What actually qualifies as a best seller? I feel the word is used so much it has become all but meaningless to us regular peeps who don’t really know how the metrics are counted.
But what it means is not as important as what the marketers, the salesmen, the ad folks want you to believe.
Having a bestseller is almost like being selected for inclusion on a 30 under 30 list.
It's nice. And it's impressive to some people. But it's also relative. Someone included in the 30 under 30 list for LA is probably an order more influential that someone included in the 30 under 30 list for Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The objective part, and the thing all bestseller lists have in common is that being included on a bestseller list means your book sold x number of copies in a specific time frame.
The New York Times updates the bestseller list weekly, which means to stay on the NYT bestseller list you need to outsell the other books in your category each week.
Or we can take Amazon.
To be the #1 selling book in the Intelligence and Espionage category on Amazon you need to sell 111 books per day.
To be the #1 selling book in the Professional & Academic Biographies category on Amazon you need to sell 757 books per day.
However if your book is #10 on the the Professional & Academic Biographies genre/category list or #9 on the Intelligence and Espionage genre/category list it's still a bestseller for that category.
We used to have a term that meant your book outsold every single other book in the country. That book was the New York Times #1 Bestselling Book. But once the marketers discovered that simply making that claim caused a book to sell more books, they started plastering that on every book that made it to #1 in its own genre or category.
Being a bestseller doesn't necessarily mean your book is selling well. It just means your book is selling better than all the other books in that category.
You can be a bestseller if your book is selling 5 copies a day, and all the other books in your category are only selling 1 copy a day.
FYI, so you can orient yourself, most books don't sell more than 1000 copies across the lifetime of the title.
Any book that has sold thousands of copies is an outlier.
Books that have sold millions of copies are incredibly rare. Which is why their authors are held in such high regard.
That is fascinating! Thank you SO MUCH for taking the time to explain in detail. It's something I have always wanted to understand but never got around to reading up on.
Yeah to me intuitively it feels like when you say 'bestseller' it should mean number 1 in that category, but it feels like there's just way too many of them for that to be the metric... So did I understand correctly that you don't necessarily need to be in first place for your category to be termed a bestseller today? It's enough to be in the top ten? Or is it that you have to have been no. 1 for some period, no matter how brief?
What actually qualifies as a best seller? I feel the word is used so much it has become all but meaningless to us regular peeps who don’t really know how the metrics are counted.
It's not meaningless.
It means something.
But what it means is not as important as what the marketers, the salesmen, the ad folks want you to believe.
Having a bestseller is almost like being selected for inclusion on a 30 under 30 list.
It's nice. And it's impressive to some people. But it's also relative. Someone included in the 30 under 30 list for LA is probably an order more influential that someone included in the 30 under 30 list for Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The objective part, and the thing all bestseller lists have in common is that being included on a bestseller list means your book sold x number of copies in a specific time frame.
The New York Times updates the bestseller list weekly, which means to stay on the NYT bestseller list you need to outsell the other books in your category each week.
Or we can take Amazon.
To be the #1 selling book in the Intelligence and Espionage category on Amazon you need to sell 111 books per day.
To be the #1 selling book in the Professional & Academic Biographies category on Amazon you need to sell 757 books per day.
However if your book is #10 on the the Professional & Academic Biographies genre/category list or #9 on the Intelligence and Espionage genre/category list it's still a bestseller for that category.
We used to have a term that meant your book outsold every single other book in the country. That book was the New York Times #1 Bestselling Book. But once the marketers discovered that simply making that claim caused a book to sell more books, they started plastering that on every book that made it to #1 in its own genre or category.
Being a bestseller doesn't necessarily mean your book is selling well. It just means your book is selling better than all the other books in that category.
You can be a bestseller if your book is selling 5 copies a day, and all the other books in your category are only selling 1 copy a day.
FYI, so you can orient yourself, most books don't sell more than 1000 copies across the lifetime of the title.
Any book that has sold thousands of copies is an outlier.
Books that have sold millions of copies are incredibly rare. Which is why their authors are held in such high regard.
That is fascinating! Thank you SO MUCH for taking the time to explain in detail. It's something I have always wanted to understand but never got around to reading up on.
Yeah to me intuitively it feels like when you say 'bestseller' it should mean number 1 in that category, but it feels like there's just way too many of them for that to be the metric... So did I understand correctly that you don't necessarily need to be in first place for your category to be termed a bestseller today? It's enough to be in the top ten? Or is it that you have to have been no. 1 for some period, no matter how brief?
I'm interested in reading the free ebook, but I'm not really sure I'm going to get there yet.
Appreciate you Michelle.
DM'd you the link.
Not ready for wide release just yet.