On Being a Bestselling Author

Three of my books have technically been bestsellers. So of course, with more than a touch of vanity, I market myself as a bestselling author. However, those of us who work in the writing and publishing industry understand that there is a hierarchy within the group who call themselves bestselling authors.

This should not come as a complete surprise. Most areas of life have hierarchies, even seemingly prestigious ones. Within the group of Olympic athletes, for example, there is also a group of Olympic medalists. Within that group there are Olympic gold medalists. Within that group there are Olympic world record holders. Where you fall within the Olympic hierarchy largely determines how likely you are to secure a sponsorship deal with your favorite shoe company.

In the world of bestselling authors, there is a similar hierarchy. You probably know that there are two types of authors: traditionally published and “indie authors”. You might not know that there are some bestseller lists that indie authors can’t qualify for, even when their books outsell traditionally published books that are on those lists.

The reasons for this are complicated, but necessary to understand why someone like me can have three bestsellers, but still not be able to afford decent health insurance.

Crazy Rich Authors

At the highest end of the bestseller hierarchy you have people whose writing has made them incredibly wealthy. There are a very, very small number of these people, and you have probably heard of all of them, even if the last book you read was The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

These are authors like J.K. Rowling, Danielle Steel, James Patterson, Stephen King, and other household names.

Newspaper Bestseller Lists

Several bags of gold lower down the hierarchy we have authors whose works have appeared on a "Newspaper" bestseller list. The most popular of these lists are those maintained by the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal.

New York Times

The New York Times maintains separate lists for various genres and formats. For example, fiction audiobooks are on a different list than graphic novels. This is important as there is a pretty big difference between the relative sales of those two groups.

To continue our Olympic analogy, it doesn’t make sense to compare the relative athleticism of Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, as swimming and sprinting are very different races, even though the distances are often the same.

Each NYT category contains the top 10-15 books for a given week, based on the sales from a select group of vendors. Exactly which vendors are included is a closely guarded secret, though it is well known that Amazon isn’t one of them.¹

Despite the secrecy, it’s believed that the vendors are either primarily or exclusively physical retailers, and since those retailers tend to only carry books from specific distributors who don’t often carry or promote indie books in their catalogs, it is nearly impossible for an indie book to make the NYT list, regardless of its actual global sales.

The list also has “editorial oversight”. Research by the Economist has found that if the NYT editors dislike a book or its author, that book won’t appear on the list no matter how many copies it has sold that week.²

USA Today

The USA Today bestseller rankings lumps everything together into a single list of the top 150 books sold in any given week, independent of format or genre. Some people say this makes the list more indicative of a book’s true popularity.³

It also takes into account Amazon sales. Since indie authors tend to dominate the Amazon ebook market (especially in the romance and mystery genres), the USA Today bestseller list has historically included a fair number of books published by indie authors.

Originally, the list was manually curated by a single individual. When she was caught up in a round of layoffs in 2022, the list went on hiatus.⁴ It was reborn the following year with several changes.

One notable change is that indie books, which had previously made up a sizable fraction of the list, now appear only rarely.⁵ Nobody outside of USA Today knows exactly what caused this shift, and nobody inside USA Today will talk about it.

Another notable change is that books from major publishers started appearing in the bestseller rankings even though those books were not yet for sale. This has led some authors to question the integrity of the list’s new methodology.⁶

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal bestseller list is also broken up into categories, though with just ten entries in each. To calculate its rankings, it uses BookScan data, which is a book sales aggregation service that many publishers and authors use to track sales. While BookScan includes Amazon sales, it only counts print book sales in its data.⁷

Since the bulk of sales for most indie authors comes from ebooks, it’s also very rare for an indie author to make the WSJ list, though not as unheard of as with the NYT.

Lists Within Lists

How people describe bestseller placement within the newspaper lists is also broken up into two levels. A book that hits the top spot of any category is usually referred to as a “Number One New York Times Bestseller” or “Number One USA Today Bestseller”. Everything else on the list is usually referred to simply as a “New York Times Bestseller” or “USA Today Bestseller”.

Just as you never hear someone bragging about coming in eighth at the Olympics, you rarely hear someone saying "a number eight New York Times Bestseller." It’s not that it isn’t still an impressive achievement, it just isn’t something people tend to say.

Amazon Bestsellers

The final grouping people commonly discuss within the bestseller world is “Amazon Bestseller”. If someone says “bestseller” without some other qualifier, it is almost certainly an Amazon bestseller, and that includes my books.

As the name implies, these rankings are calculated by Amazon and the rankings only take into account Amazon sales. The categories are also highly specific. While the NYT has a bestseller list exclusively for graphic novels, Amazon has one for "Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Graphic Novels" or "Children's Books about Trains".

The category breakdowns change regularly, and while authors can suggest categories for their books, Amazon ultimately decides which categories to market a book under. As you might imagine, some categories are easier to become a bestseller in than others.

Another major difference between Amazon and other lists is that Amazon updates its lists every hour. This means a large, short-term surge in sales can push a book into bestseller territory.

Since this is a common thing for a new release, Amazon also has two different lists within each of its bestseller rankings: "#1 New Release" rankings, and overall "Bestseller" rankings.

While some people in the industry thumb their noses at the Amazon lists, the fact is that post 2022, because of how other lists are calculated, the Amazon lists are the only major bestseller ranking indie authors can aspire to.

A good example of this is the Emma M. Lion series by Beth Brower. Though it has over a hundred and fifty thousand reviews on Goodreads,⁸ was a viral Instagram and TikTok sensation, and sold well enough for the author to secure deals with seventeen different international publishers, the book has never appeared on a newspaper bestseller list.

Somewhat ironically, the New York Times recently wrote an article spotlighting the success of the series.⁹

My Bestselling Books

All of my bestsellers are Amazon bestsellers. Sometimes it's a category I deliberately chose and am proud to claim like “Science Education”. Other times it's something Amazon chose seemingly at random, which I ignore.

Science Fictioned Volume One hit number five on Amazon's Science Education list shortly after its release:

Science Fictioned Volume Two hit number one in Amazon's Science Education and Science Education for Kids categories. It's possible it hit other Amazon lists too, but unlike the newspaper lists, nobody alerts you to your Amazon rankings. You just have to keep an eye on them.

Starship Thieves also hit number one on an Amazon bestseller list, but it was in the "Teen Travel Fiction" list...

I mean, they do travel in the book, but it's not exactly something I'd choose to put into the marketing blurbs. "Oh, do you want a fun-filled travel memoir? Have you considered this book I wrote about kids who plan a heist to steal a spaceship? It was the number one new release in Teen Travel Fiction!"

Conclusion

So yes, I am a bestselling author, technically three times, but next time you hear about someone or something being a bestseller, you'll now know a little more about what that means (or might mean) and why the vast majority of bestselling authors aren’t swimming in money.