What, exactly, is a bestselling book?
When you hear someone call themselves a bestselling author or describe their book as a bestseller, it sounds impressive, but it’s often not very descriptive. The label “bestselling” could apply to your book meeting a myriad of different criteria. It could be an Amazon bestseller, which has its own standards, or it could be a New York Times bestseller, which is something different altogether. So in order to determine if you want to pursue a bestseller campaign, you first need to identify which kind of bestseller you want to be and then realistically assess if you can actually pull it off.
Bestsellers fall into two general buckets: weekly bestsellers and hourly bestsellers. And each has their own different categories.
Weekly Bestsellers
Weekly bestsellers are the creme de la creme of bestseller lists. The most prestigious among them is the New York Times list, but they also include the Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly, the LA Times, and more. Amazon has also recently launched their own weekly lists called “Amazon Charts”, which are calculated more like the other weekly lists than their category-based bestseller lists (see below). While each of these lists uses their own, secret algorithm to calculate which books make the cut, and each focuses on different genre classifications, they all have some universal characteristics.
First off, they are calculated on a (you guessed it) weekly basis. That means that they are looking at the total sales a book has over an entire week. One important thing to remember about these weekly lists is that the time that matters most is when the book is shipped, not when it is purchased. For example, if a book is pre-ordered in May, but shipped when the book goes live in the first week of September, the sale will count in September, not in May. This is a crucial wrinkle to understand if you’re trying to “bank” a lot of pre-orders to use for a weekly bestseller campaign at launch.
The other defining characteristic of these weekly lists is that they are not simply based on sales. They also take into account how these sales are distributed. For example, geographic distribution is important, and most weekly lists want to see strong sales in regions across the country. Most weekly lists also want to see sales coming from a wide variety of sales platforms, both on and offline. That means if a book only sells thousands of copies through Amazon, and has light sales in bookstores, it won’t rank on the weekly lists.
What’s the point of all this? Bestseller lists want to maintain the integrity of their brand, and there have been many authors and bestseller companies who try to game the system and essentially “buy” or “hack” their way onto bestseller lists. The thinking goes that if a book is selling across all regions and platforms, it must be an authentic bestseller.
Of course, it’s possible to hack those criteria as well, but there are further protections for that. Namely, most of the weeklies are editorialized. That means a person (or team of people) is reviewing all the sales and distribution data and then making a choice about which books are actually bestselling in their expert opinion. On one hand, this is a good thing because it helps them to protect the integrity of the list by “spotting” books that are trying to game the system. On the other hand, it makes it harder for “unknown” authors and books to make a splash onto a list in their first week.
For example, I ran a Wall Street Journal bestseller campaign several years ago for an author who had never been on a bestseller list before. Even though we had the third highest sales among business books (which the Wall St Journal focuses on) that week, and those sales were distributed widely across regions and platforms, we didn’t make the list! Above us were a bunch of books that were either written by famous authors and/or had been on the lists for many weeks prior. Lesson? Weekly list editors will assume that a spike in sales from an unknown author that is seemingly out of nowhere, must be gaming the system. And if you’re self-publishing (rather than going with a traditional publisher), your chances of being editorialized off the list are even greater.
Finally, weekly lists require a lot more sales than the hourlies. In order to make one of the New York Times’ bestseller lists, for example you’ll need to sell anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 copies in any given week. And like I said above, you’re still not guaranteed to make it. In the Wall St. Journal campaign I mentioned above, we sold over 8,000 copies in one week and didn’t make a list where #1 had sold 12,000 that week and #10 had sold 1,500. The bottom line is that if you want to outcompete the other books in your genre, you’ll need to sell thousands of books in a very short period of time. And even if you’re one of the top selling books in that period, you could still miss the list.
Hourly (AKA Amazon) Bestsellers
In all honesty, this category should really be called “Amazon bestsellers,” because they are the primary platform that calculates bestsellers on an hourly basis. Barnes & Noble also does this, but they are a distant second to Amazon when it comes to online sales, so for the purposes of this blog, we’re going to focus on the house that Mr. Bezos built.
Most of the blogs and buzz about how to run a bestseller campaign these days is focused on Amazon. Why? Becoming an Amazon bestseller is FAR easier than hitting one of the weekly lists. In fact, pretty much anyone can become a bestseller in one of Amazon’s myriad genre categories if they apply a little ingenuity and/or money. That’s why, I believe, that the Amazon bestseller label has become pretty watered down, and doesn’t have much value (and one of the reasons they have recently launched a weekly list called Amazon Charts). That said, if you hit a bestseller list of any kind, you can technically call yourself a bestselling author. So it could be worth it.
So what is an Amazon bestseller? It essentially means that your book is in the top ten in any Amazon category at any given time (they update their rankings every hour). Being in the top ten isn’t a technical requirement; it’s more of a generally accepted industry guideline. The best way for me to explain it is to show you:
- Go to the main page for Amazon bestsellers. Here you’ll see a list of all the “overall” bestselling books on Amazon right now (calculated hourly). In this main category, every single genre is included, so it’s more difficult to be in the top one hundred here than in a more specific category.
- Now click on one of the general categories on the left side of the screen. Let’s go with Health, Fitness & Dieting for fun. Now you’ll see a new, more specific list of all bestsellers in this smaller category.
- But what makes Amazon bestsellers so easy to achieve is that you can keep drilling down into more subcategories. Let’s choose Exercise and Fitness. Another list of bestsellers, this time from an even smaller pool of competitors.
- We can now one more level down to Yoga and we’ve hit the “smallest” possible category of bestsellers.
So your book has a chance to be a bestseller in every layer of this Amazon onion, starting at “Overall” and working all the way down to Yoga. That’s four different lists you can make. What’s more is that you can enter your book into up to ten different subcategories!
And like I said before, you really only have to be in the top ten at any level in any given hour, which requires only a handful of sales. For example, here’s a list from one of our clients’ campaigns outlining how many hourly sales on average it requires to be #1 or #10 in any given category. You can see that for the smaller categories, you only need to sell 15 books in an hour!
A note about ebooks vs print books. For both weekly and Amazon bestseller categories, ebook and print books are counted separately. This will affect your strategy for trying to get on the lists, because you’re usually going to want your marketing efforts to focus on one or the other.
We’ll go into more detail about how to actually run a bestseller campaign lower down in the article, but first let’s talk about the benefits.
