What Makes an Independent Bestseller?
Indie Bestseller vs. New York Times List
Biggest “News” in Books: The Indie Bestseller List
This week I dug through the nonfiction side of the independent bookseller’s bestseller lists archives, curious about the differences between what kinds of books the independent stores sell versus B&N, Amazon, and other national retailers.
As everyone knows, The New York Times is the gold standard, for better or worse, when it comes to the “bestseller” designation. The NYT list is organized in such a way as to favor new publications and attempts to count sales from all kinds of retailers giving each type of sale a different weight: it’s a purposely convoluted system. The Indie bestseller list is a lower-stakes and more straightforward affair, as they track which books people actually walk into bookstores across the country and pay for. With less of a committee involved, the indie bestseller list is a purer indication of what people are actually seeking out and reading.
Before we dive in to what readers buy at the indies, here’s a fun nomenclature “bestseller” digression. If you’re on the national indie bestseller list, then your book is a “National Bestseller.” Confusingly, this is the same designation if you make it on USA Today’s bestseller list (the second most popular bestseller list, which is an all-category, all-format, pure, by-the-sales list), because USA Today is a national newspaper. Also, if a book is a bestseller on two different regional indie bestseller lists, then it’s also a “National Bestseller.” Go figure.
Help! I Need Somebody.
If you picture some highly literary set going into your local independent to pick up a stack of Nabokov’s, the latest prize winner, or the hot new literary novel, think again. The category that routinely appears on the nonfiction indie bestseller lists are self-help. Atomic Habits is a perennial indie bestseller, along with other staples of the genre like The Four Agreements, and Supercommunicators (this is where I must plug If Books Could Kill again—listen to this podcast instead of reading these books!).
The other major self-helpy trend on the indie bestseller list is less surprising— many aspiring writers and artists clearly shop at independent bookstores. The Artist’s Way basically never leaves the list; Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act has been sitting atop the hardcover nonfiction list for months; and even novelist Jami Attenberg’s writing guide 1000 Words was able to achieve bestseller status through the indies. Writing about writing or making art is a reliable way to reach indie book buyers.
For a long time, the New York Times bestseller list has specifically downplayed the genre of self-help by relegating this category to the “Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous” list, which only has 10 bestseller spots instead of 15 and tellingly appears at the bottom of all of the other bestseller lists in the paper. But as the indie bestseller lists show, self-help is still big business and a large majority of readers come to books seeking answers and personal improvement.
Independent Bookstores Are for the Birds
The funniest trend and difference between other bestseller lists and the indies is that indie book patrons absolutely love birds. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan a #1 bestseller (okay also a NYT #1 bestseller to be fair), but also books that only appeared on the indie list are titles like The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America and The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. In general, there’s a nature reader at the independent bookstores that doesn’t seem to be online or at big box stores. I’d say that’s pretty intuitive, that the reader and lover of nature doesn’t get their books packed in a box and shipped to them. Birds is by far the oddest trend I noticed, but it also extends to animals and nature in general for indie book buyers, with stalwart bestsellers like Ed Yong’s An Immense World and Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus.
Everyone Buys Big
Many readers went into independent bookstores and bought a copy of The Wager as a last-minute gift for dad. Lots of people all over the map are reading Jennette McCurdy’s blockbuster memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died. The Body Keeps the Score has been on the indie bestseller list for 189 weeks and the New York Times list for 290 (I think the difference being that the NYT is counting both the paperback and hardcover weeks on the list and adding them up). The fact is that when a nonfiction book is huge it gains a cycle of awareness and familiarity that is hard to break. A big nonfiction book starts to crowd out others in the category, and crucially people start reading these books because so many other people have read them already. It becomes cultural, “dinner party” knowledge, for instance, read something like Outliers or The Body Keeps the Score.
Current Events
Finally, looking at the indie bestseller list you see that indie bookstore patrons buy based on what is happening in the world and are generally engaged with current events. That means books on Palestine and Israel currently. Previously, it meant books on the Trump presidency, pandemics, and for a long time after George Floyd’s murder, racial justice in America. In a sad way you can basically trace everything bad that’s happening in the world by looking at the indie bestseller list.
Final Thoughts on the Indie Book Buyer
As not to end on that depressing note, let’s look at what we’ve observed about indie bestsellers in an optimistic way: one could say that the common theme of these readers, from self-help, to birds, to current events is that they walk into their local bookstore with the intention of appreciating and understanding the world and themselves, and ultimately trying to make it a better place.
Join the Editorial Assistant Book Club for May 2024: Real Americans by Rachel Khong
In the tradition of Emma Cline, we’re reading a sophomore novel that sold with huge expectations attached— nearly every publisher in town was vying for Rachel Khong’s Real Americans when it was on submission a year or two ago.
Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, a funny, smart, single perspective, 200-page debut novel about a woman in her 30s that returns home to deal with heartbreak, grief, and loss. The chapters are written in a short, pithy, journal-entry-like style. You can read Khong’s first novel in a few hours. Goodbye Vitamin was praised to the hilt, won a literary award or two, and sold decently, setting up Khong’s career in a big way.
What’s interesting about Real Americans is that the author is consciously trying to write a story with a much bigger canvas. Khong is going from one extreme—200 pages, what we might have even called a novella in previous decades—to Real Americans, a multi-timeline, multi-perspective epic at 416 pages. This is the type of family saga that has become a reliable staple on bestseller lists, from Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko to Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had.
Join me in seeing if Khong has pulled it off and captured the holy grail of publishing: a big bestseller that is also considered literary, important and prestigious. Read up and come back June 20th for a fuller discussion of the novel and Khong’s career.