About bestseller lists

I'm hearing a lot of nonsense lately about how Men in Black by Mark Levin can't really be selling to actual readers despite its rankings on bestseller lists. Surely radical right-wing groups are buying it by the case and handing it out free and that explains everything, is more or less the argument being floated. This, by the way, was exactly the argument floated by careless pundits on the right when Hillary Rodham Clinton's book hit the bestseller lists. Surely nobody would read something written by her? It must be all those radical lefties buying the books en masse for publicity purposes or as some sort of money laundering arrangement.

Yes, and that explained all the people standing in line for hours for an autograph, too.

(Should I point out that our recent national elections showed rather dramatically that there are fervent supporters for just all sorts of things on either side of the middle? Actually, I think I'll let that go, for now...)

Ladies and gentlemen, while undoubtedly sometimes people get horribly excited about a book and buy it by the truckload to give to supporters (or to send to enemies), and while modern publishers/authors are probably not immune to the temptation of occasionally pulling off a publicity stunt or two (including, at a guess, covertly helping to arrange bulk sales at key times), could we please get a grip?

We are not dealing with our grandparents' bestseller lists, okay?

In the old days, in fact right up until a few years ago, bestseller lists were rather open to 'gaming' in that they were (for the most part) based on wholesale sales - i.e., how many books were sold to bookstores and/or distributors. If a publisher wanted a book on an influential bestseller list, the publisher could send out very astute and aggressive agents to persuade big bookstores to place huge advance orders. This was no skin off the noses of big bookstores because they had the option of returning any of the books that didn't sell within a few weeks. (In case you've missed the point of that last sentence, the publishing industry set it up so that large chain bookstores didn't have to assume the risks associated with overstocking any given title. Whatever didn't sell didn't have to be paid for. Nor did it hang about tying up precious shelf space or filling up warehouses. Such a deal.)

This was, to put it mildly, not a perfect system for tracking sales to customers, but given the technology of the times, and given that many wholesalers were happy to share sales figures for individual titles and many booksellers balked until there were privacy safeguards in place, etc., it probably worked about as well as anything could under the circumstances. And, still trying to be fair here, although the bestseller lists were very good at supporting books pre-selected for stardom, books that sold well through word of mouth could claw their way onto the charts. Little guys didn't get the breaks up front, in other words, but the field was open to some honest competition.

But, still, it was a bad system.

I don't know who was the first to tie in to the real-time inventory control data which became available to bookstores, but I first noticed it at the Wall Street Journal. To be honest, I subscribed to wsj.com several years ago because, as a bookseller, the fact that it had a bestseller list based on actual week-by-week retail sales was much more valuable to me than the New York Times list at the time.

How times change. This is what is currently noted at the bottom of the New York Times bestseller list:

Rankings reflect sales, for the week ending March 26, at almost 4,000 bookstores plus wholesalers serving 50,000 other retailers (gift shops, department stores, newsstands, supermarkets), statistically weighted to represent all such outlets nationwide. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book's sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger... indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.

You did catch that bit about "bulk orders" at the end? I still don't like the New York Times' list as much as some of the others, because it does do 'statistical weighting' and it does rely heavily on wholesalers - but, then, it is now upfront about it, and it clearly is keeping an eye out for anyone who might be trying to cheat, as it were. Good for them. (And whoever came up with the dagger as the symbol for bulk sales gets my applause. I think it is a nice touch.) And I do like how they have broadened their base to include outlets that aren't primarily bookstores.

The Wall Street Journal list is based on different sales figures:

The Wall Street Journal's list reflects nationwide sales of hardcover books during the week ended last Saturday at more than 2,500 Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton, Bookland, Books-a-Million, Books & Co., Bookstar, Bookstop, Borders, Brentano's, Coles, Coopersmith, Doubleday, Scribners and Waldenbooks stores, as well as sales from online retailers Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. The business list also includes figures from 800-CEO-READ. A sales index of 100 is equivalent to the median number of copies of the No. 1 fiction bestselling titles sold each week during 2004.

There are other bestseller lists out there, of course. As far as I know, most if not all of them are based at least to some degree on recorded retail sales. Most of them are likely based exclusively on actual retail sales.

I'm sure that it's still possible, somehow, to outwit the system, but it would be very hard to do given today's very broad and rather transparent data sources, and I'd hate to be the one caught trying it.

Now, as to the question of what percentage of buyers actually read any given title, that's a whole 'nother question (as we say around here). Books that make bestseller lists, by their very nature, have a skewed buyer/reader ratio. More on that someday.