How to drive your nonfiction book up the bestseller lists

Every author would love to plop the words “bestselling author” alongside his or her name. But what does this term really mean? The definitions of a “bestseller” are changing in the age of digital publishing.

The New York Times is the gold standard of bestseller lists in North America but recently, more authors are citing status as an “Amazon bestseller”. What’s the difference?

The most prestigious in North America, The New York Times bestseller list has appeared regularly in that venerable publication since 1931. Books make their way onto the list via a weekly bestseller list that reports the number of copies sold through select book retailers across the United States. In 2010, the New York Times stated that their bestseller list would be compiled using data from chain bookstores, independent booksellers, online retailers, and publishers, although exactly which stores are involved and how these data are collected and used are closely guarded secrets. Controversy surrounds this hugely influential list, with some alleging that the tallies are corrupted by double reporting of sales for the same book by both publisher and retailer, and by publishers who buy up massive quantities of a particular book only to turn around and resell them.

Other newspapers such as Canada’s Globe and Mail use BookNet Canada SalesData, a nonprofit organization, partially funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage, and bookstores across the country as sources. In the United States, newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal use BookScan, a sales data repository owned by the Nielsen Company, to collect sales figures and deliver bestseller lists to the public. Although it is used widely by the publishing industry to track sales volumes, BookScan has also come under fire for inaccuracy. Their data are gathered from online booksellers and large retail chains, excluding independents whose sales may make a notable difference to some titles’ performance. Self-published titles, which are generally restricted to distribution through online retailers, are at a clear disadvantage when it comes to lists that draw primarily from the brick-and-mortar book trade. Any way you slice it, the only way to make it onto these bestseller lists is by selling a lot of copies of your book.

Amazon’s bestseller lists are a completely different animal, drawing only from sales made through its own site. This means that a spot on the Amazon list is accessible to self-published books (many of whom count Amazon.com as their only retailer) as well as those published by traditional and hybrid publishing companies. Their highly categorized “bestseller” lists rank sales not only of books but also of home wares, electronics, DVDs, music or any other items Amazon sells. Its results are highly volatile, updated hourly from algorithms that measure how quickly and how many units of a popular item are selling; every purchase of a particular item gives that item a “point”. Amazon’s narrow timeframes and highly specialized topic categories make it possible for unknown and even unpopular books to pop up on their lists by dominating just one hour of the sales window. By orchestrating a spike in sales, it is possible for an author to become an Amazon “bestseller” with relatively few units sold.

Appearance on the Amazon top 100 bestseller list varies with the season-holiday season requiring more sales- however, for most of the year it only takes a few hundred copies to be sold in a day, while close to 10,000 copies of the same book would need to sell in the first week to appear on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Understandably, this has led to a growing credibility gap between Amazon bestseller status and “true” bestseller status, leading many publishers to specify “New York Times bestseller” on their covers, if the book is successful enough to earn that distinction.

At this point, many members of the book-reading and book-buying public may respond indiscriminately to the “bestseller” label regardless of its origin – the word still boosts credibility and drives sales, even if the author’s moment in the sun was one brief hour in which all their friends and family rallied together to game the system by placing orders en masse. But you have to wonder how long that will continue, as we see more and more books of dubious quality brandishing that once-elusive badge of honour.

Maggie Langrick

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