Bestsellers

From The Economist:

John Qilliam de Forest coined the term “Great American Novel” in 1868. In an essay he argued that the novel had yet to be written that captured “the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence”. Worthy authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, he said, had “staggered under the load” of trying. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in his reckoning, had come closest with her epic slave tale, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (despite its “very faulty plot”).

Ever since De Forest wrote those words, literati have speculated about what book might qualify as the gan. Whereas the great British works of literature have tended to fixate on class, that is just one of the strands that wind through America’s defining novels. In America class is often related to its ethnic diversity, the result of waves of immigration that began with the first English settlement in Virginia in 1607 and was soon followed by the forced transportation of slaves from Africa. Novelists have celebrated America’s variety and, perhaps more often, wrestled with the racism and exclusion suffered by people who were not fully accepted by their countrymen. A third great theme is America’s vastness, which encourages writers to fill their pages with wanderers, runaways and opportunity-seekers. Many great novelists, from Mark Twain to John Steinbeck to Colson Whitehead, combine these strands in ways that might have persuaded De Forest.

Our candidates for the gan both hew to and depart from common ideas of what it should be. They are the choices of people who work on our American politics podcast Checks and Balance (plus a couple of staffers from other parts of The Economist). You can listen to an episode about the gan here. Our selection does not aspire to be the Great American Shortlist. There are no books by Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Saul Bellow, nor any by Twain, Steinbeck or Jonathan Franzen. Some of our choices are established in the canon; others may someday enter it. In general they take a bleak view of America, perhaps one that is too dark. But all these works capture something of America’s character.

The Age of Innocence. By Edith Wharton. Macmillan Collector’s Library; 384 pages; $14.99. Simon & Schuster; £9.99

If a propensity for action is a quintessential American trait, this book searingly portrays its absence. “The Age of Innocence”, published in 1920 but set in New York in the 1870s, is the most famous novel about the Gilded Age, a time of breakneck American growth. The city is in transition. In the book’s second paragraph Wharton writes of the new people whom New York is “beginning to dread and yet be drawn to”. Yet this is a book not about change, but about the forces that resist it. Wharton’s New York is a city of manners and convention, of immaculate surfaces and unruly thoughts, which rise insubordinately in the blush of a cheek or clasp of a hand.

It is this gap between exterior and interior life that torments Newland Archer, Wharton’s protagonist. Archer is due to marry May Welland but falls in love with her cousin, Ellen Olenska. She represents a new mode of being. Newland is entranced by “a world where action followed on emotion with such Olympian speed”. But he neither chooses to leave with Olenska nor chooses to stay. New York’s expert social artisans craft a result, which Archer accepts joylessly, as his imagined life with Olenska overshadows his real one with Welland. In this novel what is left unsaid, and the actions not taken, are as important as what is said and done. Wharton can convey with an ellipsis what other writers require a paragraph to describe. In Gilded Age New York the old gives way eventually to the new, as it always does, but not for Archer. Societies move forward, even as men remain stuck, haunted by the past.

Invisible Man. By Ralph Ellison. Vintage; 608 pages; $17. Penguin Modern Classics; £9.99

“Invisible Man”, published in 1952, was an immediate success. A year later Ralph Ellison became the first African-American to win the National Book Award. The novel is a shaggy-dog story. The first-person narrator—he’s never named—starts off as a student at a nameless university in an unnamed place in the South (probably modelled on the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black university in Alabama, which Ellison attended). The protagonist goes to New York City, where he has misadventures, and becomes a prominent figure in the Brotherhood, a fictionalised Communist Party, with which Ellison had a brief pre-war flirtation. He eventually falls foul of both the Brotherhood and Ras the Exhorter, a black nationalist leader modelled on Marcus Garvey. After a night of violence in Harlem, the narrator ends up living alone in an underground room whose walls are lined with burning light bulbs.

Ellison is a stunningly vivid and imaginative writer, creating scenes that linger in the reader’s imagination for months, even years. The battle royal that opens the novel, in which black boys are blindfolded, forced to fight and then electrocuted for the pleasure of rich white spectators, is horrific in its matter-of-fact brutality. But the book is also ruminative and funny.

Although race is its theme, “Invisible Man” is not a protest novel. It doesn’t make simple political points. It celebrates complexity, argument and an expansive, protean idea of America. As Ellison put it in the introduction: “My task was one of revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of one who was both black and American…as a way of dealing with the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, colour and region.”

The Sound and the Fury. By William Faulkner. Knopf Doubleday; 368 pages; $16. Vintage; £9.99

The American South is America distilled. When William Faulkner wrote his great novels in the early 20th century, the South was by turns prideful and ashamed: of its grand aristocratic families alongside its poverty, its bellicosity alongside its chivalry, its racial hierarchy alongside its fervent Christianity. No one grappled with these immense contradictions as Faulkner did.

