Publishers count the number of books they sell.
This seems pretty simple, right? It is, but as a consequence, easily gamed. Publishers don't sell to you and me, they sell to book stores. So, you create some marketing to get people to preorder your book from a lots of different book stores. Book sellers inform the number of copies based, in part, on preorder numbers. There are ways that you can get book stores to order many more books than there is demand for by fraudulently (not sure if it's legally fraudulent, but maybe?) pre-ordering books, and stocking shelves with books that no one ever picks up. But boom, there you go - best seller.
If you want to cut out the middle man, and you're rich enough, you can just _be_ the middle man. Buy all the books from the publisher, and resell them. The publisher still gets their money, so they don't care. Again, now you have a best-seller.
And then, of course, there are legitimate sales that the best seller lists market themselves as measuring.
Book sellers don't want to be stuck with unsold inventory, so there's something of an arms race between book sellers and publishers/authors.
After seeing this game first-hand, I no longer believe anything on a best-seller list. As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not. The system can still be gamed, especially if it's run by algorithms.
So, basically, I'd argue that it doesn't matter whether WaPo is "right" or not because the input data is likely of poor quality anyways.
Some years ago received a random package in the mail - turns out it was 40+ copies of this authors new book. Had no idea what to do with them so they just sat around, I never even read it
A few days later I notice some blogs running giveaways for the same book - figure they got deliveries of it as well. Go to a conference and in conversation find that a bunch of people also got the same package
I didn't put together until years later that this is all part of self-sales to boost best seller rankings.
Apparently if you know which book stores are surveyed by the NYTimes you can call them up and order a handful of copies of your own book and boost your own sales
It's no coincidence that this author heavily pitches themselves as a multiple-NYTimes best seller. It likely pays off because I have a good idea of what their appearance fee is and it's mid-5 figures+
So of course record companies and sometimes artists would make sure there were big orders at those stores. And a lot of very bad records became unexpected chart toppers.
That truth was the breakout tipping point for country music. It also makes you wonder how legit/truthful any charting previous to SoundScan actually was.
Amazon might make things a lot worse. The “recommended by amazon” windows 10 keys are mostly fake ripoffs at this point with pages of complaints in the reviews
Edit: added quote
I can't imagine publishers would let this happen more than once or twice before revoking this ability for the seller. Inventory handling is expensive.
Because of a worker error, the copies were left under a leak in the warehouse roof.
I understand there was an insurance claim. It was all very unfortunate.
But perhaps it doesn’t serve them to diverge from the bestseller model.
> In other words, The New York Times best-seller list is not a best-seller list -- which even The New York Times once acknowledged. In the early 1980s, William Peter Blatty, author of the monumental best-seller "The Exorcist," sued The New York Times for only listing his novel on the list one time, even though it sold in the millions. In defending itself before the court, as reported by Book History, the annual journal of The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (Penn State University Press), The Times said, "The list did not purport to be an objective compilation of information but instead was an editorial product."
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-...
Doesn't seem to have the same ring :)
One anecdote posted on a conservative website is hardly a debunking of The Times' 75+ year history of best sellers lists.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-supreme-court/1843273.html
The Times won on First Amendment (freedom of the press / speech) grounds. Blatty couldn't win, since the list would need to be "of and concerning" him:
> "To begin with, the list does not expressly refer to Blatty or his novel. Nor does he contend otherwise. Quite the contrary: the failure of Legion to appear on the list is the very basis of his action."
Perhaps most interesting for me is that the Times survey of bookstores included a pre-written list of the books they want sales numbers for:
> "To obtain sales figures from bookstores, [the Times] sent to the bookstores forms which [it] prepared; the forms for works of fiction contain and contained a printed list of 36 ‘bestselling’ books which has and had the effect of encouraging reports as to sales of books listed on the forms and discouraging reports as to sales of books not listed on the forms”
So basically, they use editorial discretion when ranking bulk sales. Which means they are prone to exclude books they don’t like and include books they do like. Excluding some bulk sales but not others isn’t objective. Institutional and bulk sales should all be excluded from the counts.
They are all - every last one of them - suddenly nothing but editorial opinion and entertainment as soon as they show up in a courtroom.
Stamper and other YA writers, including Jeremy West, began to investigate. Stamper shared messages he had received from bookshop staff who said they had been contacted to see if their store was an NYT-reporting shop – the paper’s lists are collated from information supplied by a confidential group of stores – before a bulk order was placed. Another bookshop shared similar information with West, while Publishers Weekly reported that a shop outside Las Vegas had a customer who ordered 87 copies after learning it was an NYT-reporting shop.
(Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-m...)
I'm also skeptical of data from Amazon, whose KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited ebook platform is notorious for scams designed to ensure rank or extra payouts for authors. See http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-nee... for an explanation of how one scam worked, and the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212.
This has been going on for a very long time.
EDIT: Phrasing.
If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.
[0]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-201...
[1]: https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-h...
Best seller lists skew towards "branded" writers typically pushing (in my opinion) a diluted version of an existing thought that is re-marketed for our time. There is nothing new under the sun, so stick to the classics. Life is much too short to read mediocre books. (:
(I'm only half joking - book discovery is a pain point in my life and I fantasize about this every time looking for a new read)
But this makes sense, because a store will generally buy items that it thinks it can sell, so it'll come down to humans making choices about what's a good book. Of course, publishers will be pushing their latest items through their marketing chains, and so new books will make it to stores based on marketability to the store owner.
In the digital realm, this is less of an issue, and can accept more books, but makes the whole shopping experience very noisy imho.
However, I personally like to read those little recommendation cards that the shop assistants make. I've bought a few books outside my normal genre that way, and haven't been let down yet.
1. Find a topic of interest.
2. Start reading at some arbitrary entry point, though generally favour texts with references.
3. Branch from there.
- Find the authors you most respect / who most make you think, and read their publications, and track down their sources and references, or where they're cited. Notes, footnotes, references, bibliographies, and citation indices are gold.
- Find the topics, questions, ideas, methods within the topic that you're most interested in and drill down on those.
- If you find yourself needing new skills in the course of explorations, pick up on those.
- Don't hesitate to ask for recommendations.
- If there's a concept that seems unclear, chase that down to its origins, and trace variants as the concept evolves
- Incidental histories and biographies can often provide further illumination.
- Eventually you should start constructing your ow structure or modle of the field or space (or subsets / components of it/them). This can further drive your exploration.
Most newspapers also have book review sections, as do many academic journals.
Presumably if you're interested in someone or something, you can also simply peruse the internet to see what's out there, i.e. you can start with your interests rather than with what's popular or well-advertised.
