Dirty Little Secrets: Part 1
The publishing industry has a dirty little secret that it doesn’t want very many people to know about. No, it’s not a vast conspiracy against unpublished authors (although it can seem that way at times). No, it’s not even anything as exciting as collusion or price fixing. The secret: book sales figures!
What?
That’s right. Most publishers consider book sales figures to be proprietary information and only a select few within the industry know the real numbers. What’s even more interesting is that the weekly bestseller lists that everyone sees in their Sunday papers probably in no way reflect what book is a true "bestseller" and what book is not.
Then where do bestseller lists come from?
Good question. Most lists are compiled by the publication printing them. And, it’s interesting to note that the way these bestseller lists are compiled is probably the most unscientific way to compile such a list. Here’s a brief excerpt from an article (WahsingtonPost.com) I found while researching the subject. Granted, the article is from 2004, it’s the only clear explanation I was able to find, and given the stubborness of the publishing industry at large, I doubt much has changed (if you have information to the contrary, please let me know):
Periodicals that create their own national lists, on the other hand, typically collect data from only a sample of stores that they believe represent all domestic booksellers, and each tries to infer total sales rankings from its own sample.
The article goes on to say:
Steve Wasserman, the Book Review editor at the Los Angeles Times, doesn’t even pretend that his staff’s process yields reliable results. "It’s a deeply unscientific — one is almost tempted to call it whimsical — compilation, which has a veneer of a certain kind of science," he says.
In other words, the bestseller lists are compiled in an unscientific fashion and only represent a small sampling of the book market and in no way reflect actual sales trends on a national level (or even a local level, if you really want to get picky about it).
Who cares? It’s just a stupid list, right? Well, if you want to look at it that way. But remember that these lists can make or break an author’s career. Lots of money and many jobs are at stake here. And don’t think that just newspapers like the LA Times, Chicago Tribune or even the New York Times are to blame. Even Publisher’s Weekly, the standard industry trade publication even admits that there is really no standard formula for determining book rankings.
Okay, so why don’t we just ask them how their lists are compiled? That would be nice, in theory, but most (if not all) of these periodicals printing the bestsellers list will not gladly hand over their information with a smile. All that is, you guessed it, proprietary information!
Such secrecy and unscientific methods for compiling a bestseller list almost seems like false advertising now, doesn’t it? Even worse, the newspapers in question can be completely bias in the bookstores they sample and how they interpret the data, and none of us would be the wiser.
The conclusion I have drawn from doing research for this post is that bestseller lists can’t be trusted (not that I gave them much credit to begin with). Although I’ve never been one to go out and buy a book just because it is on some bestseller list, there are plenty who do and given the money involved (and writing careers), the reading public at least deserves a little honesty.
Read the Washington Post article here:
Making Books
In Part 2 of this series, I will write about the real world implications of such secretive practices, with more focus on the publishing industry itself and how it keeps its sales figures confidential – and the many, many problems it causes and the amount of money at stake! Stay tuned!!!
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