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Q: How accurate are bestseller lists?
A: Not very.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t important. They are great for publicity and will probably help generate more sales. Many people peruse the various lists to help them determine what to pick up next. They are fabulous for an author’s ego. Admit it, wouldn’t you like to have the tag New York Times Bestselling Author under your name every time you published a book? All it takes is once!
Why aren’t they accurate?
Book publishers don’t use a upc code on the back of their books. Why? There is an ancient custom that book retailers should be able to set their own prices. UPC codes include a price. So traditionally, publishers have used an ISBN number and code. A few use nothing at all. That means a whole new reporting system is needed to gather point-of-purchase data. The biggest collector of this data is Nielson’s BookScan system, which is modeled after the music industry’s SoundScan.
But not all retailers feed their data to BookScan and not all bestseller lists use BookScan anyway. The New York Times has the most prestigious list, which is based on several large chains, a number of independent booksellers, and select mass market accounts. USA Today and the Wall Street Journal employ similar methods of sampling, including judicious use of BookScan. Ditto Publisher’s Weekly. However, many large booksellers – like Sams and a number of other mass market retail chains, schools, Christian bookstores, rack jobbers, e-books, and high volume tabletop display marketers – don’t provide their data to BookScan. The largest Christian retail chain doesn’t even provide its data to the CBA (Christian Booksellers Association) bestseller list. One wouldn’t, of course, expect the lists to account for other ‘special markets’ including direct sales nor organizational and author purchases. The good news is that Amazon and Walmart sales are now included with BookScan – but several of the lists resisted using Amazon’s sales until the last few years.
What percentage of book sales are reflected on bestseller lists? No one knows for sure based on all the above reasons. I’ve heard estimates ranging from 30% to 60%. Anecdotally, one author friend has now sold three million copies of a single book. Of those, 100 thousand have sold in traditional book selling settings and the other 2.9 million have sold direct to consumer, business to business, or through back-of-room sales when he speaks. Those 2.9 million units have never been counted on a bestseller list.
Because bestseller lists do create positive publicity and sales momentum there are more than a few occasions when authors and publishers have attempted to manipulate their book’s placement on the lists. For example, back when it was harder to track single store sales, an author or agent might order the five or ten or twenty or thirty thousand copies of a new book needed for speaking engagements through a single bookstore to ‘force’ a book onto the list. I’m sure this has helped ongoing sales just for the fact that accounts would see the book show up on a list and order more store copies. But point-of-purchase data, at least within a chain, is now sophisticated enough to spot this as an anomaly, not a trend. The New York Times at least used to put a dagger symbol next to books that had large bulk orders. (Do they still do that?)
There is a publisher axiom that says you can get a book on any bestsellers list through marketing but in order for it to stay on the list it has to be a great book that generates word-of-mouth advertising. Longevity of a book on various bestseller lists is almost always an indicator that the book has real ‘legs’. Or, in the case of books that sell hundreds of thousands or even millions of units and never show up on a list, they either need to be great or the author needs to have a great platform for moving product.
So bestseller lists are important indicators of what’s happening in major swathes of the book selling environment but they have information gaps in that environment and don’t even attempt to measure what’s happening in special markets, so they can’t tell the whole story of which books sell most.
Author initials. A.A. Milne. G.K. Chesterton. E.E. Cummings. E.B. White. C.S. Lewis. J.R.R. Tolkien. P.D. James. J.M. Barrie. H.L. Mencken. E.L. Doctorow. B.F. Skinner. T.S. Eliot. W.H. Auden. M.K. Gilroy. What’s with that? Why do so many authors use initials instead of their first name?
I’m guessing F. Scott Fitzgerald never forgave his parents for naming him Francis. But he could have gone with Frank.
When my first novel, Cuts Like a Knife, was introduced, my sister Susan asked me, “What’s with the initials on the cover of the book instead of using your full name?”
My first response was it seemed to have worked out fine for Joanne Rowling—and no, no one has been able to confirm whether her middle name is Kathleen or Katherine. (Do you know why?)
That raises a much bigger question than why I went with M.K. rather than Mark. Why did Joanne become J.K.? To my knowledge she’s never answered that question directly.
When I headed up marketing for a publishing group early in my career we made cover decisions on the basis of the old advertising rule that females will relate almost equally well to a picture of a female or a male—but generally speaking, males relate almost exclusively to a picture of a male.
I’m not claiming that rule is still true, but I suspect there’s significant truth to it. I just can’t prove it. If someone can point to research on the topic, please message me!
I have to assume that J.K. used initials to make her author name gender neutral, which makes sense for the launch of a series categorized as children’s literature.
Is that the same reason why I went with M.K. instead of Mark?
I’ll make a confession. I originally wrote the novel under a female pen name and attempted to sell it that way as an agent. After all, my lead character is a female. I got a lot of interest but to my surprise there was near universal resistance to buying a novel by a pseudonymous author – which I thought would be a marketing benefit. I wonder if Nora Roberts had a hard time convincing her agent and publisher to introduce a mystery series under the name J.D. Robb? (Hmmm. There are those initials again.) On the gender switch, Rowling got “outed” pretty quickly when she wrote as Robert Galbraith for The Cuckoo’s Calling.
But back to the question. Why initials on my book cover? Was it because M.K. is more gender neutral than Mark or is it because M.K. Gilroy fits easier on one line than Mark Gilroy – a decision based on style?
The former. It was a marketing decision. My guess is that is the same reason many authors use initials.
But there is another reason I went by M.K. instead of Mark. And maybe I’m not alone.
My Kristen Conner series was acquired by Jeana Ledbetter who let me know a pen name wasn’t in the cards. But then she said, “But we do think ‘M.K.’ sounds kind of cool.”
Cool. I liked the sound of that. Is it possible J.R.R. Tolkien was showing off by adding three initials to his book covers? His friend and contemporary C.S. Lewis was satisfied with just two.
I’ve always wanted to be kind of cool—so there you have it. Mystery solved. Now you know why so many authors use initials instead of full first name. We want to be cool!