If ypu go to any book store you will find a pile of pocket books that usually have almost the same plot nerdy normal guy goes for a normal assignment on his job, meets girl, ends up solving huge crime, runs away from bad guys, kills big bad guy. At least it seems to be a constant plot on Dan Brown’s books.
What makes me kinda curious is that many of those books have a #1 New York Times best seller written on top of it. MANY books. In fact, most of those books seem to have been at least once the number one best seller from new York times. Is that really a big deal?
It’s kind of like asking about a #1 pop song or a #1 Hollywood movie - it’s a huge deal from the standpoint of how well the book has sold, and extremely difficult to accomplish (think of how many books are out there for sale in any given week), but it doesn’t necessarily reflect on the book’s literary quality…look here and you will see that certain popular authors tend to dominate the list, meaning their books are that much more heavily marketed (even in places like Brazil), tending to perpetuate the cycle.
I’m not sure how true it is anymore, with Amazon, but at one point, if a book wasn’t an automatic choice of The Book of the Month Club, it couldn’t get one of the top places, like 1,2 or 3, the a few other influential book clubs like Mystery Guild, with automatic selections, came along, and propelled some other books to the top.
You got a card in the mail every month, and you had to return it if you didn’t want the book. Tens of thousands of titles got distributed this way every month because people forgot to send the card. It didn’t mean they read the book, and may have been only vaguely aware of the fact that they owned a copy, but it contributed to the numbers.
A catchy title helps. As Haruki Murakami pointed out, if your book is titled “Eat as much as you like of whatever you want and lose weight”, it will be a best seller, even if the pages inside are blank.
Nitpick: none of Dan Brown’s novels involve the nerdy guy going for "normal assignments on his (or her, in the case of Deception Point) job. Or killing any bad guys.
Yes. I’ve read all his books. Yes, I am ashamed. No, I can’t stop.
The simplest and most realistic explanation is observation bias. You’ve looked at a bestseller section of a store, which - surprise - gathers together bestsellers, overskewing their frequency.
Add to that the fact that there are many NYTimes bestsellers lists, not just one. In fact, there are seventeen.
RivkahChaya. Book club sales were always specifically excluded from every bestseller list I am aware of. Certainly from the Times’.
The Times used to flag books which had mass purchases like this, but I haven’t seen that for a while, so maybe now they just eliminate those sales.
It doesn’t have to be a cheat - sometimes CEOs or their companies buy lots of books to give out. But it is still misleading.
I agree this is observational bias. But except in rare cases, best sellers are books which their publishers have decided can be best sellers. They market it to the bookstores, perhaps give promotional allowances to get placement at the front of the store, push the books in the media, and send the authors out on book tours. It doesn’t always work, but a book marketed this way has a lot more chance of becoming a best seller than a mid-list book. And when it becomes a best seller it goes to the best seller table where you see it, and have more chance of buying it. I’m sure some people buy best sellers just to keep up.
You can also use a charity you control to pay a ‘marketing’ firm to buy many copies of your book, in order to make the bestseller list. This may not turn out well for you if you’re caught doing it, particularly if that charity does not have marketing your book as one of its stated purposes.
Due to the immense variability of sales of books, getting onto a best seller list doesn’t take all that much in sales. Very, very few books sell well. So, just separating your book from the herd is all it takes in many cases.
Once on a best seller list, then sometimes things cascade and the book sells and sells. (Which is why just making the list in the first place is important.) And that then helps the sales of the author’s later books.
A recent example of how ludicrous the book market is is the example of Outlander (a.k.a. Cross Stitch), which as recently as a week ago was number 1 on the NYT fiction list. This was a book released in 1991. The new Starz! series generated enough interest for it to become the top seller. It’s not so much that it’s an immense hit, but that most everything else isn’t.
The very small number of really huge sellers tends to distort things, in some people’s opinions. E.g., certain snobs got upset about the Harry Potter books hogging the top spot so the NYT declared it to not be an adult fiction book (despite having a huge adult audience) and so were shuffled off the list.