Totally meaningless:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffberc...tsellers-list/
Quote:
ResultSource, a San Diego-based marketing consultancy, specializes in getting books onto bestseller lists, according to The Wall Street Journal. For clients willing to pay enough, it will even guarantee a No. 1 spot. It does this by taking bulk sales and breaking them up into more organic-looking individual purchases, defeating safeguards that are supposed to make it impossible to “buy” bestseller status.
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More, the NYT only looks at select bookstores so the people who know which stores they track, gaming the system is way cheaper, especially for non-fiction and specialty categories where a couple thousand sales in the right stores can guarantee a number one rating.
Even without gaming, it is possible to hit number one through preorders alones by launching during the slow summer season when no nane-brand author books are launched.
All the list reports is peak sales *recorded* in one week. Which can be done with high 4-figures. If the book never sells a single copy after that week, it still can boast of NYT bestsellerdom. Conversely, a book could sell a million copies over a couple years and never get annointed.
Lecturing gurus routinely buy their own books to buy their way onto the list and then sell them at full list at their lectures so the Bestseller tag comes for free.