A Publisher's Conversation with Authors: When You Want Your First Book to Make the NYT Bestseller List, Part III

Photo by Frank Perez

It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side.

Today's topic continues the discussion from the last two weeks about that lure for every first-time author: the New York Times Bestseller List. We talked about the need to sell 5000-10000 books each and every week you want your book to appear on the list, with the understanding that this is not a count of total books sold but an algorithmic approach, using sampling from stores that NYT considers representative of the whole (right or wrong) and might require the number of books sold as a whole to be greater in order to have enough hit the right sampling venues. We talked about the difficulty of doing that for an unknown author; we also talked about the all-too-often cases where authors with some deep pockets simply buy their way onto the lists by buying that many copies of their own books. Some authors have connections to organizations that will buy large tranches of books so that it does not look like an author purchase. NYT tries to catch and mark the authors who are buying their way onto its list.

While being on the NYT bestseller list will help to sell books (though likely less than you imagine), there are other lists that are equally good for book promotion and less competitive in terms of others buying their way onto the list in competition with your honest efforts to get on the list. These include the following

• The Wall Street Journal
• USA Today
• Amazon Bestseller lists
• There is the overall list.
• There is also a top 100 list for the various book categories.
• Several of our authors have made it onto this list for several weeks in a row or even for a long time.
• The more niche the category, the less competition there is to get on the list.
• Books with a delayed release (advance review copies) tend, in our experience, to make the list more frequently than others.

A completely alternative route and other kind of helpful listing is book award competitions. If you are book is selected for an award, it will be listed long term at these sites. For a post about book award competitions, click HERE. 

Want to read more on this topic? Check out this article.

Lesson for today's Tuesday talk: Don't pull out your efforts and hopes on the NYT Bestseller List.
There are many alternatives. There are other bestseller lists. There are also other activities, such as award competitions, that can help promote your book. The best way of all is to get hundreds of stellar reviews.

Read more posts about publishing HERE.

The Tuesday talks reflect real discussions between the management of MSI Press LLC and our own authors or those would-be authors who come through our doors but don't make the cut--yet. If you have a topic you would like addressed, leave the question in the comment section. Chances are, in our 18 years of publishing first-time and experiences authors, we have had a conversation with one of our authors that we can share with you.