‘There will be no more professional writers in the future’

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Four of the NYT Top 25 Fiction "Bestsellers", this particular week, come from SMASHWORDS.

Smashwords is only one of the places they sell their books of course...

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Speaking of nightmare disruptions for the old guard, there is this little milestone:
http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/07/m...s-hit-new.html

Four of the NYT Top 25 Fiction "Bestsellers", this particular week, come from SMASHWORDS.

I suspect the folks at penguin won't be too pleased.
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/07/20...se-at-penguin/

I sampled all of them (romances) and it's obvious the planted reviews built up momentum to land on the list. One author received reciprocal support from other indie authors further adding to the total.

Quality is subjective, of course, but ...

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Fbone

I sampled all of them (romances) and it's obvious the planted reviews built up momentum to land on the list. One author received reciprocal support from other indie authors further adding to the total.

Quality is subjective, of course, but ...

Considering the (lack of) quality of a lot of the BPH NYT "bestsellers" and the ways some of those titles get on the list I woudn't be making looking to deprecate the event solely on quality issues.

Wherever the titles come from, however they racked up the numbers, they made it to the list: If making it to the NYT is a metric that matters to you, traditional publishing is no longer the only road to get there.

When would-be authors sit down to do their due dilligence (circa 2012) on how to bring their "great american novel" to market they now have to weigh a lot of options that the Morrisons of the world never had to consider. Pretty soon doing trade studies on a spreadsheet will be part of the pre-publishing process, maybe by hiring an accountant along with an IP lawyer.

The next milestone I'm looking for is a new-publishing title hitting number one on the NYT list. I figure it'll happen by next summer. (Just a WAG, of course. )

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Considering the (lack of) quality of a lot of the BPH NYT "bestsellers" and the ways some of those titles get on the list . . .

The next milestone I'm looking for is a new-publishing title hitting number one on the NYT list. I figure it'll happen by next summer. (Just a WAG, of course. )

Why the happy face about a book being on a list you dissed?

Reading Wikipedia, it seems that there are repeated attempts to game the list for which I wouldn't blame the Times. When they think sales are being hyped by bulk purchases, they mark the title with a dagger.

I'm guessing there is an unstated minimum price. The current Kindle #8 bestseller, the novel War Brides, selling for $1.99, is not among the 25 titles on the current Times eBook fiction list. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that in case it starts yet another round of anti-Times polemics, but, well, there it is. Given Amazon's history of selectively releasing sales data, it may be that Kindle sales aren't fully considered. Maybe Amazon itself doesn't want cheap titles to rise too high on list.

As a reader, I would look for the milestone of them giving a book both a Sunday and weekday review, and both be a rave.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Why the happy face about a book being on a list you dissed?

I diss the list because it is a purely commercial ranking yet some take it as some kind of validation/badge of quality. The trad-pub industry has lived by that list for decades and now it is being undercut by it. (I expect a flood of attempts to deprecate the rankings, now...)

The happy face refers to the WAG overstatement: for all I know a self-pub'ed title could hit #1 next week or five years from now.