Bestsellers Aren't

As I've mentioned before I have a book-shuffling job and on sundays we do the switchover for the week's bestsellers. We use the New York Times bestseller list (published approximately two weeks in advance so at least with bestsellers I can easily look into the future) which is more or less the industry standard within the United States though other lists do exist. In an empirical world the list would be done completely by volume of sales. In fact, by the very nature of the name you would be under the impression that Best Sellers are determined by volume of sales (literally which ones sold the best). Unfortunately if you were under that impression it would be a mistaken impression. The New York Times list is based on survey samples from independent and chain retailers in the United States as well as wholesalers and other factors which are trade secrets. I'll let you think about that for a moment before I start dissecting it.

It's not the trade secrets part that bothers me too much because in the over sixty year history there has been ample data that if they used the "trade secret" bit to influence the list to their own advantage it would have become obvious by now to people who can do math. There are two things about their methodology in deciding that make me cringe. One thing is the fact that they count sales from wholesalers as part of their formula. You know when you were a little kid and "double counting" was one of those unfair tricks you accused other kids of? That's what they're doing when they count not retailer but also wholesaler sales. Because where do the retailers get their books? Obviously from the wholesalers. The other thing is the word "sample". And here is where I can draw on my movie theater background. When I worked in the movie theater every single night we got a call from not one but two companies (Rentrak and Neilson EDI) that tracked box office numbers and the theater that I worked at was an independent one-screen in a tourist town seating less than two hundred per showing and usually having fewer than ten showings in a week. Rentrak and Neilson weren't taking a "sample". Our little one-screen was not part of their "sample"- they called us because they called every theater. Now that I work at a bookstore I know we don't get a call at the end of the night asking what books we sold during the day and I work at a chain that's been around longer than Borders. So who belongs to the sample? I have no idea.

Although, if I did know which stores belonged to the "sample" and I did have a book being published and also some money I could manipulate my book into being on the bestseller list. It's been done before by some economists who obviously are capable of math and clearly viewed it as a good investment. It's been done even more times with the Amazon top one hundred list but that's another story entirely. It also turns out to not be illegal in any way though the New York Times does frown upon that sort of behavior. But only when it's an individual doing it and not a large corporation. Why do I say that? It turns out that the top ten largest publishing companies in the United States are responsible for 98% of all New York Times bestsellers. The top five largest are responsible for 80% of them. If you were standing in front of a shelf of bestsellers right now and glanced at their spines you'd probably be inclined to disagree with me vehemently. You might say: "I can see Scribner, Bantam, Atria, Tor, Knopf, DelRey, Amy Einhorn, Ballantine, Beyond Words, Simon & Schuster, HarperOne, Little Brown, Razorbill, Hyperion, Harper, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, St. Martin's Griffin, Back Bay Books, Broadway Books, Reagan Arthur Books, and that's only twenty from this week that this blogger happened to remember off the top of their head from doing bestsellers on sunday!" Well, you'd say the first part but the last part was really only to illustrate my point. All those publishers are for books on the bestseller list this week and there are twenty different ones. If you looked at all the books you'd probably find twice that many or even more. So how could just ten companies have a lockout on 98% of bestsellers? Well, if you can name which of those twenty isn't actually one of the top ten in the next five seconds before I tell you I'll give you a prize. Because when I see that list I see Simon & Schuster, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Random House, Random House, Penguin, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, HarperCollins, Workman, Macmillan, Hachette, Random House, Hachette and that right there is the top six largest publishing companies in the United States plus Workman (and if you guessed Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill you won a prize).

And those companies are the reason that bestsellers aren't. Say you work for Bantam, an imprint of Random House, and you receive this amazing manuscript from me and everyone who reads it loves it so you know it will make your company money. When you print that book you're going to want to print a lot of that book because you think it will sell well. When wholesalers buy that book you convince them to buy a lot of them because you think it will sell well and the wholesalers do buy a lot of them. The wholesalers then convince the retailers that it will be worth their while to buy a lot of them. To further this cause the publishing company likely has a contract with many retailers across the country to display certain books in a prominent position and even if those books never sell the retailer still gets money for putting them on a special display. More than likely, though, those books will sell because they're in a highly visible position and the public has been trained to buy books from these special displays because it's an easy way of finding "high quality" books without doing much looking. Then, because the publishers printed a lot of them and convinced both wholesalers and retailers to buy a lot of them and get the retailers to put them in a prominent position so they sell well they make it to the bestseller list. Once on the bestseller list not only are they in an even higher visibility spot for customers but they're now bestsellers and the consumers believe that lots of other people are buying this book and use that as a reason to buy it, thus prolonging it's stay on the bestseller list. Long story short, publishing companies basically expect something to become a bestseller so it does. A self-causing self-fulfilling prophecy.