“The Sound and the Fury” is “a real son-of-a-bitch”, Faulkner wrote to a friend to whom he sent a copy. “This one’s the greatest I’ll ever write.” Anyone who casually cracks it open may also feel like swearing at first. The novel uses the modernist technique of stream of consciousness. The minds in this case are those of the Compson family, a once proud Southern dynasty that is undone by alcoholism, cynicism, greed, obsession and promiscuity. Following the narrative requires the reader to engage in some jigsaw-style rearrangements, but patience is rewarded by journeys that lead to extraordinary vistas. The mind of Jason Compson is as sulfuric and searing as the atmosphere of Venus. The shattered intelligence of Quentin is difficult to traverse, yet you are compelled to. The interior narration of Benjy, who is mentally impaired and mute, flits unencumbered across time and space. Faulkner took his title from a soliloquy of Macbeth: Life’s “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing”. In Faulkner’s hands, the tale signifies everything.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Guardian:

The first Colleen Hoover book I read was It Ends With Us, and when I opened it on the tube, I saw that the woman next to me was reading It Starts With Us. This is not likely to happen with many authors; but as of last year, Hoover was the bestselling novelist in the US, occupying the top six places on the New York Times bestseller list. “To even compare her to other successful authors,” wrote Alexandra Alter of that newspaper, “fails to capture the size and loyalty of her audience.” In the UK, her dominance is somewhat challenged by the remarkable sales of Richard Osman, who had three books in four of the Sunday Times top spots in 2022, but she was still named by that paper as “undoubtedly the biggest author of the year”.

A classic Hoover novel circles round the imperatives of romantic love with distinctively 21st-century impediments, two twentysomethings kept apart not by their parents or society or class or money, but by their own emotional affectlessness. They’re too busy, or too damaged, or too empty or numb for love; they just want no-strings sex. The strings then duly appear and catch them in a formulaic but solid cat’s cradle.

Hoover has said in the past that she defies literary genre, and her legion of fans sometimes describe her as a genre in her own right, but she is often, for brevity, called a young adult (YA) author. “There was always young adult romance, teenagers in high school, then it went to contemporary romance, stories about older twentysomethings, then indie ushered in college-age romance, what we now call ‘new adult’,” says Maryse Black, a seasoned book blogger credited with first discovering Hoover in 2012. Black uses “indie” to mean anything outside traditional publishing, and is usually referring to authors who at least started out self-publishing, as Hoover did.

Whatever you call Hoover, she is not only read by the young. “The big reveal of YA lists,” says Hannah Griffiths, former publisher and now a book scout for TV, “is that the average age of the reader is 35. The books are young emotionally, but they’re not being read by young people. It’s like comfort eating.”

. . . .

The success of Colleen Hoover isn’t a story about an author who can’t get published and through sheer self-belief builds an audience, forcing the industry gatekeepers to listen. She has always been very clear on her legend: she never tried to get a publishing deal, and is very lo-fi and hands-off. She self-published her debut, Slammed, because her mum had just got a Kindle and she wanted to have something to show her. That was late 2011, and within a couple of months she had a sequel, Point of Retreat, uploaded to Wattpad, the self-publishing platform. Wattpad is huge for fanfic – self-published fiction at any length, written by fans of an idol: a musician or actor, or a character from a TV show or video game or other book. Fanfic is idiosyncratic and, as often as not, erotic, for obvious reasons.

One YA reader, 14-year-old Ash Taylor, tells me Hoover’s is “writing for people who don’t like reading”. Then they amend that: “It’s like fanfic whose inspiration is the novel itself.” Hoover writes to the novelistic form, but isn’t trying to be it. She’s deft, she’s witty, her plots propel and her characters stand up on their own; if she wanted her books to read more like regular, commercial fiction, she would have no problem writing them like that. That’s just not the effect she’s going for.

There’s a parlour game I remember from being really small: unfortunately, I fell out of a plane; fortunately, I had a parachute; unfortunately, it had a hole in it etc. Potboiler fiction has always been an exercise in taking that “Oh no! Thank God!” emotional journey and complicating and finessing it. But what if you don’t complicate and finesse it? What if it’s absolutely bare bones: “Oh no, your dad is dead”; “Thank God, because he was violent and abusive”; “Oh no, your mum is sad”; “Thank God, now she’s happy you have a boyfriend”; “Oh no, your boyfriend is violent and abusive” (OK, I have now ruined It Ends With Us, but don’t sweat it, there are tons of Colleen Hoovers). What if you can see joins, and the lurch is part of the enjoyment?

Black was a guerrilla online reviewer when she started writing about Hoover. “I would write my reviews as if I were talking to a friend. It was, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to read this and I’ll tell you why.’” That was 2012. TikTok didn’t exist. Black had been reviewing since 2009, while running a pet supplies business. “I was only reading traditionally published books when I first started,” she says. Mostly paranormal fantasy fiction, “and it was starting to seem a little formulaic. With fan fiction, these authors weren’t trying to get the books published, they were just writing from the heart.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From The Wall Street Journal:

It’s a fundamental principle of quantum physics that an object can have no known properties until someone observes it. Most of us have been introduced to the concept through the parable of Schrödinger’s cat: you seal a cat and something poisonous in a box, where it exists in a dual-state, or non-state, of life and death until you pull the lid off and look at it. This isn’t a real experiment, since quantum phenomena occur only on the subatomic level.

