A bestseller is a book that is included on a list of top-selling or
frequently-borrowed titles, normally based on publishing industry and book
trade figures and library circulation statistics; such lists may be published
by newspapers, magazines, or book store chains. Some lists are broken down into
classifications and specialties. The New York Times Best Seller list is one of
the best-known bestseller lists for the US. This list tracks national and
independent book stores, as well as sales from major Internet retailers such
as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Other well-known lists are published by
Publishers Weekly, USA Today and the Washington Post.
In everyday use, the term bestseller is not usually associated with a specified
level of sales, and may be used very loosely indeed in publishers' publicity.
Books of superior academic value or literary merit tend not to be
bestsellers, although there are exceptions. Lists simply give the
highest-selling titles in the category over the stated period. Some books have
sold many more copies than current "bestsellers", but over a long period of
time. Blockbusters for films and chart-toppers
in recorded music are similar terms, although, in film and music, these
measures generally are related to industry sales figures for attendance,
requests, broadcast plays, or units sold.
Particularly in the case of novels, a large budget and a chain of literary
agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, retailers, librarians, and marketing
efforts are involved in "making" bestsellers, that is, trying to increase
sales. Steinberg defined a bestseller as a book
for which demand, within a short time of that book's initial publication, vastly
exceeds what is then considered to be big sales.
Early best sellers The term "Best seller" is first known to
have been recorded in print in 1889 in the Kansas City, Missouri, newspaper The
Kansas Times & Star, but the phenomenon of immediate popularity goes back to the
early days of mass production of printed books. For earlier books, when the
maximum number of copies that would be printed was relatively small, a count of
editions is the best way to assess sales. Since effective copyright was
slow to take hold, many editions were pirated well into the period of the
Enlightenment, and without effective royalty systems in place, authors often
saw little, if any, of the revenues for their popular works.
The earliest highly popular books were nearly all religious, but the Bible, as
a large book, remained expensive until the nineteenth century. This tended to
keep the numbers printed and sold, low. Unlike today, it was important for a
book to be short to be a bestseller, or it would be too expensive to reach a
large audience. Very short works such as Ars moriendi, the Biblia pauperum, and
versions of the Apocalypse were published as cheap block-books in large
numbers of different editions in several languages in the fifteenth century.
These were probably affordable items for most of the minority of literate members
of the population. In 16th and 17th century England Pilgrim's Progress and
abridged versions of Foxe's Book of Martyrs were the most broadly read
books. Robinson Crusoe and The Adventures of Roderick Random were early
eighteenth century short novels with very large publication numbers, as well
as gaining international success.. Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence
Sterne, became a "cult" object in England and throughout Europe, with
important cultural consequences among those who could afford to purchase books
during the era of its publication. The same could be said of the works of
Voltaire, particularly his comedic and philosophically satirical novel,
Candide, which, according to recent research, sold more than 20,000 copies
in its first month alone in 1759. Likewise, fellow French Enlightenment
author Rousseau, especially his Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse and of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe's novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werther. As with some modern
bestsellers, Werther spawned what today would be called a spin-off industry with
items such as Werther eau de cologne and porcelain puppets depicting the main
characters, being sold in large numbers. By the time of Byron and Sir Walter
Scott, effective copyright laws existed, at least in England, and many authors
depended heavily on their income from their large royalties. America remained
a zone of piracy until the mid-nineteenth century, a fact of which
Charles Dickens and Mark Twain bitterly complained. By the middle of the 19th
century, a situation akin to modern publication had emerged, where most
bestsellers were written for a popular taste and are now almost entirely
forgotten, with odd exceptions such as East Lynne, the wildly popular Uncle
Tom's Cabin, and Sherlock Holmes. Description and types of bestseller
Bestsellers are usually separated into fiction and non-fiction categories.
Different list compilers have created a number of other subcategories. The New
York Times was reported to have started its "Children's Books" section in 2001
just to move the Harry Potter books out of the No. 1, 2, and 3 positions on
their fiction chart, which the then three-book series had monopolized for
over a year. Bestsellers also may be ranked
separately for hardcover and paperback editions. Typically, a hardcover edition
appears first, followed in months or years by the much less expensive
paperback version. Hardcover bestseller status may hasten the paperback release
of the same, or slow the release, if hardcover sales are brisk enough. Some
lists even have a third category, trade paperback bestsellers.
