The Bestseller List is Broken
In September of 2022, I wrote a post called The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to NYT, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon. It got a lot of views, so it became a weekly feature, soon retitled The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to All the Lists.
In this feature, which I’ve been faithfully writing weekly for the past year, I take a look at the biggest bestseller lists (The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, Amazon, and the Indie Bestseller List) to see where the overlap is — because despite all claiming to represent the bestsellers of the week, they disagree on what those titles are.
These bestseller list round-ups continue to be popular. They get more views than anything else I write. And if I’m honest, I have grown to resent this feature. Because it is the most mind-numbingly boring thing I’ve ever written. In fact, calling it writing is generous; it’s mostly copying and pasting as well as basic addition.
Don’t get me wrong: I love a good spreadsheet. I often enjoy repetitive tasks like this, especially while listening to a podcast. The main problem isn’t the format of the post; it’s the content.
In July of 2020, the #1 book on the Fiction New York Times bestseller list was The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. In Nonfiction, there were titles like Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. They reflected a national conversation about race in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Look at The New York Times overall Fiction and Nonfiction bestseller lists today, though, and you’re unlikely to see any conversations about anti-racism. In fact, you’re unlikely to see any books by authors of color. If you do, they’re far outnumbered by books from white authors who have published dozens of books over many decades.
Despite all the promises from anti-racist book clubs in 2020, at least in the world of book sales, not much seems to have changed. The authors who dominated the charts in 2019 are mostly still crowding them four years later.
What would you say the biggest book of 2023 so far has been? What about the buzziest book of the moment? Did you name The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk for either of those? That 2014 title has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 157 weeks, beating out It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover (115 weeks). It shows that bestsellers are not necessarily the books getting talked about the most. Often, they’re just books that quietly move a lot of units, like Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss during graduation season.
The bestseller list is rarely surprising. Most titles stay the same week after week. When there is a new addition, it’s usually from a well-known author like James Patterson or Nora Roberts. Debut books that make it onto the list for more than a week or two are few and far between.
Maybe it’s unfair of me to expect anything more from the bestseller list. The most-watched TV shows are not groundbreaking, either. The top 20 songs at any given time are often predictable, too. Anything that aggregates taste on such a large scale is going to end up favoring the least offensive, most widely palatable products.
I don’t expect the bestseller list to be made up of only envelope-pushing, experimental literary fiction, and I don’t expect it to have a lot of radical activist nonfiction, either. But I do think we can do better than the list we have now, which is almost entirely by, about, and marketed to white, cis, straight, abled people.
Perhaps the problem is that there are just too many books being published each week. Anything that’s not already popular, that doesn’t come with a built-in fan base, is drowned out in the noise. Even those of us who make it our full-time job to be knowledgable about the book industry can’t keep up with new releases, never mind the average reader. So how is any one of those books expected to get enough attention to make the bestseller list?
What would it look like, to change the bestseller list permanently? Publishers throwing their marketing budgets behind debut authors with fresh perspectives instead of established authors would be one way to shift the needle. But what about readers? Will we ever have a movement like #BlackoutBestsellerList again? What would a long-term, sustainable campaign to diversify the bestseller list look like — is it possible?
To be honest, I’m not sure it is. I can imagine short-term, well-organized, highly publicized campaigns like #BlackoutBestsellerList being effective a few times a year at most, but I can’t picture a strategy that could be effective month after month.
Besides marketing budget, word of mouth is what sells a book, so every bookseller, librarian, and bookish influencer has some sway there, however small.
I wish I had a tidy answer to this, because I am uniquely invested in the bestseller list becoming more diverse — in many senses of the word. I would love to have one single bestseller list post that didn’t need a disclaimer that this list is disproportionately by white authors, for instance.
But maybe the bestseller list isn’t the problem. Maybe it’s just a symptom. As long as publishing continues to value the same privileged, homogenous set of authors, they’ll continue to be get the lion’s share of the publicity budget. And as long as book-buying customers continue to passively purchase whatever gets the most marketing, those books will continue to dominate the bestseller list.
Changing the bestseller list may be inextricable from changing the publishing industry — and, it’s worth noting, changing more broadly the kinds of voices (white, straight, cis, abled, etc) that get valued the most in our society.
In the meantime, I’ll keep on copy-and-pasting, hoping for the day I’ll be pleasantly surprised by what I find.
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