But increasingly physicists are trying to impose the precepts of quantum mechanics, which is based in probabilities, upon the classical, measurable, firmly verifiable model of the universe. To do so consigns objectivity to the dustbin; reality itself becomes relative, since it requires a witness to bring it into being. Or, as Cormac McCarthy neatly phrases it in his novel “The Passenger,” “Nothing is anything unless there’s another thing.”

“The Passenger,” out this week, appears in tandem with “Stella Maris,” to be published in December. These novels, arriving 16 years after Mr. McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winner “The Road,” have been rumored for so long that their own reality began to seem suspect. But the remarkable quantity of scientific theory they incorporate explains the delay. Together the books tell the stories of brother and sister Bobby and Alicia Western. Their father was a physicist who helped develop nuclear weapons with the Manhattan Project. Bobby studied physics, too, but dropped out to kick around the world before becoming, as we find him in “The Passenger,” a salvage diver in New Orleans. Alicia is a schizophrenic mathematics savant tormented by her ability to follow numbers to places that bear no resemblance to accepted reality. The two books stand in dynamic if often perplexing relation, each informing and undermining its sibling work. Frequently they read less like novels than illustrations of a long-contemplated hypothesis—like elaborate thought experiments demonstrating the strangeness (to Mr. McCarthy, the nightmare) of a universe governed by quantum uncertainty.

“The Passenger,” by far the more novelistic of the pair, begins with a plane crash. With a barebones salvage crew, Bobby enters a private jet submerged in the waters off Pass Christian, Miss. Everyone inside is dead, but one passenger appears to be missing, along with the pilot’s flight bag and the plane’s black box. In the days that follow, Bobby is questioned and trailed around New Orleans by shadowy G-men. Soon they’ve put a lien on his bank account, impounded his car and revoked his passport, forcing Bobby to live as a fugitive. In time it becomes clear that the mystery of the sabotaged flight is a MacGuffin that Mr. McCarthy does not intend to elucidate; what endures instead is the atmosphere of paranoia, and Bobby’s attendant loneliness as he is comprehensively stripped of his identity.

. . . .

Novels of ideas are not what one would anticipate from the author of the famously gore-spattered western “Blood Meridian.” So it’s worth pointing out that “The Road,” from 2006, is not in fact Mr. McCarthy’s most recent published writing. That would be a pair of articles from 2017 in the science magazine Nautilus, theorizing about the origins of language but also meditating on the workings of the unconscious. Since the 1980s Mr. McCarthy, who is now 89, has been a member of the Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical-research center known for cultivating unorthodox ideas. Readers who want to get anywhere with these two novels need to understand that they are partly the product of the author’s countless bull sessions with Nobel Prize-winning physicists. Such “lunches,” Mr. McCarthy says in one article, could run to 10 hours.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From Public Books:

Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products. It’s time to use their data to study them. To that end, we created the Post45 Data Collective, an open access site that peer reviews and publishes literary and cultural data. This is a partnership between the Data Collective and Public Books, a series called Hacking the Culture Industries, brings you data-driven essays that change how we understand audiobooks, bestselling books, streaming music, video games, influential literary institutions such as the New York Times and the New Yorker, and more. Together, they show a new way of understanding how culture is made, and how we can make it better.

Laura McGrath and Dan Sinykin

In 1983, William Blatty—author of The Exorcist—sued the New York Times.¹ His lawsuit alleged that the Times had incorrectly excluded his latest novel, Legion (a sequel to The Exorcist), from its bestseller list—the coveted ranking that purports to show the books that have sold the most copies that week in the United States. According to Blatty’s lawyers, Legion had sold enough copies to warrant a spot on the list, so its absence was due to negligence or fraud, for which Blatty was entitled to compensation. The Times countered with what might sound like a surprising admission: the bestseller list is not mathematically objective; it is editorial content, which is protected by the First Amendment. The court ruled in favor of the New York Times.

The Blatty case draws attention to a fundamental truth about bestseller lists, one that often gets forgotten amid the drama of their weekly publication: they are not a neutral window into what the public is really reading. Rather, they reflect editorial decisions about how and what to count. Changes on the list might reflect changes in counting procedure, rather than changes in the market. Despite their lack of neutrality—or, perhaps, because of it—these editorial and counting decisions can have a big effect on which books and authors get the honor of appearing on the list; in turn, they shape the public’s perception of what it is reading and what it should consider reading next.

In this piece, I want to explore one way such decisions have affected the Times list over its almost 90-year publication history: the separation of sales by book format (hardcover, paperback). In the 1950s and 1960s, the fact that the Times exclusively publicized hardcover sales meant that some of the most popular novelists of the time rarely appeared on the list, because they made most of their sales in paperback. Today, the Times publishes distinct lists for different formats, and the content of these lists often reflects status hierarchies associated with different genres and communities of readers.