In the United Kingdom, a hardcover book could be considered a "bestseller" with
sales ranging from 4,000 to 25,000 copies per week, and in Canada, the rule
of thumb is 5,000 copies sold. There are many "bestseller lists" that display
anywhere from 10 to 150 titles. = Differences among lists=
Bestseller lists may vary widely, depending on the method used for
calculating sales. The Indie bestseller lists, for example, use only sales
numbers, provided by independently owned bookstores, while the New York Times
list includes both wholesale and retail sales from a variety of sources. A book
that sells well in gift shops and grocery stores may hit a New York Times
list without ever appearing on an Indie list. USA Today has only one list, not
hardcover/paperback, so that relative sales among these categories can be
ascertained. Lists from Amazon.com, the dominant
on-line book retailer, are based only on sales from their own Web site, and are
updated on an hourly basis. Wholesale sales figures are not factored into
Amazon's calculations. Numerous Web sites offer advice for authors about a
temporary method to boost their book higher on Amazon's list using carefully
timed buying campaigns that take advantage of the frequent adjustments to
rankings. For example, faith healing author Zhi Gang Sha has used this method
to create a number of #1 bestsellers. The brief sales spike allows authors to
tout that their book was an "Amazon.com top 100 seller" in marketing materials
for books that actually have relatively low sales. Eventually book buyers may
begin to recognize the relative differences among lists and settle upon
which lists they will consult to determine their purchases.
The weight and price of a book may affect its positioning on lists. The
Amazon.com list tends to favor hardcover, more expensive books, where
the shipping charge is a smaller percentage of the overall purchase price
or is sometimes free, and which tend to be more deeply discounted than
paperbacks. Inexpensive mass market paperbacks tend to do better on the New
York Times list than on Amazon's. Indie and Publishers Weekly separate mass
market paperbacks onto their own list. Category structure affects the
positioning of a book in other ways. A book that might be buried on the Indie
hardcover fiction list could be positioned very well on the New York
Times hardcover advice list or the Publishers Weekly religion hardcover
list. = Verifiability=
Bestseller reports from companies such as Amazon.com, which appear to be based
strictly on auditable sales to the public, may be at odds with bestseller
lists compiled from more casual data, such as the New York Times lists' survey
of retailers and publishers. The exact method for ranking the New York Times
bestseller lists is a closely guarded secret.
This situation suggests a similar one in the area of popular music. In 1991,
Billboard magazine switched its chart data from manual reports filed by
stores, to automated cash register data collected by a service called SoundScan.
The conversion saw a dramatic shake-up in chart content from one week to the
next. Today, many lists come from automated
sources. Booksellers may use their POS systems to report automatically to Book
Sense. Wholesalers such as the giant Ingram Content Group have bestseller
calculations similar to Amazon's, but they are available only to subscribing
retailers. Barnes & Noble and other large retail chains collect sales data
from retail outlets and their Web sites to build their own bestseller lists.
Nielsen BookScan U.S. is perhaps the most aggressive attempt to produce a
completely automatic and trusted set of bestseller lists. They claim to be
gathering data directly from cash registers at more than 4,500 retail
locations, including independent bookstores, large chains such as Barnes
& Noble, Powell's Books, and Borders, and the general retailer Costco. Unlike
the consumer-oriented lists, BookScan's data is extremely detailed and quite
expensive. Subscriptions to BookScan cost up to $75,000 per year, but it can
provide publishers and wholesalers with an accurate picture of book sales with
regional and other statistical analyses. = The making of a bestseller=
Ultimately, having a great number of buyers creates a bestseller; however,
there is a distinct "making of" process that determines which books have the
potential to achieve that status. Not all publishers rely on, nor strive for,
bestsellers, as the survival of small presses indicates. Large publishing
houses, on the other hand, are like major record labels and film studios,
and require consistent high returns to maintain their large overhead. Thus, the
stakes are high. It is estimated that 200,000 new books are published each
year in the U.S., and less than 1% achieve bestseller status. Along the
way, major players act as gatekeepers and enablers, including literary agents,
editors, publishing houses, booksellers, and the media. The high visibility of an
established and best-selling author is paramount in the equation also. In
addition to writing the book, an author has to acquire representation and
negotiate this publishing chain. At least one scientific approach to
creating bestsellers has been devised. In 2004, Didier Sornette, a professor of
geophysics and a complex systems theorist at UCLA, using Amazon.com sales
data, created a mathematical model for predicting bestseller potential based on
very early sales results. This information could be used to identify a
potential for bestseller status and recommend fine tuned advertising and
publicity efforts accordingly. In 1995, the authors of a book called The
Discipline of Market Leaders colluded to manipulate their book onto the best
seller charts. The authors allegedly purchased over 10,000 copies of their
own book in small and strategically placed orders at bookstores whose sales
are reported to Bookscan. Because of the ancillary benefits of making The New
York Times Best Seller list the authors felt that buying their own work was an
investment that would pay for itself. The book climbed to #8 on the list where
it sat for 15 weeks, also peaking at #1 on the BusinessWeek best seller list.
