Fall of the Bestseller

 

Amazon used to make it easy to get on the bestseller lists. Authors and publishers could ask Amazon to intentionally place their book in less than competitive categories. On launch day that book would rocket to the top of that uncompetitive category and claim a #1 best seller ranking by selling a whopping 4 or 5 copies. 

The New York Times used to count bulk purchases towards best seller placements. But publishers, marketers, authors, and their agents would make large bulk orders, hit the lists, and then return the books. That unethical behavior hurt everybody in the ecosystem except the author who got to brag about an accolade they hadn't earned. 

Those days are mostly over.

Best seller lists are curated and weighted. 100 orders from a pop up bookstore of unknown reputation doesn't count as much as 10 orders from Strands or Politics and Prose. Outlets like the NYT and USA Today also give greater weight to numbers coming from independent bookstores to avoid their lists being entirely driven by Amazon numbers.

See e.g. Vox:

https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/9/13/16257084/bestseller-lists-explained

If you own a bookstore, and you'd like to have your bookstore's sales contribute to the NYT best seller lists you can submit an application here:

https://bestsellers.nytimes.com/newstoreapp

While best seller lists are susceptible to gaming, the one metric most publishers cannot game is reviews. Sure you can give your book away to 2000 people and ask them to leave reviews, but is that sustainable? You eventually either run out of money, or out of people you know who are willing to leave a review. At that point you're not even selling books. You're paying to give books away.

So an easy way to identify whether a book is selling well is to see how many reviews it has garnered. 

Which is not to say that the point of all books is to move units. 

Some books, like the Vice President's, are published to announce political ambition. Millions of dollars of marketing are poured into books like those (and that book specifically) to make them appear successful. I don't think Hillbilly Elegy is profitable once marketing costs are factored in, but I don't think Vance or his sponsor, Peter Thiel, cares. Profitable wasn't their aim. Framing an argument, and disseminating an ideology was the goal there. I've been in those rooms. I've been on those calls. I've done multiple books for people who go to work at the White House. 

I am currently editing a book by a World Champion athlete. She's not seeking to move units with her book either. This book is intended to accompany a course she teaches. She helps elite athletes address mindset and focus challenges. The success of this book is not measured by how many copies are sold. This book is measured by how well it communicates concepts in an easily digestible manner to her students.

Every good book needs editing. Irrespective of whether the book is meant for sale, or meant to be given away.

Just like you can't out-train a bad diet, you can't out-market bad writing.

Have a publishing question you can't get no BS answers about?