It turns out, then, that “bestseller” is a more complicated category than you might at first think. Though its name seems to refer to something very straightforward, there are all sorts of weird historical factors and counting choices that affect whether a book might make the cut. Given the influence of the Times list, it’s worth examining the effects of the choices made when assembling it, and what they can tell us about the kinds of information about books we consider valuable.

Link to the rest at Public Books

PG notes lots of data follows in the OP.

From IX Magazine:

1) Charles Dickens : The grandfather of British fiction Dickens has some of the most memorable titles to his name. ‘Great Expectations’, ‘Bleak House’, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, ‘A Christmas Carol’ to name a few.

2) Roald Dahl: Famous for his amazing and imaginative books for kids, many of which are also adult-friendly, such as ‘Matilda’, ‘The BFG’, ‘James and the Giant Peach’ and, of course ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’.

3) J.R.R. Tolkien: Tolkien is the incredible author that brought us ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings trilogy’. These books redefined the fantasy fiction genre and are still held in high esteem today.

4) J. K. Rowling: An author which everyone’s heard of these days, and if you haven’t had the pleasure of reading the gripping ‘Harry Potter’ books you’re definitely missing out. A modern giant.

5) C.S. Lewis: Author of the amazing ‘Chronicles of Narnia’, Lewis’ other titles include ‘The Space Trilogy’, ‘The Great Divorce’, ‘The Problem of Pain’ and ‘The Four Loves’.

6) Sir Terry Pratchett: Famous for the ‘Discworld’ series, which are written in a parody-style of many of the fantasy genre’s great authors, such as J. R. R. Tolkien and H. P. Lovecraft.

7) Philip Pullman: Most famous for the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, Pullman also has other works under his belt, such as the ‘Sally Lockhart’ books and his stand alone novels ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’ and ‘I Was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers’

8 ) Ian McEwan: One of Britain’s best-loved authors with titles such as ‘The Child in Time’, ‘Enduring Love’ and ‘Atonement’ to his name.

9) John Le Carré: Famed for his espionage novels with real-world experience of working in MI5 and MI6, adding to his air of mystery. Some of his most popular novels include ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, ‘The Constant Gardener’ and ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’.

10) George Orwell: The acclaimed author of some of Britain’s best known works, including ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, as well as ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ and ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, both of which are based on Orwell’s own life.

Link to the rest at IX Magazine

From Slice:

1. MacKenzie Bezos net worth: $36 billion (includes the value of Amazon stock received upon her divorce from Jeff.)
2. JK Rowling net worth: $1 billion
3. James Patterson net worth: $800 million
4. Jim Davis net worth: $800 million (cartoonist – Garfield)
5. Candy Spelling net worth: $600 million
6. Matt Groening net worth: $600 million (cartoonist, The Simpsons)
7. Paolo Coelho net worth: $500 million
8. Rose Kennedy net worth: $500 million (One of those Kennedy’s – did write one book)
9. Stephen King net worth: $500 million
10. Danielle Steel net worth: $400 million

Link to the rest at Slice

PG notes that methods of ranking best-sellers, authors or books, vary from compiler to compiler. He further notes that determining the net worth of individuals is a very imprecise process.

From Luxatic:

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the Kin
3. Alice in Wonderland
4. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
5. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
6. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
7. The Da Vinci Code
8. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
9. Forrest Gump
10. Life of Pi

Link to the rest at Luxatic

From Wikipedia:

Link to the rest at Wikipedia

From InfoPlease:

1. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams (1906)
2. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1902)
3. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington (1901)
4. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929)
5. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1962)
6. Selected Essays, 1917–1932, T. S. Eliot (1932)
7. The Double Helix, James D. Watson (1968)
8. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov (1967)
9. The American Language, H. L. Mencken (1919)
10. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes (1935–1936)
11. The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas (1974)
12. The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner (1920)
13. Black Boy, Richard Wright (1945)
14. Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster (1927)
15. The Civil War, Shelby Foote (1958–1974)
16. The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman (1962)
17. The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin (1997)
18. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr (1941–1943)
19. Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin (1955)
20. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein (1933)

Link to the rest at InfoPlease

From Knoow.net:

1 Lord of the Rings. Author: J. R. R. Tolkien. Published in 1954-1955. Earned about 150 million.

2 Le petit prince (The Little Prince). Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Published in 1943. Earned about 140 million.

4 The Hobbit. Author: J. R. R. Tolkien. Published in 1937. Earned about 100 million.

5 And then there were none. Author: Agatha Christie. Published in 1939. Earned about 100 million.

6 The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Autor: C. S. Lewis. Published in 1950. Earned about 85 million.

7 Vardi Wala Gunda. Autor: Ved Prakash Sharma. Published in 1992. Earned about 80 million.

8 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Author: J. K. Rowling. Published in 1998. Earned about 77 million.

