From CNN:
Since January, each book at the top of The New York Times best-seller list has had one thing in common: President Trump.
James Comey’s book “A Higher Loyalty” will surely keep the streak alive. Comey’s high-profile launch is also highlighting Trump’s broader effects on book sales.
The No. 1 spot on The Times’ hardcover nonfiction list is incredibly coveted real estate in the publishing industry. Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” landed there in mid-January thanks to explosive allegations and a full-throated presidential attack.
“Fury” held onto the No. 1 spot until Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s “Russian Roulette” came along in March. The book — subtitled “The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” — was on top for three weeks.
. . . .
There is a caveat about The Times list: Psychologist Jordan Peterson’s book “12 Rules For Life” has been a hot seller for months, and might have ranked No. 1, but because it is published by a Canadian company, it is not counted by the U.S. newspaper.
Link to the rest at CNN
By including this item, PG is not inviting a political war in the Comments section of TPV. There are many other (and better) online locations for those discussions.
Rather, he wonders what this says about Big Publishing and The New York Times bestseller lists.
Whatever his strengths and weaknesses, Mr. Trump did win the 2016 Presidential Election. He did so by winning 30 states with 306 pledged electors out of 538 total electors. The results were known on November 8, 2016, 529 days ago.
Like four previous US Presidents (1824: John Quincy Adams, 1876: Rutherford B. Hayes, 1888: Benjamin Harrison and 2000: George W. Bush) Mr. Trump did not win the country-wide popular vote.
On a state-by-state basis, Ms. Clinton won in the most populous state – California – but Mr. Trump won seven out of the ten most populous states: Texas (#2), Florida (#3), Pennsylvania (#5), Ohio (#7), Georgia (#8), North Carolina (#9) and Michigan (#10).
The large New York publishers behind the anti-Trump bestsellers have not, to PG’s knowledge (he’s happy to be corrected), released any best-selling pro-Trump books or anti-Clinton books.
While it’s no surprise that the New York-based companies hire New York-based employees, the majority of whom quite probably did not vote for Mr. Trump, PG wonders if anyone in New York thought there might be a market for a pro-Trump or anti-Clinton book.
Even before Amazon released constantly-updated bestseller rankings, the methodology behind the New York Times bestseller lists (which is confidential and described only in the most general terms by the paper) was widely-questioned.
In fact, as reported on TPV and elsewhere, it was possible to game the NYT bestseller lists and shadowy companies could (for a fee) guarantee that a book would appear as an NYT bestseller the week it was released. Typically, they accomplished this by using a variety of people to purchase books from retail bookstores known or suspected to be consulted by the Times for its weekly bestseller lists.
The most recent report about such behavior that PG could locate with a quick search was from Vox in September, 2017. Here’s an excerpt:
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.
. . . .
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.
. . . .
The author and publisher of Handbook for Mortals reportedly hoped that gaming the New York Times best-seller list would make it easier for them to sell the book’s film rights down the road, which is presumably why they were willing to spend the money to get the book onto the list.
. . . .
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.
. . . .
It’s widely rumored that independent bookstore sales are weighted more heavily than Walmart sales [by the NYT], for instance, but the Times has never confirmed this. Some observers have also suggested that it weights print sales from traditional publishers more heavily than it does digital sales from digital publishers or self-publishers, because books that do very well on Amazon’s in-house imprints seem to rarely show up on the Times list
Link to the rest at Vox
PG suspects the NYT bestseller list methodology is focused on generating bestselling books that the NYT believes its subscribers would buy (or should buy. Certain NYT bestsellers are notoriously never read. See below. ).
To be clear, PG says the NYT is absolutely free to do this, but might be a bit more upfront about its objectives.
As organizations comprised largely of people who see the world through the NYT, major US publishers are significantly impacted by the NYT. An editor at HarperCollins receives some sort of gold star if one of her books makes the NYT lists. If she consistently has a book or two that make the NYT lists each year, she gains more than a little job security.
On the other hand, even if our theoretical HC editor could credibly claim one of her authors was killing it in Houston, Miami, Cleveland and Charlotte, but, for some unknown reason, hadn’t made the NYT lists, she’s less likely to brag about it to her boss.
As far as NYT bestsellers that are never read, a long time ago, a NYT columnist even wrote about the phenomenon.
The tale of the emperor’s new clothes has been around a long time. But how about defining another category of mass delusion, the emperor’s new book: the insanely popular, often intellectually intimidating book that sells hundreds of thousands of copies (sometimes even millions) but that few people actually read.
