Johnson: What's fact and fiction about bestseller lists

Moby Lives

Posted: Sunday, July 22, 2001

   I could be wrong about this, but it's my contention that few people outside the book business pay much attention to bestseller lists. Most of us don't see reading as a competitive business, and, let's face it, the typical bestseller is a tacky book.

   

Dennis Loy

Johnson

MobyLives

more Johnson columns

Not always, I know -- right now, for example, ''The Metaphysical Club'' is on most lists. It's a 500-pager about the birth of the pragmatist school of philosophy in 19th-century Boston. Does that sound like a typical bestseller to you?

   Probably not, because a ''bestseller'' is more normally one of three things: a how-to -- usually, either about how to more efficiently grub for money or how to lose weight while eating without pause; a memoir by somebody really despicable; or a barely-literate thriller where gruesome things happen to people while they're having sex just after drinking brand-name beverages.

   God knows who buys those books in sufficient numbers to get them bestseller status, but there you have it: the typical bestseller list -- and there are many -- does not paint a pretty picture of literate America. Which is one reason I'd just as soon ignore them.

   Another is I don't really believe them.

   After all, do you know how they come up with, say, The New York Times Bestseller List, the most influential of them all?

   Me neither. In fact, how lists are compiled is always a closely-guarded secret. All the list-concocters ever reveal is that they call some local stores (they won't say which ones), ask what's selling (without asking for proof), and utilize a secret formula whereby they give more weight to sales from bigger stores.

   In other words, they make an educated guess. And there's no reason to think it's a very good one, either. Which is why, behind the scenes, there's always grumbling about the accuracy of the major bestseller lists by those with a stake in them.

   So you would think that if there was a way to calculate which books were the real, honest-to-gosh top sellers, people in the business would be happy.

   You would think wrong. Recently, the BookScan company announced it had a way to do exactly that, and the industry hasn't been particularly happy about it.

   The company -- owned by the same Dutch conglomerate, VNU, that owns SoundScan, which compiles sales figures for the music industry -- announced it had put together a system for collecting sales data from bookstore cash registers across the country, including those of Borders, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, both Barnes & Noble and Barnesandnoble.com, Costco, Target and even some independents, which they'll make available for a fee.

   ''Sounds satanic,'' literary agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh told The New York Times. ''Something like that could actually be the death of some kinds of literary darlings -- when you try to sell the next book, the perception of their sales would be, frankly, so true to life that it would prevent people from looking at the big picture, that a book is prestigious or has prize potential or is well reviewed or something.''

   Equally threatened are ''publishers that have overpaid for books that bomb,'' noted Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick.

   And beyond the threat to authors, agents and publishers, there's the threat to the institutions that run ''the influential process of anointing best sellers'' -- i.e., publications such as The Times, USA Today and Publishers Weekly.

   But at least one publisher, James Atlas, who runs the ''Penguin Lives'' biography series, thinks BookScan is great. In a New York Times op-ed piece, he scoffed at those who said BookScan would ''result in a flood of commercial titles . . . dumbing down a business already threatened by the proliferation of chains that encourage homogenization.'' He noted, instead, that ''SoundScan helped open up the music business'' to the realization that independent labels had big sales.

   Of course, Atlas' piece appeared just days after The Los Angeles Times reported that ''a coterie of consultants and merchants from Los Angeles to New York . . . have developed a system to distort sales numbers that are reported to SoundScan.'' Apparently, it wasn't too hard, either: the scheme consisted of ''swiping a CD numerous times across a scanning machine to falsely boost sales figures.''

   None of which makes me feel more secure about bestseller lists of the future. But accepting the peer pressure of bestseller lists in the first place only reminds me of my father's long-ago advice: ''You gonna jump off a cliff just because everyone else is?''

    Visit the MobyLives Web site at www.mobylives.com.

   

This article published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Sunday, July 22, 2001.



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