9 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Author: J. K. Rowling. Published in 1999. Earned about 65 million.

10 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Author: J. K. Rowling. Published in 2000. Earned about 65 million.

11 O Alquimista (The Alquimist). Author: Paulo Coelho. Published in 1988. Earned about 65 million.

12 The Catcher in the Rye. Author: J. D. Salinger. Published in 1951. Earned about 65 million.

13 Think and Go Rich. Author: Napoleon Hill. Published in 1937. Earned about 60 million.

14 The Bridges of Madison County. Author: Robert James Waller. Published in 1992. Earned about 60 million.

15 You can Heal your life. Author: Louise Hay. Published in 1984. Earned about 50 million.

16 Cien años de soledad. (Hundred years of solitude). Author: Gabriel García Márquez. Published in 1967. Earned about 50 million.

17 Lolita. Author: Vladimir Nabokov. Published in 1955. Earned about 50 million.

18 The Common Sense Book of Babe and Child Care. Author: Dr Benjamin Spock. Published in 1946. Earned about 50 million.

19 Anne of Green Gables. Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery. Published in 1908. Earned about 50 million.

20 Il Nome Della Rosa (The name of the Rose). Author: Umberto Eco. Published in 1980. Earned about 50 million.

Link to the rest at Knoow.net

From The Literary Hub (2017):

The bestseller list is a surprisingly complicated creature. A good and thorough explanation is here, but basically, to get on any official list of bestsellers, you have to sell at least 5,000 books in a single week—which seems straightforward, except that it’s really hard to count books sold week-to-week, even harder to count books sold by non-traditional outlets, and also not everyone is looking at all the same numbers. Publisher’s Weekly uses BookScan, but BookScan doesn’t track everything. Other bestseller lists rely on reported data from bookstores (online and off), or a combination. The New York Times list is the most prestigious, of course, because it’s the New York Times, but also, at least in part, because it’s the most opaque. “The Times’s best-seller lists are based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week,” a New York Times spokesperson told Vox. “These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.” Which doesn’t tell us much, and the Times is notoriously hush-hush about which stores they track and how they interpret and arrange their data.

Despite all the confusion, it’s not super hard to buy 5,000 books in a single week—if you already have the money—which could send your book to the top of the charts, depending on the week in question. This isn’t illegal, but it is gaming the system, or even cheating, if you will, and the New York Times list will sometimes include a dagger next to books they suspect might owe their placement to “strategic bulk purchases.” Worse than that demure little dagger is the fact that you’ll likely be found out and raked over the coals, especially if you’re already a public figure. On the other hand, years after people have forgotten that you scammed your way onto the bestseller list, you’ll still be putting “bestselling author” in front of your name.

Not everyone will forget, though. Considering the recent spate of bestseller-list drama, here are eight notable instances of list-hacking in its various forms, from the very cynical to the very silly.

. . . .

In August, a book very few people had ever heard of shot to the top of the Young Adult Hardcover section of the New York Times bestseller list. The book, Handbook for Mortals, was published by GeekNation, a website launched in 2012, and if that sounds odd, it’s because Sarem’s book (and attendant movie franchise deal) was the geek culture site’s first foray into publishing. It all smells a little pre-packaged, honestly, and the fact that Sarem is JC Chasez’s cousin does not make it smell any fresher.

YA author Phil Stamper brought the oddity to the book world’s attention, tweeting, “I find it . . . strange that a mediocre website can decide it wants to be a publisher, and one month later hit #1 on the NYT Bestsellers list” and “A book that’s out of stock on Amazon and is not currently in any physical B&N in the tri-state area . . . A book that no one has heard of except for the two niche blogs that covered the [GeekNation] press release. Sells ~5,000 in the first week? Ok.” Soon, booksellers began writing to Stamper, reporting that they had been getting mysterious bulk orders of Handbook for Mortals—but only after the caller made sure that their sales were reported to the Times bestseller list. More evidence quickly began to stack up, and by the end of the day, the Times had changed the list. “After investigating the inconsistencies in the most recent reporting cycle, we decided that the sales for Handbook for Mortals did not meet our criteria for inclusion,” a Times spokesperson told NPR in a statement.

In an interview with HuffPost, Sarem said, “OK, I get it. I didn’t play by the normal YA rules. I didn’t […] send out galleys two years in advance, and I didn’t go talk to the people that thought I should come talk to them. I did it a different way. Do you only get to be successful in the YA world if you only do it the way that they think it’s supposed to be done?” Later, she complained, “People keep saying that they’re tired of hearing the same story over and over again. Well, start supporting new stories. Start supporting new artists.”

A couple of weeks later, she wrote an op-ed, also at HuffPost, in which she admitted to buying her own book in bulk to sell it at Comic Con events, but said this was “well within the rules” of the bestseller list. This isn’t really borne out by the evidence, though, which shows many orders and no stock to fill them with—that is, nonexistent books purchased by people who didn’t care if they ever received them.

