BESTSELLER LISTS...?

Nearly twenty-five years ago, my very first book, NO GENTLE LOVE, debuted on its very first bestseller list. The list---compiled by the M-S News Company---had my novel at #1, ahead of books by authors like Howard Fast, Ken Folett, Louis L'Amour, Norman Mailer, and Rosemary Rogers. This was heady stuff for someone who, at the time, had only written one novel, and I remember how excited I was.

Two books later, my novel LOVE, CHERISH ME hit the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, and two books after that, my novel AND GOLD WAS OURS hit the New York Times bestseller list. I cracked open a bottle of Dom Perignon and celebrated!

Now, however, almost thirty years into my career as a writer, I'm a bit more skeptical about bestseller lists. Why? Because I understand a great deal more now about how they really work than I did as a young writer just starting out. I know, for example, that many books that are actually bestsellers may never show up on a single bestseller list.

In fact, in 2001 and 2002, there were 109 hardcover novels that never appeared on the New York Times bestseller list---although they outsold many books that did.

How does that happen? you may wonder. Well, it all has to do with how the various owners of the various bestseller lists compile them and how timely they do so. Ultimately, all lists are a compilation of book sales drawn from sample book outlets, rather than a complete survey of every single such outlet in the U.S.; and one bestseller list, the Library Journal, isn't based on book sales at all, but, rather, the number of times books are checked out from libraries. Further, some book outlets, such as airports and supermarkets, are slower to report sales than bookstores, for instance. So all this leads to great variations in bestseller lists across the country.

In addition, due to the publishing industry's peculiar system of returns, which allows all unsold books to be returned to the publisher, only when a book is actually bought by a customer does it count as a sale for the publisher. This means that real sales figures are never actually known until adjustments for those returns have been made---and returns can be very high, running to 50% or more of the books originally shipped and distributed. So a book that initially seemed to be a bestseller can, in reality, wind up being a huge flop instead.

So, now, when one of my novels makes a bestseller list, while I'm always still delighted, I know that the only sales figures that really count are those that appear on my royalty statements!

For more information on bestseller lists and how they operate, check out this article from Slate and this article from the Washington Post.