A Proposal: The Bestsellers Hall of Fame

NYT, call me

Hey friends!

I’m back from vacation! It was tremendously wonderful and I can’t wait to go back to Italy. Usually, I can’t wait to get back to work and my regular, consistent life, but this time, my vacation was so great I didn’t feel that normal life, please! itch. Also, I brought BIG SWISS and only read about 50 pages of it, lol.

Now, back to regular life. Remember when I wrote about how the New York Times bestsellers list shouldn’t be your main goal? I stand by that still, of course. But I’ve been thinking more about The List, and I’ve come up with an idea that the Times should absolutely do.

We already know that The List is not a simple accounting of total sales. If it was, it would be all The Bible, Good Night Moon, Moby Dick, and other “evergreen” titles that consistently sell year over year. The Times retires and excludes these “evergreen” titles to create a list “that’s lively and churns and affords new authors the opportunity to be recorded,” according to then-List editor Deborah Hofmann, in this admittedly old piece in the Times. But is it actually still doing that if books can stay on there for 50, 100, 200 weeks, with no end in sight? I mean, fricking Harry Potter (series) is still on the List. Hasn’t it enjoyed its time in the sun?

The List we have is not the same List the Times introduced in 1931. It created a weekly Children’s Fiction list in the wake of said Harry Potter. Before that, it created the Advice, How-to, Miscellaneous list in response to Self-Help clogging up the Nonfiction list. (I got all this from the Wikipedia entry for the List, and tbh it’s fascinating.) So maybe it’s time to shake up the List once more.

I propose a NYT Bestsellers Hall of Fame. Once your book hits that list for 52 (nonconsecutive) weeks, it becomes a Hall of Fame Bestseller. If that’s too many words to fit on the cover, may be it can be an All-Time Bestseller, a Golden Bestseller, a Lifetime Bestseller. I’m sure the Times can come up with a moniker that makes everyone look good. Publishers would get to put something even more special on the cover, authors would get to do the same in their bios and such, and everyone looks good because it’s the ultimate humblebrag. Oh, my book was soooooo successful they had to retire it from the List! I was so happy to make room for other authors to share in the success I’ve enjoyed.” Everyone wins! More books hit the List, publishers get something super special to use to market said books, and the Times looks magnanimous and like they’re the List of the people. They can even print another, separate list (mayyyyyybe only fiction and nonficiton, combined genres and ages, for now. We don’t need to double the length of the section) so that publishers and authors can screenshot it and post it on Instagram. And according to Wikipedia, it looks like the Lists benefits the Times with increased ad sales from publishers, so this could mean more and different ad sales! Because how many ads is Penguin buying for The Body Keeps the Score, after 287 weeks on the Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller list? But wouldn’t they buy an ad to celebrate its inclusion to the Bestseller Hall of Fame?

If this happened with the current list, it would impact the Paperback Nonfiction and Children’s lists the most. In fact, seven of the ten books on the Children’s and YA Series list would enter the Hall of Fame. Think about what publishers could do with SEVEN NEW NYT BESTSELLERS. Think about how this could change authors’ lives. Think about the new books readers could find with the increase in visibility from the List? Do we really think Rick Riordan or Jeff Kinney or Jenny Han would object? Maybe! I don’t know them personally. But most of the very successful authors I’ve met are happy to share the stage. And fully half of the adult Paperback Nonfiction list would turn over. What kind of sleep hits (i.e. not celebrity books and/or movie tie-ins) would take their places? I wish we knew.

Call me, NYT. Let’s make this happen.

OXOXOXOX,

Kate