Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
If it was before Rowling was outed, easily.
If you believe the NYT bestseller list is holy script you can accept the listings at face value. But by their own admission the thing is so tweaked and gimmicked with fudge factors and plain arbitrary manual jiggering that for the rest of us it is meaningless.
Besides, after their last *official* tweaking they openly admitted to Publisher's weekly the list isn't even intended to reflect actual sales, merely highlight *new releases*. A book that works its way to high sales through word of mouth over a year isn't something they want taking up space on their precious marketing tool.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...ler-lists.html
Discoverability being the establishment's substitute for actual marketing she makes it clear the list is solely a promotional tool not an actual tabulation of unit sales. Hence the need to demote paperbacks.
Just as they created the children's list in the first place to shuffle the Harry Potter books off the then-combined lists when they were outselling everything else.
Can't offend the Manhattan publ i shers or they'll stop buying ads, after all. |
This interpretation comes off as both reductionist and alarmist. The quote in the OP stands primarily because any attempt to "make the list"
is gaming the system. There has to be an editorial component. Assessing whether the editorial involvement enhances or detracts from the list is the reader's job, and can probably be accomplished by observation of the list itself, without any "insider information." Granted, in business and self help publishing, gaming systems is the raison d'etre of the genre.