![]() ![]() “It's frustrating when you get the actual numbers of what every book on the list sold and a book with lower numbers is higher on the list,” she said. ![]() Sarah went so far as to suggest that the Times’s curation goes beyond a preference for books acquired at independent retailers-a theory posited by many I spoke to. “There is quite a bit taken into consideration-i.e., are the book sales mostly bulk buys? Are they mostly indie bookstore sales? Are they mostly Amazon sales? Even which list the book would be considered for has a huge effect.” For example, whether a book is considered for the Hardcover Nonfiction weekly list or the Advice, How-To, & Miscellaneous weekly list might affect whether it becomes a best seller at all. However, the truth is, it's much more editorialized,” Sarah*, a book publicist who has worked at two Big Five houses, suggested to me. “To my knowledge, The New York Times tracks sales of books, and the sales are what is ‘supposed to’ decide where those books sit on the list. She also believes that The New York Times uses data from BookScan, employing it to flag books with a large percentage of bulk orders that might detract from the paper's mission to represent individual consumer purchases.Īlthough the list claims to be a numerical ranking with full autonomy from The New York Times Book Review, some of the sources I spoke with believe that an element of editorial curation must be at play. They can't simply rely on the individual stores,” she said.Įloise*, a book publicist I spoke to who spent several years working within the Big Five (the five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan), theorized that The New York Times seems “to look for signs that a book is selling large quantities organically-that is, individual copies being purchased from a variety of booksellers… with an emphasis on independent bookshops and geographic diversity.” “I can't imagine they do not use BookScan at all. ![]() The Times denies the use of any services that aggregate data, but according to Schmidt, those in the industry believe otherwise. Kathleen Schmidt, president of KMSPR, a book publicity and marketing firm, speculates that The New York Times’ main data sources are Amazon, ReaderLink (a distributor for big box stores like Target, Walmart, and Hudson News), individually reporting stores, and BookScan (one of publishing’s main data providers). The list of theories is longer than the actual list of best sellers. McGrath, an assistant professor of English at Temple University who teaches a course on the history of the best seller, compares The New York Times’ list to the original recipe for Coca-Cola: “We have a pretty good idea of what goes into it, but not the exact amount of each ingredient.” In The New York Times’ own words, “The weekly book lists are determined by sales numbers.” It adds that this data "reflects the previous week’s Sunday-to-Saturday sales period" and takes into account "numbers on millions of titles each week from tens of thousands of storefronts and online retailers as well as specialty and independent bookstores." The paper keeps its sources confidential, it argues, "to circumvent potential pressure on the booksellers and prevent people from trying to game their way onto the lists." Its expressed goal is for “the lists to reflect what individual consumers are buying across the country instead of what is being bought in bulk by individuals or associated groups.” But beyond these disclosures, the Times is not exactly forthcoming about how the sausage gets made. ![]() No one outside The New York Times knows exactly how its best sellers are calculated-and the list of theories is longer than the actual list of best sellers.
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