Fun fact: Blues Traveler, whom Sarem used to manage, tweeted that they “fired her for these kinds of stunts. Her sense of denial is staggering.”

Donald Trump loves to brag about how he’s a great businessman, and how he’s a great bestselling writer, and how he’s a great bestselling writer of a great book about being a great businessman. The Art of the Deal is second only to the Bible, right? But recently in the New Republic, Alex Shephard reported that when it comes to the popularity of The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump may not be as great as all that. Shocker! Shephard reports that ex-Trump executive Jack O’Donnell’s 1991 tell-all Trumped! explains exactly how The Art of the Deal became such a big bestseller: the Trump organization bought “tens of thousands of copies on its own.” Shephard reports:

And it wasn’t just the Plaza Hotel that was buying the book in bulk. According to O’Donnell, Trump executives were instructed to buy thousands of copies for their properties. In typical Trump fashion, the boss pitted his top executives against each other: When Trump’s then-wife, Ivana, ordered 4,000 books for the Trump Castle Casino in Atlantic City, O’Donnell was warned that he needed to match her. “Hey, Jack,” a fellow executive cautioned him, “you better buy as many books as Ivana, or Donald will use it against you.”

To be fair, Shephard says, The Art of the Deal would have wound up a bestseller anyway. But only last year, Trump pulled the same thing with his book Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (which I have never heard of), buying $55,055 worth of copies at Barnes & Noble. Again, not illegal—unless he gets any royalties from the purchases. “It’s fine for a candidate’s book to be purchased by his committee, but it’s impermissible to receive royalties from the publisher,” a representative of nonpartisan nonprofit Campaign Legal Center told The Daily Beast. “That amounts to an illegal conversion of campaign funds to personal use. There’s a well established precedent from the FEC that funds from the campaign account can’t end up in your own pocket.” Of course, that probably didn’t stop him. It’s Donald Trump, after all.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub (2017)

From Vox (2017):

Over the past few weeks, scandal has rocked the august institution of the New York Times best-seller list. And it’s happened not just once but twice.

On August 24, an unknown book by an unknown author from an unknown publisher rocketed its way to first place on the Times’s young adult hardcover best-seller list. But as a scrappy band of investigators who congregated in the YA Twitter community discovered, it wasn’t because a lot of people were reading the book. Handbook for Mortals by Lani Sarem bought its way onto the list, they concluded, with the publisher and author strategically ordering large numbers of the book from stores that report their sales to the New York Times. Shortly thereafter, the Times removed the book from its rankings.

And on September 4, Regnery Books — the conservative publishing imprint that publishes Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza, among others — denounced the New York Times best-seller list as biased against conservatives. Why, it demanded, was D’Souza’s new book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left ranked as seventh on the Times’s hardcover nonfiction list when Nielsen BookScan’s data, per Regnery’s interpretation, suggested it should be first? Regnery concluded that the New York Times was actively conspiring against conservative titles, and announced that it would sever all ties with the Times.

To understand how any of this could happen — how different lists can contain different titles, in a different order, how an unknown book could buy its way onto a best-seller list, how a best-seller list could have a political bias — and why any of these things matter, you need to understand how the different best-seller lists work, what makes the New York Times’s best-seller list unique, and the purpose best-seller lists serve within the world of book publishing.

Why is it such a big deal for a book to be named a best-seller?

There are multiple best-seller lists out there, and getting named to any of them is welcome for most authors, but the New York Times best-seller list is widely considered to be the most prestigious, and it’s certainly the most well-known.

Becoming a New York Times best-seller has a measurable effect on a book’s sales, especially for books by debut authors. According to a 2004 study by economics professor Alan Sorensen, appearing on the New York Times’s best-seller list increased debut authors’ sales by 57 percent. On average, it increased sales by 13 or 14 percent.

Besides the list’s effect on sales, it offers prestige. If your book appears on the New York Times list — even just for a week in the last slot of the Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous category — you get to call yourself a New York Times best-seller for the rest of your life. You can put that honor on the cover of all of your other books. If anyone ever insults you, you can say, “Well, have you written a New York Times best-seller?” (Strategy not recommended if the person who insulted you was Danielle Steel.)

And for the rare book that manages to establish enough of a presence on various best-seller lists, a self-sustaining momentum develops. Not everyone who bought a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey expected to like what they read, but Fifty Shades became such a ubiquitous cultural force that lots of people wanted to have an opinion on it anyway. That inspired them to buy it, and that meant the book stayed on the list.

. . . .

At the end of the day, best-seller lists work as shorthand for readers: “Lots of other people liked these books,” they say, “so odds are good that you will too!” 

What does it take to be named a best-seller?

The general consensus is that if you want to make your way onto a best-seller list, any best-seller list, you have to sell at least 5,000 books in a week, or maybe 10,000. Beyond that, things get complicated depending on which list you’re looking to end up on.

