It seems like no matter how good or bad a book is, it manages to have that infamous “New York Times Bestseller” sticker. Why? How?
It seems like no matter how good or bad a book is, it manages to have that infamous “New York Times Bestseller” sticker. Why? How?
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Follow the money. It will explain it all. You can buy whatever stamp you wish.
Answer: It really doesnt mean anything, the award can be bought and is just used to sell more books.
Read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/sj7aj3/what_exactly_is_no1_new_york_times_bestseller_and/
Paid for, same as any product with an award for being the best slapped on their packaging.
Because you’re likely not hearing about the thousands of books that don’t make it. No, not a snarky response, it’s a psychological effect, to be a best seller the book as to have some notoriety, so more people are aware of them, thus a greater proportion of best seller books figure into your internal known book list than the actual proportion of best sellers to published books, which, according to this study, is around 0.5% of published books in a year.
You’ve let modern society change the standard on you.
For me, if it isn’t a Newbury Award winner, I won’t read it. /s
There may seem like a lot of NYT Best Sellers, but that is because a book only needs to make that ever changing list 1 single time to earn that badge.
Think music charts. The Top 40 changes every week, but there are also 60 more songs on the Hot 100 beyond that. There are 200 slots on the albums chart, and thousands of songs and albums that never make either list. Likely, some of your favorite songs never even charted anywhere, a single time.
That’s how it works with books too.
Edit: Most “top selling” and “best” lists suffer from fuckery on the back end, and that goes for books and music.
Because it means nothing and you can have your friend buy a couple thousand copies for cheap.
JD Power award checking in. It’s hilarious that YTis pushing their “receipt” of it.
Every week a dozen or so new books are named bestsellers because they’ve sold 5000-10000 copies. 52×12 =624. How many books do you come across? Books you see advertised in your feed or the front of the shelves of a major chain likely come from big publishers with the resources to sell a lot of books.
Selection bias… the ones that are best sellers are the ones you’re most likely to see promoted/displayed in bookstores and news stands prominently, displayed in libraries, obviously the ones people are more likely to be carrying if they’ve sold more copies.
Also, there are multiple lists: hardcover, paperback, trade paperback (think trashy romance novels and the like), non-fiction, business, etc. And read the callouts carefully — some are “#1 best seller,” others are “best seller” which means they made a top 10 list, some might say something like, “from NYT #1 Best Selling Author” but the book itself hasn’t made the list, but other books by the author have.
Timing.
The NYT best seller list is calculated by week and by category.
Publishers don’t release their best books on the same week to avoid the competition.
So let’s say the next Steven King novel is dropping on May 6th. It’s probably going to sell well, so any other horror book that might be a best seller will get held back so that the big name sales don’t prevent it from being a best seller.
So the lesser name book release gets pushed to June.
The big fish usually announce their dates early, and the little fish fill in the gaps or get bumped.
There’s no way to be entirely sure, since how the NYT creates their bestseller list is a trade secret. However, there are some very well known exploits to get on the list without having an actual reader base. There are companies that you can pay to buy your book in bulk, artificially boosting the sales numbers to make it a bestseller. So it’s not really a meaningful metric for popularity.
There are a few different categories for Bestseller: Hardcover Fiction, Paperback Fiction, Hardcover Nonfiction, Paperback Nonfiction, Young Adult, Graphic Novel, Children, Fiction Audiobook, Nonfiction Audiobook, Mass Market Paperback. Maybe more.
While there are a few books that stay on these lists for a looooong time (like Emperor of Maladies was on for a long time), there is also a lot of turnover. Many of the thrillers you see are on the Mass Market Paperback list.
Most published books sell less than 100 copies.
Its called a sales pitch. A marketing tactic.
That’s it. Mystery solved lol.
LOLOL I work in Publishing and I freaking WISH every book was a NYT bestseller. You’re just only seeing those because they come to the surface being bestsellers i.e. popular af.
They don’t.
There are tens of thousands of books published that don’t get on there.
Good and bad is subjective. I don’t know the specific criteria to be a NYT best seller but it must be selling well, so subjectively good
Because there are a shit ton of categories.
It’s almost like baseball stats…this book is the best selling one on Tuesdays after a full moon in months that end in a vowel in the nation of Bumfukistan
Because you only read news about viral things.
In short: your reality is composed around the information you ( as an individual) have seen in social media.
I’d recommend stepping back from the internet and reflecting about things that aren’t “viral”.
Another thing I’ve noticed is the use of “NY Times Best Selling Author“ on the book cover, which if you don’t look closely can seem like NYTimes Best Seller
Publishers buy their own books to make the bestseller list… at least that was the case when I was freelancing at Simon & Schuster about ten years ago. I got a lot of free books out of that job.
Because the way a book is selected is a secret, and may have little to do with actual sales. I am sure it’s rife with favors and bribes.
From Wikipedia: The list is based on a proprietary method that uses sales figures, other data and internal guidelines that are unpublished—how the Times compiles the list is a trade secret.
Well, for one thing, a publisher can just pay for a novel to become a NY Times Bestseller. It’s not based on any sort of independent or publicly available metric. It’s just an endorsement by NY Times. Getting recognized is just about networking and financial considerations.
Second, you are likely engaging in confirmation bias. Even just getting published by a major publisher is already a high bar.
Because you literally only need to sell 10,000 copies to be on the NYT best seller list.
It is a weekly list of the books that sold best that week.
There are multiple categories like fiction, non-fiction and subcategories like “Paperback Nonfiction”.
It take surprisingly few copies sold to end up on some of these lists and over the years and decades lots of people have figured out ways to gain the system.
If you have half a dozen top ten list for 52 weeks a year you end up with a large number of potential spots that would qualify a book to become a NYT Bestseller.
Note that some books don’t claim to have been #1, some may just boast to have been on that list and some may just claim to be by an author who was on that list with a previous book.
You probably aren’t away of that many books that get published each year and the ones you are most likely to be aware of are liable to be on that list or even the #1 spot if only for a week or even just written by an author who had a bestseller before.
You can see extreme examples of this sort of logic with Amazon’s own rankings where books especially Kindle Unlimited ebooks can get high-rankings in really specific categories so that everyone can be high-ranking.