sold in large numbers as paperbacks at nontraditional outlets.”
“So, what, then, is a bestseller? It seems like the answer should be simple—it’s just a book that sold the best! But, as we’ve seen, the truth turns out to be more complicated. Since novels are published in many different formats and sold at many different kinds of stores, decisions must be made about how and what to count. This is not to say that bestseller lists are arbitrary, or that they can’t be trusted. Rather, it’s just to point out that editorial decisions may favor some books over others.
How we count reflects what we want to know—or, at least, what the Times thinks we want to know. Whether they are right about this might depend on who you ask.”
There is a lot more in this article; read the whole thing here!