– By Wendy Nelles
You’ve gotta understand algorithms to understand Amazon’s best-seller lists
In yet another example of how the publishing industry is changing dramatically, the ability to electronically and instantly track sales of books ordered online has greatly impacted best-seller lists.
Traditionally, best-seller lists were based on sales from previous weeks at bricks-and-mortar stores. It’s always been an inexact science, and often accused of gross subjectivity due to the sample of retailers chosen to represent sales, the types of “literary” books deemed to be worthy of being included, or the inaccuracy of data gathering.
As this article in Slate explains it, the use of the word “best-seller” is almost meaningless, because neither the government nor the publishing industry regulates the use of the term, and there are many different lists based on different criteria. Eliza Truitt writes, “What is a best-seller list? It is a ranking of the relative sales of particular kinds of books at certain groups of stores within a one-week period. Best-seller lists tell us not which books sell the most, in absolute terms, but which fiction, nonfiction, or advice books sell the fastest at the bookstores list makers think deserve attention.”
For example, many best-seller charts don’t track genres such as romance fiction, sci-fi, cookbooks or children’s books, or back list titles, classics or mass market paperbacks. A Harlequin novel may outsell the latest Margaret Atwood novel, but we don’t hear about it. Until recently, books sold primarily through Christian bookstore channels were not included in mainstream media’s best-seller lists. This resulted in such oddities as Canadian inspirational fiction pioneer Janette Oke rarely – if ever – appearing on a major best-seller list, despite selling 27 million-plus copies of her 75 books starting in 1979. Consequently, Oke was pretty much ignored by Canadian secular media, while other authors selling far fewer volumes of a more literary nature in more prestigious stores were feted.
Mainstream media paid little attention to books selling through religious bookstores until the unprecedented sales figures of the fictional Left Behind series, and the non-fiction mega-sellers Prayer of Jabez and The Purpose Driven Life. Ironically, that very success and multi-million dollar business pushed Christian booksellers into a downward spiral — as large mainstream retailers such as Barnes and Noble, Costco and Walmart suddenly got interested in skimming off the best-sellers, at steep discounts that Christian booksellers couldn’t match.
In the past, publishers themselves did guesstimates, and oftentimes inflated the sales numbers, or announced the number printed rather than the number actually sold. It is extremely complex to track exact sales figures if a book goes through various editions, has hard cover and paperback versions, has different publishers for different English-language versions for U.S., Canadian, British and Australian markets, has been translated into other languages, has had a lot of unsold copies returned to the publisher, has been remaindered, or if the original publisher has been absorbed by a multi-national media conglomerate. For books in the public domain, including many of the classics such as those by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, it is impossible to know how many copies were sold over decades or centuries.
In 2001, the Neilson ratings people introduced Bookscan, an expensive service that uses the bar codes to tally cash register sales from American chains such as Barnes and Noble, Borders, Costco and Amazon — but not from smaller, independent retailers. Bookscan estimates the database captures about 75 percent of sales for typical hardcover books. An interesting article in Slate by Daniel Gross explains that while we have accurate figures for box office movie ticket sales or album sales, “Still, there’s at least one sector where we lack reliable and transparent market data: books.”
Ironically, even though best-seller lists always have been sketchy and subjective, they act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Books deemed to be best-sellers get more publicity and better shelf placement, get picked up more by browsers, generate more buzz, get discounted more, and consequently drive more sales. Buyers think, “Well, if everyone else is buying this book, I guess it must be good, so I’ll buy it too.”
Ever wondered how the online bookseller Amazon’s best-seller list works? The rankings for categories change hourly, so how many sales are required to make a book spike upward?
MSNBC.com posted an informative article on August 10 titled “Secrets of the Amazon best-seller list: A not-so-pretty peek inside the obsession of every author” by Marion Maneker.
As you’ll see in the article, even Amazon’s electronically-tracked best-seller list is not strictly objective. It is based on a series of weighted averages, so that recent sales are weighed more heavily than older sales. Like other best-seller lists, it seems to report on momentum rather than actual total sales.
Here’s how the article opens:
It’s almost a philosophical riddle: Do sales drive the best-seller list, or do best-sellers get all the sales because buyers see them on the list? As much as we’d like to believe that the crowd picks the best books, a strong presence in retail locations — front-of-store positioning and tempting discounts — still counts a great deal in determining how well a title sells.
Nonetheless, authors are in it for the glory, and the visibility and bragging rights of being a “best-seller” retains the glamour of years past.
In the old days, the New York Times best-seller list meant everything. But it doesn’t come out until weeks after the sales take place, and it only updates on Sunday. Today’s author needs a better, faster sounding board. And she’s found it in Amazon’s unblinking sales rank, the 24-hour barometer of book sales. Indeed, it’s a rare author with self-control who, as soon as the book is published, doesn’t obsessively check the list these days, which is updated every hour.
Yet for all that, few people understand how the Amazon list works or its relative importance in the publishing industry. Amazon’s method of ranking books remains something of a black box with the fancy word algorithm used to describe it.
Let’s look at an extreme version of what a writer can be today. The best writers take an active, entrepreneurial role in their book sales. Publishing is filled with success stories that began as self-publishing miracles…
Read the rest of the article here.
