Best-Sellers List

Found this at the bottom of a best-sellers list compiled for the week ending January 9, 2011 to "explain" a little about how the list was compiled? I'll not list the books as I don't feel the list is NOT representative of what's actually selling. No surprise there.

"Rankings reflect sales, for the week ending January 9, 2011, at many thousands of venues where a wide range of general interest books are sold nationwide. These include hundreds of independent book retailers (statistically weighed to represent all such outlets); national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; university, gift, supermarket, discount department stores and newsstands."

I only post this to help substantiate the fact that the "sales" this list is talking about are the sales a publisher makes to a book store Independent or otherwise. The only publisher that large bookstores (the ones that make the difference in this matter) buy from are large publishers and they do so in mass quantities regardless of whether the author is a bestseller or not. This is actually how authors become best-sellers.

In the early years of publishing it was expensive to print books so publishers (only large publishers existed at the time. There were no little guys.) called upon the bookstores to help them store the large number of books they had to print as they had large print runs in order to save money. The bookstores and large publishers worked hand in hand. No surprise that things still work like this today but it is important to know otherwise you might think a best-seller is determined by how many individuals are buying it. Not so at all. There is absolutely no way to track how many books sell to individuals via bookstores or all the venues that sell books.

Ironically, all the books that bookstores buy from large publishers to secure that publishers hope of another author making it to the best-sellers list never sale at all!!! The bookstore usually returns them at some point because they can. No skin off their back. By the way, that's why you'll never see anything but larger publishers books on these list. Bookstores don't buy books from small publishers and they certainly don't when, in order to survive the insane return policy, the small publishers makes their books NON-RETURNABLE and prints through a POD.

Ahhhh, the publishing industry. Gotta love it.

I apologize if you thought I was going to post that I made the best-sellers list. I'll not make one any time soon with the requirements listed above and t hat's EVEN if I sell more books than some of those authors on the best-sellers list. Because if I sell more books it will be my small pub selling them directly to customers or me selling them myself and those sales are counted. So the real best-sellers will never be known because there's no way to accurately determine the number.

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