Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Totally meaningless:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffberc...tsellers-list/
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. |
Thanks fj!
Remember in the late '70s when Doug Casey with
Crisis Investing and Robert Ringer with
Winning Through Intimidation both came out of nowhere to hit #1 on the NYT chart? When I first heard about ResultSource some time back, they came to mind immediately.
There may be something else to consider. I believe that back in the '30s, the best sellers were genuinely talented authors like Falkner and Hemingway. The sort of people who would get Nobel Prizes. I'm pretty confident that James Patterson and Sue Grafton are not in line for a Nobel Prize. Perhaps the practice of promoting an author as a NYT best-seller started back when such authors were good!