The phenomenon of the unread best seller comes to mind because of the recent publication of ”Ravelstein,” Saul Bellow’s novel about the life and death of his friend Allan Bloom. In life, Bloom was a humanities professor well known only in the academy who gained international fame in 1987 after the surprising success of his dense treatise ”The Closing of the American Mind.” To this day, many consider it one of the prime examples of an emperor’s new book.
Another classic example also comes from the 1980’s: Stephen Hawking’s ”Brief History of Time” remains no doubt the most abstruse volume ever to sell nearly nine million copies around the world.
Figuring out which best sellers go unread is not easy, since most people don’t want to admit to the unfinished state of their reading. Much of the evidence is anecdotal. Bloom and Hawking, for instance, were the universal first responses when a small sampling of people in the book business were asked about unread best sellers. But a somewhat more solid indicator of unread books emerged in 1985 when Michael Kinsley, then of The New Republic, acted on his suspicions about reading habits in the nation’s capital.
Mr. Kinsley and a colleague put coupons redeemable for five dollars each in the back of 70 copies of selected books in Washington bookstores. Two of the books were ”Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control” by Strobe Talbott and ”The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong” by Ben J. Wattenberg. Though neither was a national best seller, they were chosen, Mr. Kinsley said, as the kinds of books Washingtonians were most likely to claim to have read. No one ever redeemed a coupon. The Kinsley report may be as scientific a study as there is.
. . . .
Michael Willis was the marketing director at the Free Press in 1994, when the company published ”The Bell Curve” by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.”We thought it was very much the case that both professionals and the general public bought it to have it and didn’t read it,” he says. ”We got the sense even from reviews that people basically read the first chapter and the last.”
Link to the rest at The New York Times
We should put the lie to the idea that the New York Times has a bestseller list. They don’t. It is simply a list, and we don’t know what it tracks, because it certainly does not capture all the bestsellers.
I buy lots of nonfiction with no intention of finishing the book. I read the parts that interest me.
The bias, lack of credibility and lack of transparency of the NYT Bestseller lists makes those lists very vulnerable. As I posted in my comments here on another article, it is no accident that Amazon established its own lists. I expect that over time they and other more honest lists will erode the status of the NYT ones. That is, of course, unless the NYT acts to address the problems in time, which I just can’t see.
I suspect it’s not really about the books. Huge author advances seem to be the current method of paying off co-conspirators.
MomRed bought a political book last year out of morbid curiosity. She ended up feeling sorry for the author – the individual took on a difficult and thankless task, did the best with what was available, and cleaned up some major financial tangles – but still disagreed with the author’s philosophy.
Other than that one book? The RedQuarters readers are not the target demographic, I suspect.
Didn’t we have an article a few days back that pointed out Jorden Peterson’s book never made the top of the Times list, despite being atop the Amazon and USA Today list?
(To be honest, I’m not sure about it. I have seen the article, and the Times’ denial.)
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2018/02/09/jordan-petersons-book-is-a-bestseller-except-where-it-matters-most.html
Wow.
They can’t even keep their stories straight.
Well, of course the Times doesn’t count sales of books from Canadian publishers, no matter how many copies they sell in the U.S. After all, Harlequin was owned by Torstar for many years, and the Times might have had to acknowledge that there are more than two or three people who buy those nahsty romance books. ‘Not published in the U.S.’ is a handy excuse to have tucked away.
Books I have bought and read include:
The Closing of the American Mind (good)
A Brief History of Time (meh)
The Bell Curve (very good)
… but then I’ve always known I’m not the target datum for the general American non-reader.
I read The Bell Curve. I thought he worked hard, but left his assumptions unstated. (I say ‘he’ because Herrnstein died before the book was published. Murray has vigorously defended the book.) I did not find it a ground-breaking work, but I thought it brought up questions that deserved further study. I did not find it the rabid racist rant that others have damned it for.
I was put off by Murray’s injection of opinions and speculation, but maybe that’s just me. Just give me tables of your data, tell me what analyses you performed, and what your results were. I can run the stats myself to check you for internal consistency. That’s easy to do.
“Pictures or it did not happen.” Data or it does not matter.
I am tempted to put a note near the end that says, “If you didn’t like this book, email me why and I will refund my royalty share to you.”
I’m sure it will be equally as successful as the $5 coupon.
I hope that’s because, by the time someone gets to where it says, ‘To Be Continued,’ they are desperate for the next book, rather than significantly annoyed.
Of course, the refund will not occur is there is a mean-spirited review – but them’s the breaks.
Meanwhile, authors and publishers are terrified Amazon will publish stats on completion percentages for Kindle books.
