
The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong - gruseom
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/07/26/editors-note/
======
peterlk
Here's how "Best Sellers" become a thing:

Publishers count the number of books they sell.

This seems pretty simple, right? It is, but as a consequence, easily gamed.
Publishers don't sell to you and me, they sell to book stores. So, you create
some marketing to get people to preorder your book from a lots of different
book stores. Book sellers inform the number of copies based, in part, on
preorder numbers. There are ways that you can get book stores to order many
more books than there is demand for by fraudulently (not sure if it's legally
fraudulent, but maybe?) pre-ordering books, and stocking shelves with books
that no one ever picks up. But boom, there you go - best seller.

If you want to cut out the middle man, and you're rich enough, you can just
_be_ the middle man. Buy all the books from the publisher, and resell them.
The publisher still gets their money, so they don't care. Again, now you have
a best-seller.

And then, of course, there are legitimate sales that the best seller lists
market themselves as measuring.

Book sellers don't want to be stuck with unsold inventory, so there's
something of an arms race between book sellers and publishers/authors.

After seeing this game first-hand, I no longer believe anything on a best-
seller list. As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear
whether this problem will be addressed or not. The system can still be gamed,
especially if it's run by algorithms.

So, basically, I'd argue that it doesn't matter whether WaPo is "right" or not
because the input data is likely of poor quality anyways.

~~~
greedo
Book sellers are rarely stuck with unsold inventory. They almost always have
the ability to send unsold inventory (though not magazines) back to the
publisher for full credit.

~~~
pessimizer
To remainder paperbacks, instead of sending the entire book back for credit
they'd rip off the covers, send those instead, and dumpster the book. I don't
know if they do this anymore. When I grew up in the 80s, I read an enormous
number of coverless books:)

~~~
themattress
This was SOP for me when I worked as the receiver in a supermarket from
~2007-2011.

It’s a shame, I must have thrown thousands and thousands of books away,
instead of donating them to a library or something.

But then again, I guess the library would only accept so many copies of the
same nascar-themed trashy romance novel.

------
hirundo
Kudos to the Post for attempting to produce an objective list. The New York
Times doesn't:

> In other words, The New York Times best-seller list is not a best-seller
> list -- which even The New York Times once acknowledged. In the early 1980s,
> William Peter Blatty, author of the monumental best-seller "The Exorcist,"
> sued The New York Times for only listing his novel on the list one time,
> even though it sold in the millions. In defending itself before the court,
> as reported by Book History, the annual journal of The Society for the
> History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (Penn State University Press),
> The Times said, "The list did not purport to be an objective compilation of
> information but instead was an editorial product."

[https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-...](https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-
new-york-times-bestseller-list-another-reason-americans-dont-trust-the-
media-n2471554)

~~~
trentnix
Does that apply to the rest of paper as well?

~~~
jammygit
Not sure why the downvotes. If a news provider can’t promise to try to tell
the truth in a legally binding way, but just claims to be editorializing, it’s
no wonder there is so much public distrust of the news.

~~~
chillwaves
> If a news provider can’t promise to try to tell the truth in a legally
> binding way

which news provider does this?

~~~
spikels
You see the point then...

------
ilamont
These lists can be manipulated. There was a case a few years back involving
bogus bookstore sales of Lani Sarem’s "Handbook for Mortals" to trick the New
York Times:

 _Stamper and other YA writers, including Jeremy West, began to investigate.
Stamper shared messages he had received from bookshop staff who said they had
been contacted to see if their store was an NYT-reporting shop – the paper’s
lists are collated from information supplied by a confidential group of stores
– before a bulk order was placed. Another bookshop shared similar information
with West, while Publishers Weekly reported that a shop outside Las Vegas had
a customer who ordered 87 copies after learning it was an NYT-reporting shop._

(Source: [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-
for-m...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-mortals-
by-lani-sarem-pulled-from-nyt-bestsellers-list))

I'm also skeptical of data from Amazon, whose KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited
ebook platform is notorious for scams designed to ensure rank or extra payouts
for authors. See [http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-
nee...](http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-
know/) for an explanation of how one scam worked, and the HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212).

~~~
rosser
A friend used to work for an organization whose function was to buy books from
NYT-reporting sellers for purposes of inflating the sales numbers of a given
title, to manipulate it onto the bestseller list. They were usually paid by
the publishers, but sometimes directly by the authors themselves.

This has been going on for a very long time.

EDIT: Phrasing.

~~~
rsj_hn
WOW, can I ask what the most common genre was?

~~~
rosser
I didn't ask, but in the conversations we had on the topic, I never got the
sense that was a thing that mattered to them.

------
pwinnski
The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed?

If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies
with other lists during that time.

~~~
Someone1234
I misread it the first time as one month (May->June) but it was May 2018 to
June 2019(!).

------
twerkinggumby
They should just get rid of bestseller lists. They exist purely for marketing
and for tricking chumps into buying mediocre books.

~~~
adeelk93
Discovery is challenging, how would you propose finding something new to read?

~~~
dlivingston
A lot of influential figures publish their reading lists, like Bill Gates [0],
Elon Musk [1], and Patrick Collision [2]

[0]: [https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-
Books-201...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-2019)

[1]: [https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-
book-h...](https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-he-
mentioned-on-twitter-with-tweets-aee4361f3513)

[2]:
[https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf](https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf)

~~~
chc
That seems like an even more questionable tool for deciding what to read than
a best-seller list. Those guys are renowned for starting tech companies that
made lots of money, not for their outstanding taste in books.

~~~
NicoJuicy
They are also very smart, which made them read/like interesting books.

If they read books ofc, in these cases they obviously do

~~~
gingabriska
>They are also very smart, which made them read/like interesting books.

This logic doesn't take us anywhere because there existed equally intelligent
people who either worked in farm or meatshop or even might be working as a
janitor instead of launching companies worth billions and recommending othes
books.

And does being intelligent means not being evil? What if they posted these
books to distract you while they go around reading something else which helps
them build competitive advantage against masses.

I won't blind accept a reading suggestion from someone even if they happen to
be commerically successful or they happen to be smarter.

~~~
NicoJuicy
So people post book reviews to distract you from doing something. Lol.

I still have a bigger respect for people that started a multi billion dollar
company than a janitor. It doesn't mean I have no respect for them, but just a
bigger one for someone that did something unique.

------
camillomiller
That’s securities fraud

~~~
rocqua
For which security?

~~~
camillomiller
I guess the joke wasn’t clear enough:
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/a...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-
everywhere-is-securities-fraud)

~~~
rocqua
I actually wondered whether it was a reference to Matt Levine. Does literally
every HN reader also read his news-letter?

