As you can see our Halloween Guest Author is none other than Julie Anne Long! Congratulations to Kat who was the first to guess correctly! Now if you didn’t win yesterdays contest don’t give up! If you comment on either of Julie’s topics your name will be dropped into a hat for a drawing! So post away!!

Gather round, children. I’m going to tell you a story.

Once upon a time, two (this is all hypothetical, mind you) historical romance titles—let’s call them STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT (a print run of 200,000) and A NIGHT FULL OF STRANGERS (a smaller print run of 75,000)— written by two different authors, were released by two different publishers during the same month. Both books were showered with unanimously ecstatic reviews, and both went on to rack up very respectable 65% sell-through rates (the percentage of a book’s total print run actually sold) —a publisher-pleasing figure, indeed. To ice the cake, both books were subsequently nominated for a whole slew of awards. All in all, by anyone’s definition, both books were resounding successes, and both authors (and their friends and family and publishers and agents) should be pleased and proud.

But here’s where their destinies diverged: One of those books appeared both on both the Nielsen BookScan and USA Today bestseller lists. The other book didn’t appear on any bestseller list.

Care to hazard a guess which one became the bestseller?

A NIGHT FULL OF STRANGERS. Yep. The book with the smaller print run.

If this seems counterintuitive, welcome to the world of publishing.

It all begins to make a little more sense, however, when you understand 1) the purpose of bestseller lists, and 2) how various bestseller lists are compiled.

In essence, a bestseller list (loosely defined as anywhere between 10-150 titles ranked by sales figures accrued during a particular timeframe, usually a week) such as those compiled by USA Today, Borders, Nielsen BookScan, or the New York Times are marketing tools invented either by booksellers as a means of promoting and selling books or by publications as a means of selling ad space. Publishers also happily use bestseller lists to promote titles—scan your bookshelf and note the prominence of the words “NYT Bestselling author” or “USA Bestselling Author” across the top of some of your favorite author’s books, and you’ll see what I mean.

Why is this marketing technique effective? Humans are social creatures, and studies done at Columbia University show that we tend to make decisions about what we like based on what other people like, whether we do it consciously or not. If a book is a “bestseller,” we tend to think it must be worth reading, since so many other people seem to have found it worth reading.

Authors, on the other hand, tend to view bestseller lists as goals—something we can “achieve”— and, whether or not we care to admit it, we also tend to view them as measures of our worth as authors.The problem with this is that the word “goal” implies something that can be gained through, say, hard work and focused effort and perhaps a series of defined steps— something controllable, in other words. After all, one becomes a piccolo virtuoso or an Olympic Equestrian or a Black Belt in karate or an MBA through application of consistent, determined, systematic effort.But such is the delightfully ambiguous nature of publishing that no amount of hard, ongoing, systematic work, nor unanimously stellar reviews, nor award nominations, nor copious self-promotion, nor those profoundly subjective factors “talent” and “quality”—will ensure an appearance on a bestseller list.

Here’s why:

The combined underlying factors influencing whether a book appears on a bestseller list such as BookScan or USA Today include the size of your print run, your distribution (where are your books are being sold?), sales velocity (how fast are they being sold?), consistency and timeliness in shipping (are your books being sold in bookstores a whole month ahead of release date by various retailers? Or are they shelved right on the date of release? Do they show up in stores late? Do they show up in stores at all?). And, because a bestseller list rank is determined relative to the ranks of other books, we need to factor in the distribution, print runs and lay down of all the other books released during the same timeframe as your book. It’s lovely if your reviews are good…but it isn’t imperative.

An ideal confluence of all of these factors might lead to your book’s triumphant appearance on a bestseller list. Then again, all of these factors are acutely sensitive to even the minutest changes, and one minor event might be the thing that either keeps your book off a list or launches it to bestseller list heights. And unless someone like Kelly Ripa spends airtime extolling the pleasures of your book, it’s nearly impossible to trace—or ever know—which event or events made the difference in either direction.

Let’s talk about some of the factors involved in bestseller list appearances. To understand how distribution affects bestseller lists, I’ll compare two bestseller lists, Nielsen BookScan (available by subscription) and USA Today (available online and in copies of USA Today). According to data passed on to my agent by a member of the Avon salesforce in 2004, most national and regional bookstore chains report sales to BookScan, but BookScan estimates—they guess, in other words—the sales for some booksellers, including one major chain and some independent bookstores. Online retailers like Amazon and B&N.com also report to Bookscan, as do Costco, Target and K-Mart. Significantly missing, however, are Wal-Mart, Sam’s, BJ’s, and all of the supermarkets, drugstores, etc., jobbed by Levy, Anderson News and the News Group, and so on. And Wal-Mart is an increasingly major player in mass market romance sales.

