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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
If you think bestseller lists are based on solid facts, guess again. But a new technology is promising to improve the hot-book scorecard.
Jun 25, 2002 | It's the hallmark of publishing success, the only part of the book section many people look at. It's an appellation that gets authors invitations to speak at commencements and on television, maybe even a visit to the White House. But what exactly is a bestseller?
That may seem like an easy enough question to answer -- it's the book that sold the most copies in the past week, a matter of simple, quantitative fact. In reality, though, the actual process of calculating a bestseller list from week to week often involves as much interpretation on the part of list-compilers as it does actual sales figures. And many observers despise the lists, claiming that they spotlight books for dubious or purely commercial reasons.
Others, however, think fussing about bestseller lists is a waste of time. When asked about the accuracy of the lists and what they mean to the culture at large, one publishing executive became scornful: "Bestseller lists don't have much effect [anyway]," he stated. "If someone doesn't like one list, they can just look at another. Or start their own."
That advice has already been taken. In the '90s, the two major lists -- the New York Times, which is the one most read by consumers, and the Publishers Weekly list, which is the industry organ -- suddenly found themselves in a room crowded by lists from such publications as the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and by programs like BookSense (run by the American Booksellers Association), which keeps track of independent bookstore sales. And sites like Amazon, Powells.com and Barnesandnoble.com post bestseller lists according to sales data from their sites, which sometimes update their rankings hourly.
And now there's BookScan, which is being trumpeted as the final word in book-sales tracking, a point-of-sale marketing technology that began last July. BookScan purchases data from retailers and tells subscribers exactly how many copies of a book have sold and where. It's owned by the same company, VNU Retail Entertainment Information Group, that a decade ago introduced SoundScan to the music industry. Until SoundScan, music charts were compiled by information given by radio stations and music stores. SoundScan revolutionized the industry by revealing the popularity of previously underrated genres such as rap and country, but critics say that it also increasing the rise of shoddy, market-driven pop music.
Jim King, a vice president of sales and service for BookScan, said the company has signed up 70 percent of the market share so far (large chains such as Barnes and Noble and Borders, an increasing number of independent bookstores, other book sale outlets such as Target and Costco) and that BookScan's sign-up rate is faster than SoundScan's was at the same point in its development. BookScan hopes eventually to capture 90 percent of the market and intends to develop and license its own bestseller list. In fact, it's probable that this point-of-sale system will expand overseas as well, enabling BookScan to tally not only American sales figures, but those in England and anywhere BookScan can sign up booksellers, setting the stage for the first international bestseller list.
In the end, though, the question is whether the proliferation of bestseller lists has provided more or less reliable information about books and the book industry. If you glance at the lists from USA Today, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BookSense and the San Francisco Chronicle for any given week you'll find that no two lists will have the exact same five books in the top five, and many books that are in the top 10 of one list don't even appear in the others.
The differences between lists are not due to sloppiness or errors but to how the lists are tallied and organized. (The people who maintain the lists and gather the information are invariably diligent and scrupulous, combining a librarian's quiet zeal with a statistician's respect for figures.) None of the lists use the actual nationwide sales figures from all outlets because no objective source gathers such figures. Instead, each one uses a sampling of sales from selected retailers, much the way pollsters use surveys of a segment of a population to estimate the opinions of the larger group. Some samples include more retailers than others, but none of them can cover the entire market.
For example, the New York Times, still the most famous and influential list, gathers information from large chain stores, bookstores, online venues, department stores, supermarkets and independent sellers to come up with its weekly list, using a statistically weighted formula that's as secret and closely guarded as the recipe for Coca-Cola. Publishers Weekly, the industry standard, has a similar process that taps its own selection of retailers and outlets. The Wall Street Journal, however, surveys only large sellers (no independent bookstores). USA Today uses figures from a variety of large and independent booksellers and other book retailers. Some major newspapers -- such as the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and others -- poll only local booksellers.
Also, each reporting source has its own way of breaking down and organizing the information, which means that some record overall sales without distinguishing categories (USA Today, with an additional section recording business book sales), while others break the list into fiction, nonfiction/general and business (the Wall Street Journal) or into a myriad of categorical derivations, such as hardcover fiction and nonfiction, trade paperback, advice, religious, children, etc. (BookScan is the king of derivations, able to supply its subscribers with 800 different lists.)
