Well, that’s the thing. The bestseller lists titled with the four permutations of hardcover and paperback, fiction and nonfiction certainly carry the implication of covering the waterfront. Any book that’s sold would seemingly fall into one of those four categories.
If they want to do specialty lists such as kid-lit or self-help books too, that’s great. Otherwise, you’d never know what the #7 bestseller amongst kid-lit was unless you went looking for the info.
Seems like if they want a bestseller list for Serious Literature, without including Harry Potter, Left Behind, and other stuff that sells well but that they don’t like, then they can construct a special list for Serious Literature.
But the four basic lists carry the implication of all-inclusiveness, and they shouldn’t deceptively exclude the occasional book based on what editors find annoying.
I’m a Times Select subscriber. Or was, I guess, now that they’ve decided to give it away for free.
No they don’t. They don’t make a separate list for “Romance” when Danielle Steele is populating the list. Or “Brain Dead Shit to Take to the Beach” when James Patterson is on there. It’s not a list for Serious Literature at all, and “Children’s Literature” has always been a major category of fiction. . .The Newberry Medal goes back to 1922.
They also have a “business list” and an “advice” (self help) list. People want to buy books in these categories, just like they want to buy “children’s books”. Again, they’re not the keeper of the Box Office for books. You can find that at Amazon, or USA Today, or probably a million other places. It really seems to come down to the fact that people don’t want HP called “Children’s Literature”.
And it seems that authors and publishers of children’s books seem quite happy that they have a children’s list. . .
Trunk, the NYTimes never had a separate cildren’s list until after the HP books starting crowding out the usual Danielle Steele garbage from the regular fiction lists.
The people who were being defensive were the publishing companies and the shitty, hack novelists who who couldn’t stand being dominated by a children’s writer. I find it annoying that the list no longer tells me what the bestselling fiction books are but only an arbitrary selected sampling of titles they want to help the publishers move off the shelves. It’s not a source of information anymore, it’s just a commercial.
There are a lot of problems with the NYT lists, but I wouldn’t say that having a children’s literature list is one of the big ones.
Lots of books aren’t considered suitable for the main lists, or else are underrepresentative because they aren’t counted properly.
Cookbooks, almanacs, textbooks, travel guides, bibles, computer manuals and others are officially eliminated. Christian bookstores are not well-sampled. Specialty subject bookstores are not well-sampled.
Normally, children’s books are a universe separate from that of regular adult trade fiction. It’s true that Harry Potter became a spectacular exception to that, but I’d argue that it’s better to have a regular ongoing list for children’s literature that has continuity than to see Harry Potter popping up once a year. And don’t forget that Harry Potter is dead and gone but the children’s list will continue. That’s a better thing for children’s books than seeing Harry Potter top the regular trade fiction list.
The usual reason why there are special bestseller lists for things like children’s books is because books in those categories generally don’t attain bestseller status by the standards of the overall lists, but a fair number of people would still like to know what the bestsellers are within that limited category.
But that doesn’t negate the fact that such categories are subsets of fiction or nonfiction as the case may be, and ISTM that if their sales rank them amongst the overall bestsellers, then they should be on the list of overall bestsellers.
In an era like this one where everything’s tracked electronically, ISTM that the necessity of sampling has long since passed. One way or another, they should be able to obtain essentially complete counts.
I didn’t say they did. And all the more reason for them not to make a special list for Harry Potter. If they can include Danielle Steele, they’ve got a lot of nerve to ghettoize J.K. Rowling.
And romance, mysteries, westerns, F&SF, and others are also major categories.
So because something falls in a major category, it should be excluded from the seemingly all-inclusive category? Of course not. Should we pick and choose which major categories should be excluded? That seems even sillier, not to mention more arbitrary.
That’s fine. But plenty of ‘business’ bestsellers have made the nonfic bestseller lists. Did the NYT keep “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” off the nonfic list? I bet not.
Then why don’t they call their list “The ten currently popular paperback nonfiction books we like the most,” with no reference to box-office? The rankings are all about box-office. Except for the occasional stuff that they don’t want to show up on the rankings.
They can be the Box Office Keeper or not, as they damned well please. The problem I have is their having a list that gives every appearance of being the BOK, and more or less is, but with a few arbitrary exceptions.
How do you know that’s a fact? I sure don’t have a problem with it. Lots of good books are kid-lit, from Alice in Wonderland through Winnie the Pooh through A Wrinkle in Time right up to the Harry Potter septet.
Of course they are. Most of the books on that list don’t have a prayer of showing up on the overall list, so the ghettoizing is a plus for them.