Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
The NYT lists have always been skewed by paid promotion... and the new ebook lists will also favor promotion through the traditional markets.
Suppose, for example, that I hit a ball out of the park and sold 10 million copies of a book... through my own website? NYT will never see those stats, and I won't be on their list. Only if I sold well through one of their traditional channels (existing publishers and booksellers, or now, Amazon and B&N ebook services) would I be noticed.
So, this might be progress, but there are still a lot of holes in their methodology, making this a limited step forward.
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Agreed that the NYT list is useful only if you know the limitations in its compilation, but I think if anyone sold 10 million books outside the list's parameters (or any such large number), it would be a publishing wonder. It would be a significant enough development that the compilers probably would find some way to note it, and if they thought it could happen again, they'd probably try to adjust the parameters of the survey.