Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Surely it's the other way around, isn't it? A book is on the best-sellers' list because a lot of people buy it. Not vice versa.
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Nope.
The NYT list is strictly a promotional tool to get people to buy the highlighted books.
They've said so themselves repeatedly, most recently when they re-rigged the children's book list to exclude titles that reach high levels of sales over time. They only want fresh produce on their list.
That is why they created the children's book list in the first place: the Harry Potter books kept selling and selling and by "cluttering" up the list kept them from promoting newer releases.
The other thing is the list rolls in months of pre-orders into the launch week "sales" numbers so, again, titles that are steady good sellers get shuffled out of view while one-week wonders get highlighted. It is possible for a book to sell a million copies over a year and never hit the list while a book that sells 30-50K total copies gets to call itself an NYT Bestseller. It is in fact common for books to sell a couple hundred thousand copies in a few months without ever showing up on the list.
There's been a couple threads here documenting why the "bestsellers" list doesn't list the best sellers.