Why is James Patterson Mad at the NYT Bestseller List?
A theory of how “The List” gets put together
“Biggest” News in Books: Bestseller Alchemy
James Patterson wrote an angry letter to the New York Times decrying the ordering of their bestseller list. The paper of record didn’t publish it (surprise) and so instead he posted his letter on social media. The letter itself is written in a very insider kind of way, so I’ll translate and summarize. But here is the full letter if you’re interested:
Basically, Patterson’s complaint is that the New York Times bestseller list is not a purely accurate list of which books have sold the most copies—did you already know that? Then you’re probably in publishing or around publishing people. It has long been common knowledge in the industry that the most important bestseller list in the country—a huge lifetime gold seal of approval and marketing opportunity for authors—is at its core chosen by editorial means and not strictly by the numbers. When the Times published an article about how they put together the list a couple of years ago, the only thing it really illuminated was that they consider a lot of data, but reading between the lines it basically confirms that they put the list together using their own proprietary blend of magic.
No publisher, editor, or author truly knows how The List gets put together, but I imagine it goes something like this: the New York Times gathers a bunch of sales data and makes a list of 20-30 of the top selling titles that week for each category, then they pick 15 and order them based on how legitimate the sales seem and how much they like the author, book, subject of the book, etc. If you’re not favored by this qualitative aspect of the list making, you can see exactly why you would be mad. That’s the crux of Patterson’s complaint: how can a book that sold 25,000 books be ranked #15 on the list (or not be on it at all) when #14-#7 have only sold around 5,000 copies? This exact scenario has happened to projects I’ve worked on many times, and it does, indeed, suck.
Patterson is entirely correct that The List has “actual monetary value for authors and publishing houses. And a list that can make, or break, the careers of new writer.” For editors and authors, securing a spot on the list paves the way to promotions or better paydays, it’s the first thing mentioned in editor retirements and in author bios. To have so much that rides on a mixture of sales and arbitrary decision-making is…frustrating…to say the least, when your livelihood hangs in the balance. But is there a better way?
It’s not too hard to look at the reported sales numbers verses the NYT rankings each week and understand why the outlier books are ranked higher or lower than they should be. Sometimes the answer is clearly preferential treatment: the makers of The List give an author or book they like a bump or demerit some long-in-the-tooth author or politically distasteful book. What complicates the picture and provides the Times more cover than it always being a simple case of editorial bias, is that there can be a lot of efforts to cook sales numbers, especially on the nonfiction side of the business. That’s where the NYT’s “dagger” comes in and this symbol is to alert readers that the sales have something suspicious about them. The dagger and docking suspicious sales is an effort to prevent someone with a lot of money from simply buying their own books to get on the bestseller list and pay for the honorific of “New York Times bestselling author.”
The New York Times dagger, which honestly looks more like a cross
But this false picture of actual sales can, theoretically, also happen in small ways that aren’t dagger-worthy. It’s fair to assume you should weight the sale of one book sold to an actual reader differently than the sales of 20 books to the author’s supportive father; maybe the latter isn’t suspicious, per se, but the Times might “dock” that sale, count it as 7 say instead one-for-one, to factor in actual popularity with readers vs. buying power. Another example might be if the books are purchased at a steep bulk discount and given out at a conference as part of admission—are the attendees really buying the book to read, or are they just being given it? Alternatively, there are also plenty of ways for sales to be underreported to the general public. The conventional wisdom is that publishing’s main third-party sales tracking system, Bookscan, which is mentioned by Patterson, captures about 85% of sales for standard publications . However, there are many ways, such as book club programs (like Book of the Month) and specialty stores (small gift shops, etc.) who don’t report sales to Bookscan, whose sales might not show up when publishers or authors like Patterson look at the “raw” data through Bookscan—the Times may have access to data that individual publisher’s don’t and visa-versa.
Of course, The New York Times can’t publicly say that they are basically picking and choosing the bestsellers from a short list based on a rough feeling of what the real sales are, that would sort of undermine the perception of the general audience that this is intended for that it is, you know, a bestseller list. But there will always be enough plausible deniability baked into the system that James Patterson’s complaint can be both justified or dead wrong depending on the week and month.
Do I wish, at times, as an editor, that the decision making around the list were a little more objective and further away from the fully editorial, review arm of the Times? Yes. But the alternative is having very clear rules that publishers and authors would then try to game. If we knew exactly how the Times weighted each sale, every resource would then be poured into one retailer or type of sale (if the Times favored maritime gift shops, we’d hold every author event on the Battleship New Jersey), painting an even more distorted picture of what people are actually buying and reading. The alchemy can be maddening, but full transparency might be worse.
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