said one agent, who asked to remain
anonymous. “Not that long ago, it meant
a lot if you said a book was a bestseller.
Why? Because a select number of books
earned that accolade, and we all understood and agreed what it meant.” Now,
he said, he worries that the multiplicity
of lists has “watered down” the
designation.
“Every publisher must make a decision
on when to refer to a book as a bestseller,”
said Bill Wolfsthal, executive v-p of sales
and marketing at Skyhorse Publishing.
“Was it a bestseller on Amazon for a day?
Is it a bestseller if it makes a bestseller
list for independent bookstores? In those
decisions, good judgement and common
sense rules the day. No publisher wants
to mislead a reader, but we are all fighting
to get attention for our books.”
Whether the bestseller tag even really
drums up attention is also a point of
debate. “As long as it has an XYZ in front
of it—as in New York Times bestseller,
USA Today bestseller, or Wall Street
Journal bestseller, I do think it carries
weight with the reader,” agent Kristen
Nelson said. “If it just says ‘bestselling
author,’ I do think readers tend to perceive
the moniker with some skepticism.”
Ironically for booksellers, titles
dubbed bestsellers aren’t necessarily pop-
pretation. The New York Times famously
pulls data for its lists from a select and
secret sample of retailers, and Amazon,
while reporting its print sales, does not,
for the most part, disclose sales of
e-books. The lists that are arguably the
most transparent, like PW’s, rely on
NPD BookScan’s point-of-sale data,
which tracks 80%–85% of print sales in
the country but doesn’t include data on
e-book sales. Other news outlets, such as
the Wall Street Journal and USA Today,
run their own lists, and organizations
like the American Booksellers
Association produces multiple lists,
including an overall list of bestsellers in
ABA bookstores and regional lists.
The sheer number of lists and Amazon’s
decision not to widely share its e-book
sales figures (despite the fact that
BookScan has for years asked the company to take part in its sales aggregation
program) means that there is not a true
national bestseller list that can definitively identify what the top-selling
books are across all formats in a particular week. As a result, there’s some confusion about what the designation “
bestseller” really means.
“Even when it comes to ‘national bestseller,’ it seems that we don’t have a consensus [about the meaning of the term],”
News
Does Anybody Know What a Bestseller Is?
There are more bestseller lists than ever and the
ramifications for publishing remain unclear
Bestseller lists have long been powerfulmarketingtoolsforthe industry. In short, they sell
books. But they have proliferated, with
more lists that group books according to
different metrics, and industry insiders
are wondering whether they wield as
much power as they used to. When
nearly any title can be called a bestseller,
does becoming a bestseller still matter?
Though insiders we spoke with agreed
unanimously that the term “bestseller”
still means something to readers, they
disagreed on how lists affect the market
and what actually defines a bestseller.
Historically, bestseller lists were broken
down along two major lines: format and
category. The largest groupings were nonfiction and fiction. Those groups were
then broken down by the three major
print formats: hardcover, trade paperback,
and mass market paperback. The introduction of the fourth format—e-books—
disrupted the way bestseller lists are
compiled, as it did many other parts of
the industry. Because e-books are predominantly sold online and not in stores,
their sales can’t be tracked in the same
way that print sales are: by collecting
data from physical retailers.
Further complicating the bestseller
list landscape was Amazon’s introduction
of multiple bestseller lists. The e-tailer,
which tracks sales of its titles in real
time, publishes a wealth of lists, broken
down by format and also by multiple
subcategories. There are “overall” print
and Kindle bestsellers on the site, but
also numerous subcategories like “Crafts,
Hobbies & Home,” “Humor &
Entertainment,” and “Law.”
The sources of the data on which the
lists are based also complicate their inter-
“Every publisher must make a decision on when
to refer to a book as a bestseller. Was it a bestseller
on Amazon for a day? Is it a bestseller if it makes
a bestseller list for independent bookstores?”
—Skyhorse’s Bill Wolfsthal
