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.

The Truth Behind Bestseller Lists

By Sandra Parshall

Publishers Weekly, which uses Nielsen BookScan figures for its bestseller lists, has begun publishing the actual number of units of each book that were sold in the previous week – and those numbers might make you rethink what you “know” about bestsellers.

BookScan, I should point out, reports about 75% of all book sales in the U.S. Nielsen collects sales data from booksellers but not from Wal-Mart, Hudson airport stores, and similar outlets. The New York Times bestseller list uses numbers collected from a selection of vendors. Neither list will tell you precisely how many copies of a book have been sold – only the publisher has that information – but they give a broad overview of what is selling well. You will seldom see much difference between the BookScan/PW list and the N.Y. Times list. 

 
I’ve always heard that 10,000 copies sold in a single week was the threshold number for making bestseller lists. But only the top three titles on the PW hardcover fiction list sold that many or more units in the week of July 2-8 through the vendors reporting to BookScan. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn sold 25,391 copies (total sales after five weeks on the market: 91,786); Wicked Business by Janet Evanovich sold 13,049 copies for the week (total after three weeks: 69,839); and The Next Best Thing by Jennifer Weiner, in its first week after publication, sold 11,708 units.

Below the top three, the drop-off is steep. Most novels in the top 25 sold fewer than 5,000 copies for the week, and several sold less than 3,000.

Number 4, Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand, sold 7,825 copies in its second week on the bestseller list (total to date: 19,637). Karin Slaughter’s new release, Criminal, jumped onto the bestseller list after publication and made number 5 with sales of 7,749 units for the week (total to that date: 8,270).

Some books have been out so long that they’ve already racked up impressive sales. Although John Grisham’s Calico Joe sold only 6,534 units during the week between July 2 and 8, it has been on all the bestseller lists for more than three months and had total BookScan sales of 263,689 copies as of July 8.

Other books that continue to make the list after many weeks are:
George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons (total after 52 weeks: 115,591);
The Storm by Clive Cussler (73,306 total sales after six weeks);
11th Hour by Patterson/Paetro (175,292 after nine weeks);
The Innocent by David Baldacci (191,510 after 12 weeks);
Stolen Prey by John Sandford (108,292 after eight weeks);
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (151,197 after 11 weeks);
Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris (166,191 after 10 weeks).

Deadlocked came in 25th on the PW list, although only 2,812 copies were sold that week. A new book, Iron Gray Sea by Taylor Anderson, made number 24 with sales of only 2,897 copies. Another just-published title, one that’s getting a lot of attention, is Gold by Chris Cleave. It made the PW hardcover bestseller list – number 20 – but sold only 3,184 copies nationwide that week.

The mass market paperback list tells a similar story, with only the top six books selling more than 10,000 copies during the reporting week and the bottom six selling fewer than 5,000.

On the trade paperback list, the three “Grey” novels are leaving everything else in their dust. Fifty Shades of Grey sold 253,336 copies during the week of July 2-8 and had sales of 4,165,759 units up to that date. Fifty Shades Darker sold 177,759 units that week, and Fifty Shades Freed sold 157,865.

On the whole, sales of trade paperback fiction were better than either hardcover or mass market. Trade sales have been improving slightly in recent weeks, while hardcovers continue a slow decline and mass market paperbacks are in free fall, having lost nearly a quarter of their sales in the past year.

The Kindle bestseller list looks much the same as BookScan’s combined (hardcover and paperback) list, although the order of books is somewhat different and a few older titles, such as The Help by Kathryn Stockett, continue to be e-book bestsellers.

What does all this mean? Only that it takes far fewer sales these days than you might imagine to make the bestseller lists. And the huge sales of the few books at the top emphasize how wide the gap is between achieving true mega-success and rising just far enough to claim the label of bestselling author.