Here on It’s Lit!, we spend a lot of time pontificating on the high canon of books:
Your Shakespeares, your Tolstoys, your… erotic beast wars fanfiction.
But today we’re craving something a little lighter, a little fluffier… you know, novels
you pick up for the sake of just having something quick-- your beach reads, your airport novels,
your Books of the Month.
Books that, while you might never have to read them for a seminar or a class or that
sweet clout, somehow manage to dominate most water cooler discussions about literature.
We’re talkin Your Dan Browns, your Jodi Picoults, your Where the Crawdads Sing, seriously,
how has the book managed to be on the top of every best seller lists for so many months,
I don’t even KNOW what it’s about but it’s my mortal enemy
These are your blockbuster books, the bestsellers of the bestsellers--And whether or not you
read them or turn your nose up at them, for better or worse, they are the tent poles that
support the publishing industry.
Intro
So what do we mean when we say “best seller”?
Because, I’ll be real, it’s actually a pretty nebulous term.
Technically i am one - don’t read too much into it
According to American literature professor Sarah Garland: “The term “best-seller”
(or bestseller) as it is used by the press is, in a sense, always hyperbole.
[...] To call a book a bestseller already indicates that the book has come through a
series of decisions about whether to count it.
The bestseller represents the highest sales, but,[...] the highest in sales where and when?
And for how long?”
It won’t surprise you to know that best-seller lists, like the ones you see in The New York
Times or USA Today are fairly modern inventions, but to really trace the origin of mass literature
we must go back and look at everybody’s favorite fulcrum of literary history—the
printing press.
So prior to its invention in the mid-15th century, books were a precious commodity that
took serious time, effort, and money to create and to buy.
But even with the printing press bringing down costs of bookmaking, most people, if
they could read and afford books, usually owned mass-produced prayer books or heavily
spiritual titles—books like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress, a whip-cracking 100k words
of heavy religious metaphor about perdition and hell.
You know, a fun beach read.
All this is to say that popular books then were functional must-haves for the soul.
And they were usually short.
Very short.
For production costs.
Which ironically meant the Bible itself didn’t sell particularly well until the 19th century.
But in the 18th century, as the novel began to take off, literary critics noticed almost
cult-like devotion to titles by authors like Voltaire, whose Candide reportedly sold a
then-staggering 20,000 copies in its first month, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young
Werther, which was so popular it had MERCHANDISE—from prints, to porcelain, to perfume.
Your move, Twilight promotional body spray.
America didn’t get hip to this until the mid 19th century, when publishers started
realizing they could gamify the industry by following suit and by also publishing books
to the taste of audiences, and not necessarily by what the intelligentsia deigned to disburse
to the rabble.
And then the first real American best-sellers, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, start flooding bookstores.
Books that dealt with highly topical, highly emotional subject matter became must-reads
that everyone could get their hands on because of highly strategic but bold publishing maneuvers.
But unlike, say Uncle Tom’s Cabin, most of these blockbusters eventually fell into
obscurity.
The first published American best-seller list appeared in 1895 in a new monthly magazine
called The Bookman.
This magazine was imitating its London counterpart, also called The Bookman, which had been publishing
a best-seller list for several years, and used sales information from the leading bookstores
in sixteen cities (later extended to thirty cities in the United States and Canada) to
gain information for its list of the six best-selling titles for each town.
And then, in 1931 came the absolute game-changer: The New York Times Best Seller list.
Initially, it only had a grand total of five fiction and four non-fiction books on it,
and it only reflected numbers from the city of New York itself.
But by the 1950s, the controversial proprietary ranking method had become THE list for tracking
book sales, and by the 1970s, bookstore chains began using business models that highlighted
books with four words that have changed everything: New York Times Bestseller.
So despite competition from movies and television, more people were reading novels than ever:
As literary critic Peter Swirski has highlighted, “More than half of all the books ever published
came out after the first hydrogen bomb; more than half of all wordsmiths who ever put pen
to paper did so after the birth of TV…
The number of new titles released each year in the United States quadrupled between 1950
and 1991.”
So now that we’re here, you might be wondering—how does one get their book ON a best-seller list?
Does it have to be a masterpiece of emotion, wit, and craft?
na.
Well if you’re thinking that publishers decide who’s a bestseller before anything
even gets printed… you’re kind of right.
According to big-wig “lawyer-agent,” Morton L. Janklow:
“Self-fulfilling prophecies play a large part in book publishing.
What makes a publisher decide that a first printing should be a hundred thousand copies
rather than sixty-five thousand?
If a publisher buys a book for five thousand dollars, it’ll be a miracle if anything
happens to it.
Because in the mind of the publisher it has already failed.”
Well….
let’s create a hypothetical author -- his name is Jimmy Squibbles, and he is a high
profile Pocky beauty influencer, and he’s ready to go ahead with his debut novel, Hype
House Bloodbath.
Let’s put talent aside and suppose he has a good literary agent who manages to net him
an advance from a big six … big five… big four book publisher…. say $1.5 million
dollars.
Jimmy Squibbles is in luck, because the higher the advance, the more his publisher will push
hype house blood bath harder from a marketing standpoint, which means more mainstream coverage,
which translates to more sales.
Argues professor of sociology Laura J. Miller, “The self-fulfilling nature of the list
thus comes from the fact that the reading public is constantly bombarded with information
about, and opportunities and incentives to buy books on the list—and buy they do.”
And this works!
Sort of.
That push has to coincide with some sort of demand in the market.
A good recent example of this is Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, which focuses on the topical
topic of Central American migration to this proud… land.
