Best-seller lists

Secrets of the Best Seller Lists

by Robyn Jackson

Robert St. John is a restaurant owner and chef in Hattiesburg, Miss. He also writes a humor column about food and restaurants that is syndicated in numerous newspapers in Mississippi and Louisiana. This foodie entrepreneur self-published his first cookbook, "A Southern Palate," in September 2002, and by August 2003 had sold about 17,000 copies.

"Do you realize," I told him recently, "that if you had gone with a New York publisher, your book would have been a major best-seller?"

It's surprising to learn just how few copies a book might actually sell before it lands on the best seller lists. In the March 2, 1992 issue of Publishers Weekly, Daisy Maryles revealed that the No. 15 book on the non-fiction hardcover list that week had sold less than 1,000 copies, while the No. 2 book had sold about 10,000.

It's all a game, and the cards are stacked in favor of the big New York publishers, who have the money to promote new titles and generate a burst of sales. Best seller lists reflect sales for a short period of time, generally the first few weeks a book is on the shelves, and books have to sell a lot of copies in this short time frame or they don't register.

Books that start small and sells thousands - even hundreds of thousands - of copies through word-of-mouth recommendations over a period of months or years may never make the lists. Books by small, regional and independent publishers might outsell books by the big guys in the Big Apple two to one, but they're not likely to show up on the New York Times or Publishers Weekly lists.

In fact, in "1001 Ways to Market Your Books," John Kremer says the lists are "more or less works of fiction."

When you consider that the Harry Potter books aren't listed on the Times' and PW best-seller lists because they're classified as children's books, even though J.K. Rowling's latest, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," just set records, and many adults buy the books for themselves, you can see that this is true.

Here's how the game works: The New York Times submits a list of 36 titles - which the book section's editors think will be the top selling books for that week, thanks to the publicity departments of the major publishers - to about 3,000 bookstores across the country. The book sellers are supposed to record the number of books sold each week and return the list to the Times. There is space on the form for book sellers to list other titles that are selling well, but apparently few ever do. The Times compiles the returned lists each week and issues its new list of best-selling books.

Publisher's Weekly compiles its list much the same way.

That means a handful of editors at two publications pretty much dictate which books will become best-sellers because they compile the initial lists that book sellers fill out and return.

USA Today ranks books in order of national sales as reported by some major retailers and some independent book stores. It doesn't divide and rank books into categories like fiction, non-fiction, mass market paperback or trade paperback, like the others do, so a Harry Potter title is likely to be No. 1, and it's likely to be followed by a non-fiction title or two.

Online book sellers such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble compile their daily lists based on orders. If Oprah Winfrey featured a book on her show that day, it'll be near the top of the online lists by the end of the day.

Publications that compile best seller lists don't count books sold at most of the small independent book stores, many specialty book stores, health food and gourmet kitchen stores, craft and do-it-yourself stores, grocery stores or Wal-Mart, or through book clubs and mail order.

Best seller lists are a great gauge of what people are reading, and many worthy books end up there, but don't be fooled into thinking that they accurately or completely reflect book sales. We've all read at least one great book that never made it onto any best seller lists. Now you know why.

Robyn Jackson is a newspaper features editor with 20 years experience. She is also the author of three unpublished historical novels and plans to become a life coach specializing in helping writers achieve their dreams. She writes a weekly column about writing on her Web site, www.robynjackson.com.