The List is not a Monolith

All your faves are problematic

Hi friends!

Today we’re talking about the New York Times best seller list because this is what’s going on this week:

Thanks to @amistadbooks for this initiative.

A few suggestions for you!

Brit Bennett’s follow up to The Mothers, THE VANISHING HALF, which I have been eagerly eagerly eagerly waiting for!

Nefertiti Austin’s MOTHERHOOD SO WHITE: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America, a title I’m so proud to have worked on and a point of view almost completely absent from the parenting world.

A middle grade novel, FROM THE DESK OF ZOE WASHINGTON, by Janae Marks, that I have been eyeing for too long, about wrongful incarceration AND baking.

And Brandon Taylor's debut novel, REAL LIFE, which I am reading as soon as my husband is done with it. O Magazine called it a “blistering coming of age story.” (If it’s as blistering as Brandon’s tweets, I know I’m going to love it.)

So, why, besides hundreds of years of racial inequity in publishing and also in the world, are we doing this? Because the New York Times best seller list is not just a measure of the all books that sold the most in one week, ranked in order of highest to lowest. Most people don’t know this but it is a curated list created by a proprietary algorithm owned by the Times, and kept under lock and key. Every publisher runs a post mortem the day after the list comes out (we get it Wednesday nights), to see how their high preforming books compared to the books that “hit the list” that week, to see how close or far they might have been. Might. Because sometimes one of their books sold MORE than a book that hit the list. Because is not a print out of top sellers. There isn’t one organization that tallies up All Sales of All Books and reports it to the Times. Retailers, a lot but not all, report their sales to the Times and then the Times creates the list from “statistically weighted” analysis. What does that mean? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m not saying that the Times is twiddling their mustache to make it as unfair as humanly possible. But this post on Medium that looked at the YA hard cover best seller lists over the last two years is nooooooooooot great. Now, this is only one of the Times’ many lists, but this author, John the Correlator, found that there was one debut Black author on the YA hard cover list since 12/31/17. No, it wasn’t Angie Thomas’ THE HATE YOU GIVE, because that came out before the start date of his analysis. That you can probably name The One it might be is telling in and of itself. There were NO Indigenous authors. 69.6% of the authors that hit this list were white. Just… just read the post. It’s a lot.

Why is this important? Why does it matter? Why are you telling us this, Kate?

A couple of reasons:

Because we all need to investigate our own book buying habits and make sure we haven’t, unconsciously or not, fallen into the traps that publishing assumes readers fall into. That books by Black authors aren’t widely relatable (which is code for white people won’t buy them.) That readers are, consciously or unconsciously, divided on racial lines. Books by Black authors, as well as those by many other Indigenous authors and People of Color, are under represented by publishing as a whole and then often under marketed or under promoted for any number of conscious and unconscious reasons. That’s what publishing is reckoning with right now. Readers, too, need to examine their own habits, and discover the things they’re missing because of bias.

It’s important because Black Lives Matter, Black Authors Matter, and books both about and NOT centered around race by Black authors matter. Buying a few books, if you can swing it (and if you can’t, contact your local library and let them know you want these titles, especially if the holds for them are backed up for weeks!) is a signal to publishers that there is demand for these stories and signals to authors that readers support theeir stories. This will hopefully not be a flash in the pan, a one week rally for Black authors. But any book that hits the list gets a boost of attention, not just sales, which could lead to new reviews, new coverage, new opportunities for those authors. Once you hit the list, you are a New York Times Best Seller evermore.

But outside of all this important action and messaging, this is an education for everyone that the Times list is not A: egalitarian and B: everything. 112 individual YA authors hit the list in that two year period. That’s it. That was about the size of my high school graduating class. Of the thousands and thousands of YA books published in two years, just 112 different people hit the list. Those numbers are not great if you consider this the pinnacle of success as a writer. Is it great to hit the list? Yes! It is great! But it is not the only way to measure success as a writer, and if you consider this the only way to deem yourself a successful writer than you are statistically unlikely to be a successful author, even worse if you are Black. Non-existent if you are Indigenous, so far. I hope publishing will rectify as soon as possible.

But on a personal level, author to author, I hope you do not pin all your career hopes to this one list. There are so many ways to be a successful author, some still behind barriers erected by an inherently biased society and infrastructure, but still so many ways to measure success that isn’t this one list. Finishing your book, period. Landing an agent. A book deal. Another one down the line. Interaction with readers who love and connect with your story. Opportunities to talk with or work with writers you admire. Reviews, profiles, articles about your work. Seeing your book on the shelf, one day.

I know I am saying on one hand pack the best seller list with Black authors!! and on the other hand saying there is more to life than the list. Both of these things are true. The NYT best seller list has real and percieved value. John the Correlator noted in that Medium post that a 2004 study by economics professor Alan Sorenson found hitting the list boosted sales by 57%. Sales = money and opportunity and attention. Those are real things. Hitting the list means you can say New York Times Best Seller on every bio you ever write for the rest of your career. There was a while there on Twitter that hitting the list got you a blue check mark. These things have real value, in variing degrees.

But personally, you are more than all that, and you are more than that if you DON’T make the list. You will be enough if you don’t hit the list. You are enough right now. I want you to dream big. I want you to write hard and defy odds and get your due. But I also want you to measure success outside of this one thing. Because this one thing is just not the thing you think it is.

Take care. Wash your hands. WEAR A MASK. Buy books by Black authors if you can. If you’ve read books by Black authors recently, review them on Amazon, regardless of where you bought them. Tweet/Facebook/Instagram about them. Feed the algorithms with good information.

XOXOXOX,

Kate