Bestseller

This article is about the concept of a book bestseller. For other uses of the term, please see the disambiguation page at Best sellers.

[Image:tool_cover.jpg] A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on a list of top-sellers. In everyday usage, the term bestseller is not usually associated with a specified level of sales, or considered of superior academic value or literary quality, it simply implies great popularity, similar to blockbuster for films and chart-topper in music (although, in film and music, these measures are generally related to sales figures or units sold). Therefore, bestsellers are to a degree self-defining, in that identifying a book as a bestseller may be enough to establish it as such in the public mind. Bestsellers are usually divided into two main categories, fiction and non-fiction. Particularly in the case of novels, an involved chain of literary agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, retailers, and marketing efforts go into "making" bestsellers.

Bestselling books are a relatively new phenomenon. Their existence depends on mass production and some means of assessing popularity, by sales or otherwise. Therefore, the "first" bestseller by current definition may at best be little more than two hundred years old (in fact, Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther), published in 1774, may have been the first popular bestseller).

Origins: the first bestseller?

While the term bestseller has a relatively modern etymology, it requires certain prerequisites. Mass production in print must be possible, furthermore there must be a reliable measure of a book's circulation. Since popular books were commonly pirated well into the period of Enlightenment, it is hard to quantify the popularity of earlier works, such as Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605), even if they are known to have been immensely popular in their own time. The same goes for the 1534 edition of Martin Luther's Bible translation. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) (1774) is generally considered the first modern bestseller. Soon after its initial publication, it was read throughout Europe and the United States. Like some modern bestsellers, the book spawned a spin-off industry, with items like Werther eau de cologne and porcelain puppets depicting the main characters. While modern bestselling authors make a considerable profit, this was not the case with Cervantes or Goethe, as the royalty system was not yet in effect.

Description and types of bestseller

Bestsellers are usually separated into fiction and non-fiction categories. Different list compilers have created a number of other subcategories. The New York Times was reported to have started the "Children's Books" section in 2001 in order to move the Harry Potter books out of the No. 1, 2, and 3 positions on their Fiction chart, where they had remained for over a year.

Bestsellers may also be ranked separately for hardcover and paperback editions. Typically, a hardcover edition appears first, followed in months or years by much less expensive paperback version. Hardcover bestseller status can help drive the paperback release to the same.

In the UK, a hardcover book could be considered a "bestseller" with sales of between 4,000 and 25,000 copies per week, and in Canada, the rule of thumb is 5,000 copies per week, though the number is still relative — a book can be considered a bestseller in relation to other books, without ever reaching that threshold.

There are many "bestseller lists", which display anywhere from 10 to 150 titles. In North America, the New York Times bestseller list is perhaps the most widely known.

Literary perception

Partly due to commercialization, bestseller can acquire a negative connotation, particularly in fiction, when it is seen to indicate a work with mass appeal and of inferior literary quality. Nonetheless, the term is widely used in book marketing, with bestseller status advertised prominently on the covers of paperback editions whenever possible.

Differences between lists

Bestseller lists can vary widely, depending on the method used for calculating sales. The Book Sense bestseller lists, for example, use only sales numbers provided by independently-owned (non-chain) bookstores, while the New York Times list includes both wholesale and retail sales from a variety of channels. A book that sells well in gift shops and grocery stores may hit a New York Times list without ever appearing on a Book Sense list.

Bestseller lists from Amazon.com, the dominant online book retailer, are based on sales from their Web site only, and are updated on an hourly basis. Wholesale sales are not factored into Amazon's calculations. Numerous Web sites offer advice for authors about how to temporarily shoot their book higher on Amazon's list using carefully-timed buying campaigns to take advantage of the frequent adjustments to rankings. The brief sales spike allows authors to make claims like "Amazon.com top 100 seller" in marketing materials for books that actually have relatively low sales.

The weight and price of a book can affect its positioning on lists. The Amazon list tends to favor hardcovers and more expensive books, where the shipping is a smaller percentage of the overall purchase price (or sometimes even free). Inexpensive mass market paperbacks tend to do better on the New York Times list than they do on Amazon's. Book Sense and Publisher's Weekly separate mass market paperbacks onto their own list.

Category structure affects the positioning of a book in other ways. A book that might be buried on the Book Sense hardcover fiction list could do very well on the New York Times hardcover advice list or the Publisher's Weekly religion hardcover list.

Verifiability

Bestseller reports from companies like Amazon.com, which appear to be based strictly on auditable sales to the public, can be at odds with bestseller lists compiled from more casual data, such as the New York Times list's survey of retailers and publishers (the actual method for calculating the New York Times bestseller lists is a closely-guarded secret). This situation suggests a similar one in the area of popular music. In 1991, Billboard magazine switched its chart data from manual reports filed by stores, to automated cash register data collected by a service called SoundScan. The conversion saw a dramatic shake-up in chart content from one week to the next.