American Dirt got a seven-figure advance from its publisher, Flat Iron Books, and not one,
but TWO reviews in the New York Times.
And while one was glowing, the other absolutely trashed it.
According to new york times critic Parul’s sehgal: “I found myself flinching as I read,
not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English language receives.
Lydia’s expression “is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent.
It’s as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and
they’re all pulling at once.
One from the eyebrow, one from the lip, another at the nose, one from the cheek.”
Yes, of course.
That expression.
And once that type of negative publicity was coupled with a huge outpouring of backlash
regarding Cummins’ handling of a sensitive subject matter while not being Latina herself,
well… who knows?
As in the case of American Dirt, backlash can actually boost sales numbers a LOT.
Some people were curious, and a LOT of people wanted to support the book just to stick it
to the woke brigade that took issue with it.
Controversy, legit or manufactured, is extremely lucrative.
American Dirt is one of the top selling titles of 2020.
So.
One of the other big vehicles for pushing a best-seller are book-club lists.
Things like Oprah’s Book Club, for example, which has single-handedly made many debut
or relatively unknown authors into stars—it even made Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 novel Anna
Karenina a best-seller in 2004! Fordham university marketing professor Al Greco estimates that
sales of Oprah editions (aka books slapped with Oprah’s book club stamp of approval
on the cover) have sold a total of 55 million copies in the US alone, while book publicist
Patricia Eisemann has referred to Oprah’s book club as “A Blessing from the book gods”.
And while the list does tend to skew towards a female audience—which probably explains
why noted pleasant person Jonathan Franzen pitched a fit when his novel The Corrections
was added to it—if Jimmy Squibbles and his publisher don’t care about being marketed
to ~ women ~, then getting on her list is a GOOD thing, Franz.
There are, of course, less scrupulous means of getting books into people’s hands.
A few years ago, there was the controversy of Handbook for Mortals author Lani Sarem
buying up her own books through third parties and landing at the top of the NYT list for
YA fiction before being removed once she got caught, or the Don JR.’s of the world who
purchase their own books in mass orders to fudge best-seller numbers.
This happens more often than you might think, but usually with non fiction, and when it
does the NYT puts a little dagger next to it.
Like hey, Ben Shapiro had a book come out the very same day as mine and … look at
that dagger.
But here’s the other, less acknowledged caveat - being a best seller does not always
equate success.
Let’s return to our friend, Jimmy Sqiubbles.
He’s got that advance, he’s gotten mainstream coverage, his novel, Hype House Blood Bath,
has been added to a bunch of book lists, and, hey, let’s even say he already has a huge
built-in audience as a pocky beauty guru influencer.
And it’s enough for him to get on both the NYTs list for several weeks.
Success?
Well… no.
None of that means his book has found a staying audience, nor does it necessarily mean he’s
earned back that huge advance.
And unfortunately for Jimmy Squibbles, the math is not on his side.
With a standard boilerplate royalty rate and an MSRP of, let’s say, $28, you might be
thinking, oh, he only needs to sell 1.5 million divided by $28 = about 53k books - he’s
a Pocky influencer with 20 million subs and 9 billion instagram followers, that should
be easy right?
Well, no.
That’s not how royalties work - with an MSRP of $28, royalties are only a tiny percentage
of that, he actually needs to sell about 360k.
And selling that many books, Thems some michelle obama numbers
If Jimmy Squibbles sells 20-30k copies per week for about 10 weeks - that is already
more than 99% of books will ever sell, and also nowhere near enough to earn out his advance.
And if interest in Hype House Bloodbath peters out there, he’ll probably never earn it
out.
So that book was technically a bestseller… but not exactly a success.
And so like so many 19th century authors who had their moment in the sun, Jimmy Squibbles
and Hype House Bloodbath fade into obscurity, never to reach the heights of The Sun Also
Rises or The Great Gatsby or Where The Crawdads Si—SERIOUSLY WHO IS BUYING THIS BOOK?
MOM.
STOP I-
If this all sounds labyrinthine or intimidating for any aspiring author out there, well—there
is truth to that.
Book publishing trends are finicky and wild, with publishers hedging their bets on what
they think will sell, and not necessary with any regards to a writer’s talent.
If Hype House Bloodbath becomes the next American classic with a multi-million dollar movie
deal starring Logan Paul, you can be sure that literary agents will be looking for manuscripts
that are similar to Hype House Bloodbath to hop on that sweet gravy train.
But it need not always be like this—it’s not always large publishers that pick authors
out of obscurity.
There have been many notable titles that have found larger audiences via a growing indie
publishing industry or through less orthodox means.
Margaret Atwood’s first published book of poetry, Double Persephone, was published as
a pamphlet by a small press in 1961, winning her an EJ Pratt Medal.
Andy Weir’s The Martian, which sat on the Best Seller list for 76 weeks (19 of those
at number one!) started as a series of blog posts that he compiled, self-published, and
sold for 99 cents.
Lisa Genova’s Still Alice was originally self-published on a digital self-publishing
platform iUniverse, with copies literally being sold out of the trunk of her car.
And Fifty Shades of Grey… well… uh… we don’t need to talk about that.
Point being that getting a book published is incredibly difficult, to say nothing about
turning it into a “hit.”
And this is not to dunk on authors who do make it on the list or suggest there is no
merit to a best-selling novel—for those who do make it, it’s often the result of
years of sculpting away at an idea, hundreds of hours of revising and revisiting and completely
rewriting out of a labor of love or devotion to storytelling.
But more often it’s just who the publisher thinks should be there.
Sorry bout it.