Readers of the Pack

Bookforum discusses the history of the American bestseller's list.

From the article...

Trends come and go, but the best seller remains essentially serendipitous. An editor can be no more certain of finding the next one than a writer can be assured of writing it. "As a rule of thumb," writes John Sutherland, an English scholar who has studied the phenomenon, "what defines the bestseller is bestselling. Nothing else."

The term best seller has always been a misnomer. Fast seller would be more appropriate, since the pace of sales matters as much as the quantity. The first list of books "in order of demand" was created in 1895 by Harry Thurston Peck, editor of the trade magazine The Bookman. Publishers Weekly started its own list in 1912, but others were slow to follow: The New York Times did not create its best-seller list until 1942. Now, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today also compile national lists, and each of the major regional papers has its own—all generated in slightly different ways. The Times bases its list on sales reports from around four thousand booksellers, which it declines to name (a column by the paper's public editor a few years ago said only that they change constantly). The Wall Street Journal used to track only sales in major chain stores but now bases its rankings on data from Nielsen BookScan, an authoritative industry source that includes as many as three-quarters of the nation's bookstores, around eleven thousand. IndieBound surveys only independent bookstores. Amazon.com offers its own list, updated every hour, but—like all the others—it is based on orders, not actual sales (since returns are not taken into account). Thus a writer with a carefully timed marketing blitz can push his book to a relatively high Amazon ranking for a day or so, allowing him to claim that it was, say, a "top ten Amazon best seller." The system's vulnerability to manipulation has resulted in the perception that, as Eliza Truitt wrote in Slate, the term best seller on the cover of a book means "about as much as the phrase 'original recipe' does on a jar of spaghetti sauce."