Today, many lists come from automated sources. Booksellers can use their POS (point-of-sale) systems to report automatically to Book Sense. Wholesalers like giant Ingram Book Group have bestseller calculations similar to Amazon's, but they are available only to subscribing retailers. Large retail chains like Barnes & Noble collect sales data from retail outlets and their Web sites to build their own bestseller lists.

Nielsen BookScan US is perhaps the most aggressive attempt to date to produce a completely automatic and trusted set of bestseller lists. They claim to be gathering data directly from cash registers at over 4,500 retail locations, including independent bookstores, large chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and general retailers like Costco. Unlike the consumer-oriented lists, BookScan's data is extremely detailed and quite expensive. Subscriptions to BookScan cost upwards of $75,000 per year, but can provide publishers and wholesalers with an accurate picture of book sales with regional breakdowns and other statistical analysis.

The making of a bestseller

Buyers in droves ultimately make a bestseller, however, there is a distinct "making of" process that selects which books have a shot. Not all publishers rely on or strive for bestsellers, as the survival of small presses indicates. Big publishing houses, on the other hand, are like major record labels and film studios, and require regular high returns to manage their large overhead. Thus, the stakes are high. It is estimated that 200,000 new books are published each year in the US, and less than 1% of them achieve bestseller status. Along the way, major players act as gatekeepers and enablers, including literary agents, editors and publishing houses, booksellers, and the media (particularly, publishers of book reviews and bestseller lists). In the US, the five major publishers—Random House, HarperCollins, Time Warner, Penguin USA and Simon & Schuster—are responsible for about 80% of bestsellers; the five majors together with the next five largest publishers—Von Holtzbrinck, Hyperion, Rodale, Houghton Mifflin and Harlequin—control around 98% of all US bestsellers. At least equally influential is the marketing effort, including advertising, promotion and publicity. When present in the equation, the brandname value of an established best-selling author is paramount. In addition to writing the book, an author has to acquire representation and negotiate this publishing chain.

At least one scientific approach to creating bestsellers has been devised. In 2004, Didier Sornette, a Professor of Geophysics and complex systems theorist at UCLA, using Amazon.com sales data, created a mathematical model for predicting bestseller potential based on early sales results. This information could be used to decide the potential for bestseller status, and to finetune advertising and publicity efforts accordingly.

Cultural role

While the basic dictionary definition of bestseller is self-evident, "a popular, top-selling book", the practical cultural definition is somewhat more complex. As consumer bestseller lists generally do not detail specific criteria, such as number sold, sales period, sales region, and so forth, a book becomes a bestseller mainly because the "right" source says it is so. Calling a book a "top-selling" title is not as impactful as calling it "the New York Times bestseller", although the former phrase is assumed to be derived from sales figures, the latter benefits from the high profile of the particular list. And a book that is identified as a bestseller greatly improves its chances of selling to a much wider audience. In this way, bestseller has taken on its own popular meaning, rather independent of empirical data, by becoming a product category and in effect, a people's choice award. For example, a "summer bestseller" is usually determined long before the summer is over, and signals a book's suitability for millions of lounging pool-side readers.

The use of the marketing phrase, underground bestseller further illustrates the independent-from-sales, self-defining aspect of a bestseller. For example, publisher HarperCollins suggested the bestseller potential of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel by announcing "...four years after her award-winning, underground bestseller, Little Altars Everywhere..." in the books promotion. The book went on to achieve bestseller status in the 1990s. In reviews of the 2002 film of the same name, the novel's bestseller status was then routinely cited, as in "compelling adaptation of Rebecca Wells' bestseller".

Connection with the movie industry

Bestsellers play a significant role in the mainstream movie industry. There is a long-standing Hollywood practice of turning fiction bestsellers into feature films. Many, if not the majority, of modern movie "classics" began as bestsellers. On the Publisher's Weekly fiction bestsellers of the year charts, we find: #2. The Godfather (1969); #1. Love Story (1970); #2. The Exorcist (1971); #3. Jaws (1974); among many others. Several of each year's fiction bestsellers are sooner or later made into high profile movies. Being a bestseller novel in the US over the last 40 years has guaranteed a first crack at being turned into a big budget, wide release movie.

See also

• List of best-selling books

External links

• The Book Standard Bestseller Charts powered by Nielsen BookScan (US) (subscription site, Top 10s are free)
• Bestseller Lists from 1900 to 1998
• Best-Selling Books from 2000 to Present