![]() “It feels like this chart signifies that the indie author sector has come of age. “We’ve interviewed indie authors who regularly outsell the kind of household-name authors you see on the New York and London Times bestsellers,” he says. Stay reckons Amazon bestseller rankings can allow authors who don’t usually trouble the traditional bestseller lists to come into their own. ![]() They are attempting to write a book that will hit the top of Amazon’s chart listings – in any category – and charting their efforts in a weekly podcast called The Bestseller Experiment in which they interview other authors aiming for the same dream. Two authors who are going all out for an Amazon bestseller tag are Canada-based life coach Mark Desvaux and Mark Stay, who works in publishing in London. “Though for genre books, for which a New York Times tag is not possible due to their evaluation system, it might serve the purpose in the same way – as a validation that this book stood out above the others.” “In general, I do not think the Amazon bestseller tag will carry as much weight for literary works,” Stein says. On the one hand, it gives a leg up to authors working in a genre that might not have its own New York Times bestseller category, and who might never trouble the upper reaches of the general fiction sales charts. ![]() One advantage Amazon has is that it subdivides literary categories almost to an atomic level, which has both pros and cons. I believe consumers are looking for an affirmation that a book performed well/is popular when making their decision.”Īmazon Charts are based on real-time orders and what’s being read on Kindle and listened to on Audible Photograph: Hannah Mckay/Reuters “There’s prestige associated with being a New York Times bestseller, and industry influencers and booksellers take notice of it. ![]() “I do believe the tag helps sell more books,” says Liz Stein, senior editor with HarperCollins imprint Park Row Books. Methods of data collection notwithstanding, can Amazon oust the New York Times for that all-important blurb on a book’s cover that denotes something being so popular that you just can’t afford to not read it? Does the “New York Times bestseller” tag actually help to shift more units anyway? To summarise: “Rankings reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles … The panel of reporting retailers is comprehensive and reflects sales in stores of all sizes and demographics across the United States.” The New York Times has a reasonably detailed explanation of its methodology online, without actually giving away the actual 11 herbs and spices that give it its market-leading flavour. A request for an explanation and a breakdown of audience figures for the various NYT bestseller lists which are posted online was greeted with a firm: “We don’t share traffic data at the section level.” It certainly isn’t just a roundup of physical books bought over the counter at bricks-and-mortar stores. On the face of it, Amazon Charts might democratise and re-evaluate the bestseller concept, but on the other – like Coca Cola, KFC and Big Mac special sauce – nobody really knows what actually goes into the New York Times’ bestseller list. But will this carry more weight with the publishing industry – and readers – than the venerable New York Times bestseller tag, which has been the go-to example of bragging rights since 1931? So while every man and his dog might have bought a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Thomas Pinketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, not everyone actually read them.Īmazon Charts might open up a whole new set of bestsellers based on books actually read rather than books bought as coffee-table status symbols. In 2014, the mathematician Jordan Ellenberg created an index of the most abandoned books, based on Kindle data. It’s an interesting algorithm, and one that has been utilised before, but never formally by Amazon in this way.
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