The NYT isn’t alone in its Trump-mania: The WP is at least as obsessed, if not more, given that it is *their* town he is polluting with his presence.
As an owner of a Fire tablet I receive daily news summaries from the WP and every single day 60-80 of the linked articles are political and anti-Trump. It got tiring after a week.
Most of mainstream news sites are no better though I’ve found that the MSN News aggregation site is significantly better than most, avoiding editorially-slanted articles and linking instead to more neutral pieces and even (gasp!) linking the occasional piece from Fox or outside the US.
They also feature regular online polls on topics both trivial and meaningful and on the political side they often ask responders to indicate their political inclination. Online polls are notoriously unreliable but the MSN polls consistently show large participation and a centrist inclination in both responses and identification. To the extent that their polls mean anything, they indicate that the majority of their traffic is from people sick and tired of the endless partisan sniping.
Most people have more urgent matters to deal with than the doings of the idiots populating the upper reaches of the political establishment.
You CAN turn that off, you know…
It’s like a train wreck, you can’t help wonder how long they can keep it up. 😀
Quote, “Another classic example also comes from the 1980’s: Stephen Hawking’s ”Brief History of Time” remains no doubt the most abstruse volume ever to sell nearly nine million copies around the world.”
Except I’ve read it. All of it.
That’s the trouble with anecdotes, they’re not the plural of date.
However, the question of lots of sales for a book that people don’t finish is a fascinating one.
I unfortunately do not have any fascinating insights, other that to observe that glib opinions by marketing directors illustrate their inability to understand why one book sells and another doesn’t.
Those marketing directors are too busy networking or warring with their biggest sales channel to look for the answers staring them in the face. Consider:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/10/kobo-survey-books-readers-finish-donna-tartt
These things are knowable.
Yes, but only within limits set by the data collection, and in this case, excluding those who do not read electronic books. Of course, said readers of the latter may not be statistically significant within the whole data set.
However, I do not know whether that is the case or not.
PS: an addition, an article from the Guardian is at best tertiary research evidence.
eBook readers are a large enough segment of the market to be a statistically valid representation of the overall market.
If anything, because ebook readers skew heavily towards avid readers, rather than casual readers, they are more likely to stick with a “difficult” book than a casual reader or somebody who got is as a holiday present.
The data exists and if the traditional publishers were willing to make nice with ebook retailers, arrangements might be possible for the data to be shared with them.
Since they’re not willing, it isn’t shared.
So they keep on shoveling stuff out, hoping something sticks.
This is going to sound aggressive, so I apologize now.
Have you had a statistician run a power test on the data to test whether it meets the criteria of being a valid representation? Numbers can be quite low for a power validity test, but as long as they’re representative then you’re good to go.
The problem is in the first assertion: large enough segment.
The second assertion about ebook readers being avid consumers is also moot, because they fall outside the norm i.e. 56 percent of the population.
Also, as an observation, the tendency to stick with a book, is in and of itself not an indicator of the readability of the book, unless one can show cause rather than correlation.
This may all sound rather negative. However, the question that is interesting is what makes people buy a book they don’t read?
I would posit that there’s no simple answer to that question.
Peer pressure, of course. : )
Mega Bestsellers are the product of hype bandwagons.
“Everybody is reading it!” stokes curiosity and front table payola provides the opportunity for the impulse purchase. Then they go home, put it on the coffee table and fire up the football game. Life goes on.
the plural of date is “it’s twins”
I will admit to being one of those who bought a copy, but did not finish it.
Well, that’s two of us… I’ve also read “Warped Passages” (string theory), which is even more abstruse.
But I suspect that we are two of the rare breed that never buys coffee table ornamentation.
I do buy an occasional “political” book, for the purposes of reading it – but I never buy one that is “by” a political figure. Those are political advertisements, not political argumentation. (I have a feeling that Comey – assuming he manages to avoid prison, or even if he doesn’t – will be running for office at some point in the near future.)
An anecdote. Many years ago, while house hunting, we went around a bunch of houses, and couldn’t help but notice that not one (out of twenty or so) had any books on display.
Comey is being courted by the party you’d expect.
So is Randa Jarrar, no doubt.
Such are the times.
I liked Warped Passages.
History of Time sadly had nothing new for me, but then I’m a regular with Michio Kaku and Brian Greene.
Mostly I’m waiting for a theory that allows for things we have yet to see. In that, I agree with critics of the Standard model: it’s mostly curve fitting and extrapolation with no underlying concept to guide us into terra incognita.