Why the Bestseller List Should Not Be Your Goal

Eff the List

Hi friends,

Sorry this newsletter is a little late. I’ve been too busy making deals this week [hair flip]. And it kinda worked in my favor, because last night I went to the book launch for Jo Piazza’s THE SICILIAN INHERITANCE—I cannot wait to read this book!!!!—with my friend Glynnis MacNicol, whose book you need to preorder RIGHT NOW (it’s about Paris and sex and cheese and pleasure and it’s great and look at this cheeky cover!!! If any book needs a tote or a bucket hat, it’s this one. Attention Penguin Life.) and our conversation led to the idea for this post. That and the negronis.

I’ve talked to so many writers who say their goal is to hit the list, i.e. see their book on the New York Times bestseller list. There are other bestseller lists (USA Today, one for Indies) but it seems writers only have eyes for the Times. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My point today is not to argue why or why not this should be so, but to convince you that you shouldn’t care about the List at all. Really. It won’t matter for you and for the vast, vast, vast majority of us. If it happens that is AMAZING and a BIG DEAL but also not the golden ticket you think it will be. It does not guarantee infinity six-figure book deals forever. You will get to say New York Times Bestselling Author in your bio for the rest of your life, even if you only hit once, at number 15, for one week, and that’s very gratifying. But if your sights are only on the list, you’re going to miss a lot of other markers of success and you’re probably going to be disappointed.

No one knows how the Times populates the list. It’s not based purely on sales, ordered from biggest to smallest, every week. People are always shocked when I tell them this. Whole teams of people at publishers try to reverse engineer how the list worked out every week, according to sales data they have in-house or through BookScan (or whatever it’s called now), but the Times uses a proprietary algorithm and they’re not telling anyone how they do it. I imagine it’s roughly based on sales, but not always, and not all sales because if it was the list would never change and the top books would be The Bible, Oh the Places You’ll Go, and like some test prep books or something. But broadly speaking, the list is made up of the previous week’s sales, as reported by specific stores and retailers (including bulk-buys from ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ organizations and which the Times notes with a little dagger symbol, usually for books by politicians and “thought leaders” or whatever. Funny this never happens in fiction…) and weighted according to whatever their algorithm does. Every week on Wednesday night, industry professionals get emailed the list that will be in the paper the Sunday after next. Yes, it’s exciting to get it and yes I read it instantly when it comes in.

The first thing I do is scan the column to the right of each list that tells you how many weeks the book has been there. You can see it here above the title. I’m looking for single digits, for the new books that just hit that week, because otherwise, the list is the same 8-12 books it always is each week, give or take. Some books like Lessons in Chemistry and The Body Keeps the Score have been on the list for 98 and 186 weeks respectively. That’s two spots your book won’t get because those books aren’t going anywhere. There’s a specific list for different formats and audiences (Adult Hardcover Fiction, for example) and on the YA Series list, Diary of a Wimpy Kid has been there for 784 weeks. THAT’S FIFTEEN YEARS. What. Like. Why? I have personal opinions about how I think the Times should retire (maybe make a bestsellers Hall of Fame???? Call me, NYT) certain titles after a good number of weeks/years on the list but the list itself is free advertising (no you cannot pay the Times to get on the list) so I don’t think publishers will like this but I digress. There are a handful of titles each week with single digit “weeks on the list” numbers, and of course after 10 weeks it’s no longer a single digit. Some books fall off the list quickly. Some stay until they’re old enough to vote.

There’s no number of books you need to sell to hit the list. One week sales of 7,000 hardcovers could get you to number 15 on the fiction list (I am making up numbers. I do not look up sales every week.) but you might need 35,000 to hit the non-fiction. The non-fiction list is very celebrity driven right now (always?) so if you are coming out with a non-fiction title in the next three to six months, I would basically forget about hitting the list. Not because you’re not good enough to hit it, not that your book shouldn’t hit it, but because it probably won’t unless you are already a celebrity and/or your book has a huge print run¹, close to if not more than six figures. If that’s you, you might start getting excited about the list. But if your first print run is like 6,000 books (which is fine! and common!) you probably are not going to hit the list. You will not sell all those books in the first week and that is ok. You do not need to hit the list to be “successful” (however you define it) and/or to get another book deal.

What should you worry about instead? Selling through that print run so your publisher has to go back to press for more books (i.e. a reprint). If they have to order a reprint before your book even comes out, because stores have called dibs on all their existing stock, EVEN BETTER. What’s going to make a publisher look at your next proposal or manuscript with heart eyes? Reprints and low returns. Stores ordering more of your book(s) because people keep buying them, long after your “launch week” marketing extravaganza. How do you sell your next book? Sell your current one.

And how do you do that? Small moves, Ellie. Keeping your book in conversations by doing what you can do online—writing, posting, videoing, whatever you can do that makes sense for your market—whether it’s about your book or not. Boosting other authors so you become a member of a community, which in turn may support you. Saying more than just buy my book to your readers. Is this a lot of work? Yes. Is it amorphous and ambiguous and without anyway to know if it’s working? Yes. (Your publisher might have an author portal where you can see sales figures. Just saying.) Should your publisher be doing this work? No. [crowd gasps in shock] This is work only you can do in support of your career, so you can keep publishing books. The publisher cannot build your platform or following or fanbase of readers who automatically buy your next book as soon as you post a pre-order link. Readers are not looking at publishers for news of those pre-order links. They are looking at you. You do not hear about new books from publishers. You hear about them from friends and articles and random posts that get shared in your feeds and from the bio at the end of that great article you just read and oh look they have a new book coming out. [clicks preorder] And a person that reads your whatever article six months from now can just click order.

Yeah, I know this post is too long. But I want to really convince you that you do not need to think about hitting the list. It should not be your goal. My book is not going to hit the list and I do not care. (It would be on the hilariously named and impossible to crack Advice, How-to, Miscellaneous list, which currently features Savannah Guthrie, Dr. Phil, and Deion Sanders and a lot of those little daggers.) My goal will not be to hit the list. My goal will be to convince you, my loyal readers, that there’s enough new/good/different stuff in the book from this newsletter so that maybe 2-5% (if I get so lucky) of you buy it and that’ll get me that much closer to selling through the print run, whatever it may be. My publisher is going to get it into stores and libraries, get me reviews and hopefully some media placement, and a kick-ass cover (see Glynnis’s book above), but as this newsletter reaches new people, I’m going to be sure to say oh hey, if you liked this, you might like my book [link] forever and ever or until it’s time to sell my next one. I wouldn’t kick the list out of bed, but it does not figure into my plans for a successful writing career.

XOXOXOXOXO,

Kate

1. The number of books the publisher prints at one time. Print runs are more modest than you would think because it costs money for publishers to store copies in warehouses.