The USA Today list is compiled from sales reported by “4,700 independent, chain, discount and online booksellers,” among them Walmart. As of last year, according to a paragraph posted above USA Today’s online Top 150 list (which apparently no longer appears above the website list), the reporting stores included: Davis Kidd Booksellers (Tennessee), Doubleday Book Shops, Hudson Booksellers, Joseph-Beth Booksellers (Lexington, Ky.; Cincinnati), Little Professor Book Centers, Powell’s Books (Portland, Ore.), R.J. Julia Booksellers (Madison, Conn.), Scribner’s Bookstores, Tattered Cover Book Store (Denver), Waldenbooks, WordsWorth Books (Cambridge, Mass.), Amazon.com, B. Dalton Bookseller, Barnes & Noble.com, Barnes & Noble Inc., Books-A-Million and Bookland, Books & Co. (Dayton, Ohio), Borders Books & Music, Bookstar, Bookstop, Brentano’s, Schuler Books & Music (Grand Rapids, Mich.).

So some overlap exists between these two bestseller lists, and changes in accounts may occur, but significant differences remain between them. Depending upon what percentage of a book’s print run is distributed where (maybe your book is being sold at Borders but not Wal-Mart), a book may show up on the BookScan list but not on the USA Today list. It might show up on both lists. It might not show up on either list, even if sales are stellar and the print run large. And where and how an author’s print run is distributed varies author by author and publisher by publisher—and is continually subject to change based on an author’s sales history and other reasons unique to the publisher.

What about shipping and lay-down—in other words, when are your books showing up in stores and on shelves? These are the things that strongly influence sales velocity, and selling a lot of books in a short amount of time is how you make a bestseller list. But here’s the thing: you might know when your books are being shipped. Then again, you might not. Instead, anecdotal information might trickle in from a reader who was delighted to find your May release in her favorite bookstore…on April 5th. Or you might hear from readers who’ve tried desperately to find that May release in major bookstores and can’t—and it’s already May 20th. Or they might show up on the shelves the official day of release. Online retailers such as Amazon and B&N often ship early, too, but online sales constitute a very, very small percentage of overall romance sales. The reason for early shelving is that bookstores are, naturally, in the business of selling books. If a bookstore thinks they can sell a decent number of copies of your book and it’s sitting back there in the stockroom a few weeks ahead of its release date, odds are good they’ll put it out on the shelves. Other publishers seem able to exert a little more control over the preciseness of release date, but how this is accomplished remains a mystery, too. Anything can happen to prevent those books from making it into stores on time, too, or at all, from computer glitches to warehouse fires.

How much will you be able to learn from your publisher about things like distribution and shipping? Well, philosophies on how much and what kind of information to share with authors varies from publisher to publisher—and these philosophies are also continually subject to change. This is simply a fact of the publishing world that authors must come to accept. So you might be privy to precisely where your books are being sold (Wal-mart? Airports? Supermarket checkouts?); you might not. Or you might only ever have a very general idea of where your any of your books are being sold.

And how about print runs — is there a sort of “bestseller list print run” minimum threshold? Well, since bestseller lists are snapshots in time and books on those lists are ranked relative to all the other books released during that timeframe, any print run threshold will be determined by the print runs of other titles released during a given timeframe.

And, as I mentioned earlier, of course, every single factor contributing to the appearance of a book on a particular bestseller list is mind-bogglingly sensitive to life’s vicissitudes. A blizzard might close major bookstores across the Midwest the week of your book’s release, for instance. All the other conditions that facilitate a bestseller list appearance might be in place—distribution, timely shipping, etc.—but because of store closures, the book will instead sell somewhat erratically, denied that crucial initial velocity that launches a book onto a list. Ultimately, over its life, the book might ultimately sell very, very well…but it might never show up on a bestseller list.

As for The New York Times Bestseller list: unlike BookScan and USA Today, it doesn’t track sales of all books. The times has a unique and pretty proprietary (meaning, they won’t divulge precisely how they do it) approach to compiling their list. They send a list to bookstores indicating which books they’re tracking as potential future best sellers and ask booksellers to provide sales information on those books (and any other books the bookstores think will sell well or want to report on). The Times says this tracking list is drawn from information provided by bookstores, but publishers say they also call the Times as a matter of course to alert them to books selling with increasing momentum so that they can be added to the tracking list. They attempt to keep their focus on new books, too, which means perennial bestsellers, like, say, Catcher in the Rye, might show up on the USA Today bestseller list but not the Times list.

By this definition, it’s conceivable for a book to realize NYT bestseller list-caliber sales volume and still not appear on the list.

So do bestseller lists provide an accurate or comprehensive picture of the total sales of a given book? No. Are they accurate indications of the size of a book’s print run? No. Are they lists of the “best” (a subjective term, of course) books available for sale, or indicators of the quality or value of an author’s work? No. Is it constructive for an author to attempt a methodical approach to becoming a bestseller? Well…no. You simply can’t mount an expedition up a bestseller list the way you would up Everest. Because, as you see now, it’s quite simply beyond an author’s control.

What is within an author’s control? Probably the only thing truly within an author’s control is the quality of her work. You can’t go wrong if you use your intention to do your very best work as a sort of rudder to steer yourself through publishing’s unpredictable seas.

Regardless, making a bestseller list is cause for rejoicing. It’s a milestone in your career, after all, and henceforth you and your publisher will have a very effective marketing tool to use to sell your ensuing books. And if one Thursday morning you wake up to find your book on the USA Today list, you should happily trumpet the news far and wide, and at the very least, have some chocolate—the traditional food of celebration of authors everywhere.

Copyright 2007, Julie Anne Long