Since such lists hold the power of cumulative advantage chart success often
begets more chart success. And although such efforts are not illegal, they are
considered highly unethical by publishers.
= Unread bestsellers= Bestsellers have gained such great
popularity that it has sometimes become fashionable to purchase them. Critics
have pointed out that just because a book is purchased doesn't mean it will
be read. The rising length of bestsellers may mean that more of them
are simply becoming bookshelf decor. In 1985 members of the staff of The New
Republic placed coupons redeemable for $5 cash inside 70 books that were
selling well, and none of them were sent in.
Major publishers In April 2013 Penguin Random House was
created to become the world’s largest publisher. The two major shareholders
are Bertelsmann and Penguin Group owned by Pearson PLC.
Other major publishers include: Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer,
Hachette, McGraw-Hill Financial, John Wiley and Sons, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan Publishers, and
Harlequin Enterprises. Cultural role
While the basic dictionary definition of bestseller is self-evident, "a popular,
top-selling book", the practical cultural definition is somewhat more
complex. As consumer bestseller lists generally do not detail specific
criteria, such as numbers sold, sales period, sales region, and so forth, a
book becomes a bestseller mainly because an "authoritative" source says it is.
Calling a book a "top-selling" title is not so impressive as calling it "the New
York Times bestseller". Although the former phrase is assumed to be derived
from sales figures, the latter benefits from the high profile of the particular
list. A book that is identified as a "bestseller" greatly improves its chance
of selling to a much wider audience. In this way, bestseller has taken on its
own popular meaning, rather independent of empirical data, by becoming a
compromised product category and, in effect, attempting to create a marketing
image. For example, a "summer bestseller" is usually determined long
before the summer is over, and signals a book's suitability for millions of
lounging pool-side readers. The use of the marketing phrase,
underground bestseller further illustrates the independent-from-sales,
self-defining aspect of the term. For example, publisher HarperCollins
suggested the bestseller potential of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood:
A Novel by announcing "...four years after her award-winning, underground
bestseller, Little Altars Everywhere..." in the promotion. The book went on to
achieve bestseller status in the 1990s. In reviews of the 2002 film of the same
name, the novel's bestseller status was cited routinely, as in "compelling
adaptation of Rebecca Wells' bestseller".
The famous Diogenes Publisher at Zürich started to talk about its own
Worstsellers in 2006, and therewith brought a new mode-word into the German
speaking European countries. Connection with the movie industry
Bestsellers play a significant role in the mainstream movie industry. There is
a long-standing Hollywood practice of turning fiction bestsellers into feature
films. Many, if not the majority, of modern movie "classics" began as
bestsellers. On the Publishers Weekly fiction bestsellers of the year charts,
we find: #1: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, #3. Jaws; #2. The
Exorcist; #1. Love Story; #2. The Godfather; among many others. Several of
each year's fiction bestsellers ultimately are made into high-profile
movies. Being a bestseller novel in the U.S. during the last forty years has
guaranteed consideration for a big budget, wide-release movie.
See also List of best-selling books
List of bestselling novels in the United States
References Further reading
Boss, Shira. "The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller", New York Times,
May 13, 2007. Sorensen, Alan T.. Bestseller Lists and
Product Variety: The Case of Book Sales. Bloom, Clive. Bestsellers: Popular
Fiction Since 1900 External links
The Top 150 Bestsellers According to USA Today
The Barnes and Noble Top100 The New York Times Best Seller List
Historic New York Times Lists Product Best Seller of USA
Publisher's Weekly Bestseller List Publisher's Weekly Bestseller Lists from
1900 to 1998 "The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best
Seller", by Shira Boss, The New York Times, May 13, 2007
Frank Luther Mott Collection of American Best Sellers, 1662-1945 at the
University of Missouri The Bestsellers Database, consisting of
original research on 20th-century American bestsellers by students at the
University of Virginia, the University of Illinois, Catholic University, and
Brandeis University Teen Books