That’s because the different lists don’t all use the same data. No one has access to all of the sales made by every single book published in the US in a given week. It takes months for publishers to assemble that data; it’s impossible to get it all in time to publish a weekly best-seller list. “At the end of the day, the publishers will have a hundred percent understanding of what was sold,” says Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly, “but they won’t have it by the end of the week.”

So all of the different best-seller lists have established their own methodologies to gather sales data — and once they’ve got it, they break it down differently. They put the break between one week and another in different spots (ending on Sunday versus Saturday, for example); they use different categories to sort the lists; they weigh digital and print titles differently. Here’s a breakdown of how the five major lists — Publishers Weekly, USA Today, Indiebound, Amazon, and the New York Times — work.

Publishers Weekly, which Regnery has cited as the “benchmark” it will be following henceforward, pulls its data from the Nielsen service BookScan. BookScan is also the service that most publishers use to track their competitors’ sales, so it’s more or less the industry standard.

BookScan reports that it tracks 80 to 85 percent of the sales of printed books in the US, and although that claim has been contested, it certainly gets data from major sellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and Walmart, as well as a number of independent bookstores. (BookScan estimates that it collects data from approximately 16,000 outlets every week.)

Link to the rest at Vox (2017)

From Jane Friedman:

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein remains an undisputed classic. It’s required reading in classrooms across the world, while artists, writers and filmmakers constantly reinterpret its man-makes-monster premise. The longer you look, in fact, the more extraordinary its success becomes.

First published in 1818, Frankenstein was released in a modest edition of just 500 copies. Some 200 years later, in 2021, a first edition sold at auction for $1.2 million, setting a new record for a book by a female author. Thomas Edison, Mel Brooks and Tim Burton all adapted Frankenstein for the screen, with the total number of film adaptations now well into triple digits. Fresh off the success of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro began pre-production on his own adaptation in the 2010s—his dream project, he said—only to have it killed by the studio. A huge Frankenstein mask still hangs in the entrance to his L.A. home.

There are Frankenstein-inspired dolls for sale at Build-a-Bear. Frankenstein Legos. There’s even a breakfast cereal you can buy seasonally at Target—General Mills’ Frankenberry. Any 19^th century novel inspiring this many interpretations is a wonder. But maybe most enviable are the book’s “backlist” sales. As the Guardian reports, Frankenstein still moves an eye-watering 40,000 copies a year, which means it outsells 99% of all “frontlist” (or newly released) titles.

Authors dream of such long-term success. But how to pull it off? Is Frankenstein a freak, or can it show us how to make art that lasts?

“Write a classic” isn’t a strategy, obviously. It’s a goal, plus a highly contingent outcome. No one could recreate the conditions that gave life to Frankenstein—its famous origin story is itself a series of unlikely contingencies. In 1815, Indonesia’s Mount Tambor volcano exploded in the largest, most powerful eruption ever recorded. With so much ash still in the atmosphere, the summer nights of 1816 were gloomier than anyone could remember. It became known as the “year without a summer.”

Mary Shelley, then 18 years old, happened to be staying in a Swiss villa with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, next door to the poet Lord Byron and other literary friends. To entertain themselves in the evenings, they told ghost stories, and in the grand tradition of writers everywhere, tried to outdo each other. Later, Mary Shelley would claim a certain monstrous face and form came to her in a waking dream. Two years and three drafts later, Frankenstein was published, though Shelley, fearing scandal, didn’t put her name on it. Instead, the book was published anonymously, which meant that—notwithstanding differences in copyright law then and now—its premise could essentially be pirated in stage plays and elsewhere without attribution.

The novel caught on quickly in part for such perverse reasons. To explain its staying power, however, we have to look further, seeing how Shelley’s novel demonstrates timeless truths about “perennial sellers,” to use Ryan Holiday’s phrase. As he argues in Perennial Seller, “the more important and perennial a problem” that a book concerns, the better the chances it will survive the test of time.

Frankenstein practically bum-rushes the criteria. Its characters’ problems are timeless. Victor Frankenstein, a starry-eyed scientist, is blinded by ambition, leading him to an act of creation he comes to bitterly regret. Meanwhile the monster, like all of us, finds himself here, alive and breathing, without ever having been consulted. Stranded and alone, he craves love. Denied it, he plots revenge. Shelley’s shifting POV, which veers from creator to so-called monster, poses daunting questions: Don’t we all deserve love? If bad treatment creates bad actors, what is our moral responsibility to every person and creature around us?

Helping to make these questions extra sticky is how readers of all ages may identify with an abandoned, rejected child. Impressions from our early childhood stay with us, consciously or unconsciously. Since our parents’ love is key to our survival, all of us know what it is to need it—and far too many know what it means to get something rather less than what they’d hoped. When stories touch us on such universal fears and on longings so fundamental they virtually define our species, then they can survive beyond their own epoch, fascinating no less than an Edison or del Toro.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

From Time:

Acquaintances of Agatha Christie could be forgiven for hesitating when she offered them a cup of tea. Christie was notoriously good at dreaming up undetectable poisons, and prolific with their use—at least in fiction. Out of her 66 murder mysteries, poison was the cause of death for more than 30 characters.

