Demystifying the bestseller lists

by Sandra Parshall

Recently the book community expressed its collective dismay over business writers hiring a marketing company to buy enough copies of their books in their first week of release to put them on the Wall Street Journal list of bestselling business books. The Wall Street Journal itself ran a story highlighting three recent “bestsellers” that were created in this fashion. (The Journal article included the laugh-out-loud line: “The Journal declined to comment.”)

The authors and the company providing the service regard this as a legitimate marketing ploy. A book and its author will forevermore wear the label “Wall Street Journal Bestseller” and that alone will draw bigger audiences to the seminars and workshops that are the writers’ main source of income. In the end, perhaps no harm is done.

These incidents should, however, make all of us stop and question bestseller lists in general. How much validity do they have?

Compare two major bestseller lists for the same period, the week ending February 17, and you may wonder who to believe.

The top 10 New York Times hardcover fiction books for that week are, in order:
A Week in Winter
Gone Girl
Tenth of December
Guilt
A Memory of Light
Private Berlin
Suspect
Touch and Go
The Dinner
The Night Ranger

The Publishers Weekly list, which is based entirely on sales reported by Nielsen BookScan, has these top 10, in order:
A Week in Winter
Guilt
Until the End of Time
Gone Girl
Private Berlin
The Power Trip
A Memory of Light
Tenth of December
Touch and Go
The Racketeer

The differences are more pronounced on the mass market paperback fiction  bestseller lists.

The Times lists these top 10:
Safe Haven
Stay Close
Kill Me if You Can
The Hunter
A Game of Thrones
Killing Floor
Betrayal
Criminal
Cat Trick
A Storm of Swords

PW mixes fiction and nonfiction on its mass market paperback list, but  American Sniper is the only nonfiction title on it (and it’s #1). Discounting that book, PW lists these top 10 fiction paperbacks:
Betrayal
Stay Close
Kill Me if You Can
Love in Plain Sight
Safe Haven
Close Your Eyes
Criminal
The Hunter
Angel Mine
Just Kate

Of the top 20 paperbacks on the Times list, 11 do not appear at all on the PW top 20 list. 

Which list is accurate? Probably neither, although I'm inclined to favor the PW list because it is backed up by sales data.

The methodology behind the Times bestseller lists is such a closely held secret that not even staff members of the Book Review know how it’s done. The general explanation is that “selected” retail outlets across the country are sampled, and an estimate is made of which books are selling best. No sales figures are given.

The PW list does give sales figures, provided by BookScan. For example, BookScan reported that Betrayal by Danielle Steel sold 26,396 copies in the week between February 11 and 17. (Total sales for the year to date: 94,075 copies.) BookScan reported sales of 14,696 that week for Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks. Yet the Sparks book, which is number 6 on the PW bestseller list, is number 1 on the Times list for the same period, and the Steel book, the top fiction seller on the PW list, is number 7 on the Times list.

BookScan numbers supposedly represent 75-80% of total sales, so the books on the PW list are all actually selling better than reported.

Confused yet?

Here’s something else to consider: many writers say the BookScan numbers are nowhere near 75-80% of their total sales. Depending on where the books are sold, BookScan figures may represent only a fraction of sales. Author Colleen Doran compared her royalty statements with BookScan’s figures and found a huge disparity. She wrote a revealing blog about it here.

Through AuthorCentral on Amazon, writers can access BookScan sales figures for their books – but Amazon posts a long list of reasons why the BookScan number does not include all sales. BookScan counts sales in retail outlets, including Barnes & Noble, but ignores one huge market: libraries.

I can’t access figures for any books except mine, and sales of my small press novels are nowhere near the bestseller level, but they do illustrate what happens when the library sales are left out of the equation. My publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, makes the majority of its sales to libraries. My novels are not stocked by Barnes & Noble. The hardcover printing of my latest book, Bleeding Through (published simultaneously in trade paperback), sold out shortly after publication, and most of those copies went to libraries. I have already received a royalty statement and a check for those sales, so I know they happened. But according to BookScan, Bleeding Through has only sold 128 copies in all formats except e-book.

In the end, only the figures on a writer’s royalty statements mean anything. Yet, as Colleen Doran pointed out in her blog, BookScan’s drastic under-reporting of sales can torpedo deals for future books if an author is trying to sell to one of the big New York publishers. Editors and marketing people at those publishers look at BookScan’s report on sales of a writer’s past books before deciding whether to take a chance on a new project. If they see low numbers, they’ll be scared away. Never mind that BookScan only reports certain sales. Never mind that the writer’s royalty statements show much higher sales. BookScan is king right now, and too many people in publishing accept its figures as accurate.

At least we know that the books on the PW/BookScan bestseller list are actually selling better than the list indicates, perhaps a great deal better. But what of the New York Times list, the most respected, the most coveted by authors and publishers alike? Its methodology has long been suspect, as any process conducted in secret will be. Nobody knows exactly how the Times arrives at its ranking of books, but the list represents estimates, and no hard sales figures are ever supplied. The listing of many books by the Times is not supported by real, albeit under-reported, sales figures from BookScan. But the “New York Times Bestseller” label is considered golden by authors and publishers, although in many cases the books in question appear on the bottom part of the extended list – which has 35 titles on it – rather than in the top 20 published in the Book Review.

All of this may be life or death career stuff to writers, but it shouldn’t affect readers, who ought to make their buying decisions after determining whether a book is the kind of thing they will enjoy. Some readers, though, buy bestselling books because they are bestsellers (and that keeps them on the various lists). Then some of those readers show up online, on Goodreads or Amazon or Shelfari or, in the case of crime fiction, DorothyL, complaining that they wasted their money and feel deceived.

I’m not urging readers to avoid buying and reading bestsellers. If you know a writer’s work and have a good expectation of enjoying his or her new book, then by all means give that author your support by buying the book. If you don’t know the writer’s work, don’t let the book’s bestseller status be your only guide. Keep in mind that all bestseller lists may be deceptive. As with any product, know what you’re getting and whether it’s likely to suit you before you spend money on it. 

And remember that a lot of excellent books, including many you would enjoy, will never show up on any bestseller list.