Posted on by seasonsshadow

Opinion: New York Times Bestseller Achievement Does Not Promise a Good Read

Maybe I’m old and getting grumpier, or maybe the world I live in is truly getting sneakier and less whimsical. I remember times when I would go to the bookstore and be drawn in by things like “#1 New York Times Bestseller!” written on the cover. However, it wasn’t until recently that I learned exactly how one gets on the New York Times Bestseller list. If you’re like me and were living in the land of assumptions, let me lay it out for you.

The New York Times takes in information from certain vendors both brick-and-mortar and digital. Each week, it’s essentially a popularity contest of sales – Who in which genres sold the most copies that week, as reported by the vendors who report to the New York Times (which will be abbreviated to NYT moving forward in this opinion piece). There are different parameters for digital media and ebooks, but the general idea is the same.

When I found out that not all bulk sales were immediately discounted for this contest, I became a little disillusioned. Now, MOST bulk sales are discounted, but not ALL OF THEM.

The next thing I found out was that there is no criteria for the content of the book, just the parameters of genre. The NYT Best Reviewed list is something else entirely.

Think about that for a minute. If someone wrote a book, marketed it as fiction, wrote 300 pages of paragraphs filled with sentences like “And then I saw”, “And then I went”, and “And then I thought” over and over and over, and 10,000 people bought it because they thought it was funny… that would make it on the list. The book could be written as though dictated by a child in their rambling story phase, with many grammar and spelling errors, but as long as it is reported as selling well, then it makes it on the list.

What started me on this whole rabbit hole was listening to an opinion piece about Lani Sarem’s Handbook for Mortals. Now, the events that sparked the YouTube video I was listening to happened back in 2017, so it is by no means new news. However, if you live under a rock like I do, you may have missed it. If that’s the case, allow me to paraphrase it for you.

Handbook for Mortals upstaged The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas on the NYT Bestseller list. Position #1. It was widely unknown by the online reading community prior to this. The displacement sparked controversy because it was thought Lani Sarem bought her way to the top of the list for her debut novel.

Before I looked into this more, I thought that had to be an obnoxious and very well-coordinated effort on the part of the author and the author’s friends to go and buy at least 5,000 individual copies of this book over the period of one week.

Silly me, there are companies to do that for you!

Companies like Result Source Inc. If you go to their website, which it blew my mind to find out was still active, you can submit your contact information. The entire thing has been stripped down to a simple “contact us” link. Probably because of the unwanted attention scamming a bestseller list got them.

Now, this is not the first time a book has been flat out removed from the NTY Bestseller list, but in my opinion, it is certainly the most interesting.

I wish I could say that there was a source of reviews I trusted. Goodreads was a promising effort, but the amount of 1-star review bombing that’s happening there based on the author’s behaviour or opinions. Can we please implement a 2-tiered system? This author gets 1-star because of reasons X,Y, and Z. Their book, A Tale of Mischief, 5 stars. Amazing. This tells me that I might have a good time if I find this book at a used bookstore, but not to order from the author themselves, or from a standard bookstore.

What’s your opinion on good books written by questionable people? I’d love to know in the comments!

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