Her familiarity with lethal substances was rooted in real-life experience. Christie, born in the seaside town of Torquay, England, on this day, Sept. 15, 125 years ago, volunteered as a nurse during World War I and was stationed in a hospital dispensary after passing an exam to qualify as an apothecary’s assistant. Prescriptions were prepared by hand in those days, so Christie became intimately familiar with the dosages of a variety of drugs — and their toxic effects, according to Kathryn Harkup, [who wrote] A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie.

. . . .

Christie had the literary luck of studying under a pharmacist who seemed to be plucked from the pages of a mystery novel himself. In her autobiography, she writes that he once showed her a lump of a plant extract called curare, which he kept in his pocket, and which killed by inducing paralysis and asphyxiation. He explained that he carried it because “it makes me feel powerful,” per Christie.

The pharmacist later appeared, in thinly fictionalized form, as a character in her 1961 novel The Pale Horse, per Harkup. In real life, however, Christie may have used her knowledge of toxic substances to prevent him from killing people, albeit inadvertently. Harkup relates that the pharmacist once unwittingly prepared a batch of suppositories with ten times more medication than they were meant to contain. Christie wasn’t in a position to correct his mistake; instead “she pretended to trip and sent the suppositories crashing to the floor, where she trod on them firmly. After she had apologised profusely and cleared up the mess, a fresh batch was made, but this time at the correct dilution,” Harkup writes.

Suppositories, of course, would have been an awkward choice for a murder weapon; Christie’s plots relied more heavily on substances that could be slipped into something a British murder victim might eat or drink. The author and pharmacology professor Michael Gerald catalogues Christie’s favorite poisons, and their most effective deployments, in his 1993 book The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie. For example, arsenic trioxide is a good fit for teatime, since even 20 times the lethal dose can’t be tasted in a cup of tea. Taxine, on the other hand, is too bitter to go undetected in tea, but mixes well with marmalade.

Christie was, however, understandably aghast when a real-world killer made use of one of her fictional concoctions. In the early 1970s, a British factory worker named Graham Frederick Young killed two of his coworkers by dosing their coffee and tea with thallium, “a tasteless, soluble and highly toxic substance that had never before been used on humans as a poison in Britain,” according to TIME. It had, however, been the murder weapon in The Pale Horse.

Unlike Christie’s fictional villains, Young was easy enough to incriminate without the super-sleuthing skills of Poirot and Marple. When police searched his house, they found “enough thallium to keep a pharmacy in business for an entire month,” 

Link to the rest at Time

From The Wall Street Journal:

Our Mystery columnist selects the best new works of mystery, suspense and crime fiction for 2021.

‘The Dark Hours’ by Michael Connelly

Retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch, the hero of many a Michael Connelly procedural, shares billing on the dust jacket with Renée Ballard, a younger active-duty officer whose passion for justice matches his, but this is Ballard’s book, with Bosch giving moral and physical support. The novel’s title refers not only to the late-evening shift Renée works but also to the malaise fallen over L.A. in the wake of protests over police abuse, in the thick of the Covid pandemic. Ballard carries on regardless, pursuing a “tag team” of serial rapists even as she hustles to make the case against the New Year’s Eve killer of a Hollywood auto-repair shop owner. Sharp observations of characters, from victims to perpetrators, make this entry a standout.

‘Find You First’ by Linwood Barclay

Forty-two-year-old self-made multimillionaire Miles Cookson is enjoying life to the fullest until he learns it will end sooner than expected, due to a debilitating inherited disease. Officially childless, he nonetheless feels the prick of conscience: during his scuffling days, he donated sperm to a fertility clinic. Shouldn’t he contact any kids he may have sired, to warn them of their possible genetic ill fortune and provide for their medical care? Others in Cookson’s family and business are alarmed at how this may diminish their own eventual inheritances. Soon shady agents are shadowing Cookson and those offspring he locates; and Miles’s newfound children begin to vanish as if they’d never existed. Linwood Barclay can plot like Dickens and thrill like Hitchcock.

. . . .

‘The Turnout’ by Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott’s first-rate thrillers take place in sealed-off environments, where characters’ passions and resentments simmer in dangerous ways. “The Turnout” is set in a young people’s dance school run by two orphaned sisters, Dara and Marie, and Dara’s husband, Charlie. The school’s course of study is focused on its annual production of “The Nutcracker,” with students (pushed forward by ambitious parents) competing all season for the prominent roles. Into this hothouse of jealousy slithers Derek, a manipulative contractor who talks the school’s owners into an expensive makeover that strains frayed nerves to the breaking point. Family secrets are revealed, malicious pranks draw blood, and terror erupts in a manner worthy of Patricia Highsmith or Shirley Jackson.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal, including links to the original reviews. (PG apologizes if you hit a paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

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