I was visiting my Mom the other week and the topic came up regarding what the importance of books being “New York Times Bestsellers”. As a regular reader and lover of the New York Times, I wasn’t able to give her any factual background. The topic intrigued me, so I decided to do some homework.
It goes without saying that the New York Times newspaper wields tremendous power and prestige and is considered one of the world’s most respected newspapers since its inception in 1851. In 1896, the paper introduced a Book Review section and the Bestseller List was introduced in 1941 and has been published on a weekly basis ever since. It began as having Fiction and Non-Fiction, but eventually added categories of Advice/How-To, Children’s, and others. Appearance on the Bestseller List is a virtual guarantee of success for most books and increases sales and publicity for the book, the author and the publisher.
Unlike many other bestseller lists, the New York Times list reflects sales in independent and national bookstores that specialize in selling books and disregards all sales from mass-market department stores in their calculation of numbers of books sold. The appearance or lack of appearance on the New York Times list can be misleading as the sales are tracked week by week, so books that sell quickly (due to advance orders, store placement, advertising, publicity, etc.) often rate higher than books that have higher but slower sales over a longer period of time.
In years past, there was some prejudice with bookstores to carry self-published books which made it more difficult for these books to appear on the New York Times Bestseller List and others. This was due, in no small part, to the confusion of self-publishing with vanity publishing, where an author pays an exorbitant fee to publishers to print their work. With the advent of print-on-demand and e-books, self-published authors have the same chance to make the Bestseller List as books published by the major publishing companies. The broad acceptance of electronic and self-published books is evidenced by The New York Times carrying a section in its weekly Bestseller List for both Fiction and Non-Fiction E-Books.
It’s exciting to see that the playing field has been leveled so that the game is fair for all, whether published or self-published authors. Many authors chose to self-publish, not because they had been turned down by publishing companies, but to retain control of their books and make more money. Some of the books and authors that started out self-publishing were: What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles (over 6 million copies sold and spent 288 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List), In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters (over 10 millions copies sold), The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (over 5 million copies sold), The One-Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson (over 12 million copies sold), The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans, and A Time to Kill by John Grisham.
As inspiring as the success of all of these books is, the most impressive story for me is that of my business partner at Ink Tree Marketing, Denise Hamilton, for the successful publishing, printing and marketing of her book, Fit to Cook, and selling over 250,000 copies through both traditional and non-traditional markets.
Bestsellers are within everyone’s grasp, with books that are well-written, timely, offer something of value to the reader, and are well published, promoted and marketed. Learn from the experiences of others and create the bestseller that lies within you!
Linda L. Matthie
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