Intro: I was at lunch with my friend Todd Sattersten, who helps business experts create and publish books. He mentioned in passing that making the best-seller list can actually be counter-productive for an author. Interested, I asked further, and the result is this guest post from him.
The Real Results of Best Seller Campaigns
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported on the work of ResultSource, a San Diego based company that helps authors successfully get their books the bestseller lists.
If you have spent any time around book publishing, this kind of activity is an open secret. If you are not familiar with this practice, then you probably have a number of questions.
- What does ‘help’ mean?
- Are there rules that apply to bestseller lists?
- What would motivate an author to do engage a company like ResultSource?
Let’s start with the first question. Authors might hire someone to help them with make the bestseller lists because it is actually unclear how the bestseller lists are compiled. The most popular lists, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today are derived from the sales of booksellers around the country. Some outlets compile their own list, while others use data from Neilsen’s BookScan.
The rules for how the bestseller lists are created are equally opaque. The New York Times is known to edit what titles will even make the list. The number of copies sold to a single customer or the retailer who reports the sales can influence how much the ranking is affected. Large quantities of book count less in the bestseller list calculus or they don’t count at all, the logic being that getting 10 people to buy 500 copies each is not the same as getting 5000 people to buy one copy each.
This again may seem unusual but so many people have tried to influence and game the list that news outlets have determined that taking a black box approach to their methodology is best.
You can see why a motivated author with high hopes of making the bestseller list might employ such a firm to help. Author Soren Kaplan who is profiled in the WSJ article wrote a detailed explanation of his decision to use ResultSource on his blog.
But does it work?
I don’t mean at making the bestseller list. This sales wrangling of three to ten thousand copies into the two week window during a book’s launch does certainly works. If you want to make a list, the route exists.
The whole point of making the list though is to make a broader impact. By appearing on the list, the expected result would be more awareness for the book and additional sales from readers watching the list, but that is not the case. Every chart in the WSJ article showed the books tanking in the week following the bestseller campaign. I remember doing a more extensive analysis of the WSJ list a few years ago and finding that over 60% of the titles that appeared on the list one week were gone the next.
Another effect of appearing on the bestseller list is the ability to say you were on the bestseller list. What author doesn’t want to put the label “New York Times Best Selling Author” in front of their name on a speaking bio? The power to leverage this recognition is far greater for the author than the publisher.
Did you notice you didn’t see any publishers mentioned in the article ponying up for this service? No. If a book doesn’t sell well beyond its opening week, it doesn’t make much difference to the publisher what list the book was on.
Seth Godin wrote a post recently about the new Netflix series “House of Cards.” He believes that Netflix made a fundamental marketing mistake by releasing all 13 episodes at once. Godin says by not dripping the episodes out, Netflix has been it difficult for viewers to know when to talk about the show or how much to say. Something similar is happening with bestseller campaigns.
I think the launch of the book is incredibly important. We are signaling to fans and followers when they should talk about the book, but compression of a book’s sales into one week limits the conversation to the opening week. We have gotten so efficient at converting the demand for a book into pre-order sales that after the launch there is little momentum left to move it into the next week or the next month and for those additional conversations to spread the ideas beyond your tribe.
Because those conversations are what we are looking for–more people being exposed to the idea, more readers buying the book, and the world being changed just a little.
Todd Sattersten helps business experts create and publish books. He co-wrote The 100 Best Business Books of All Time and is the author of Every Book Is A Startup. He lives in Portland, OR with his awesome wife and three rockstar kids. You can find him at: http://www.toddsattersten.com or on Twitter at @toddsattersten.
