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Particularly in the case of novels, a large budget, and a chain of literary agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, retailers, and marketing efforts are involved in "making" bestsellers.
Early bestsellersThe term bestseller, has a relatively modern etymological origin since it was first used in 1889, but the phenomenon of immediate popularity goes back to the early days of mass production of printed books. For earlier books, when the maximum number of copies that would be printed was relatively small, a count of editions is the best way to assess sales. Since effective copyright was slow to take hold, many editions were pirated (in modern terms) well into the period of the Enlightenment, and without effective royalty systems in place, authors often saw little, if any, of the revenues for their popular works. The earliest highly popular books were nearly all religious, but the Bible, as a large book, remained expensive until the nineteenth century. This tended to keep the numbers printed and sold low. Unlike today, it was important for a book to be short to be a bestseller, or it would be too expensive to reach a large audience. Very short works such as Ars moriendi, the Biblia pauperum, and versions of the Apocalypse were published as cheap block-books in large numbers of different editions in several languages in the fifteenth century. These were probably affordable items for most of the minority of literate members of the population. In 16th and 17th century England Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and abridged versions of Foxe's Book of Martyrs were the most broadly read books. Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roderick Random (1748) were early eighteenth century short novels with very large publication numbers, as well as gaining international success.[1]
By the time of Byron and Sir Walter Scott, effective copyright laws existed, at least in England, and many authors depended heavily on their income from their large royalties. America remained a zone of piracy until the mid-nineteenth century, a fact of which Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, bitterly complained. By the middle of the 19th century, a situation akin to modern publication had emerged, where most bestsellers were written for a popular taste and are now almost entirely forgotten, with odd exceptions such as East Lynne (remembered only for the line "Gone, gone, and never called me mother!"), the wildly popular Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Sherlock Holmes. Description and types of bestsellerBestsellers are usually separated into fiction and non-fiction categories. Different list compilers have created a number of other subcategories. The New York Times was reported to have started its "Children's Books" section in 2001 just to move the Harry Potter books out of the No. 1, 2, and 3 positions on their fiction chart, which the then three book series had monopolized for over a year.[3] Bestsellers also may be ranked separately for hardcover and paperback editions. Typically, a hardcover edition appears first, followed in months or years by the much less expensive paperback version. Hardcover bestseller status may hasten the paperback release of the same, or slow the release, if hardcover sales are brisk enough. Some lists even have a third category, trade paperback bestsellers. In the United Kingdom, a hardcover book could be considered a "bestseller" with sales ranging from 4,000 to 25,000 copies per week, and in Canada, the rule of thumb is 5,000 copies per week,* although the number remains relative—a book may be considered a bestseller in relation to other books without ever reaching that threshold. There are many "bestseller lists" that display anywhere from 10 to 150 titles.
Literary perceptionPartly due to commercialization, the term bestseller may acquire a pejorative or negative connotation, particularly in fiction, indicating a work of inferior literary quality with mass appeal. Nonetheless, the term is widely used in book marketing, with its bestseller status advertised prominently on the cover of paperback editions whenever possible. Differences among listsBestseller lists may vary widely, depending on the method used for calculating sales. The Book Sense bestseller lists, for example, use only sales numbers, provided by independently-owned (non-chain) bookstores, while the New York Times list includes both wholesale and retail sales from a variety of sources. A book that sells well in gift shops and grocery stores may hit a New York Times list without ever appearing on a Book Sense list. USA Today has only one list, not separated into fiction/non-fiction and hardcover/paperback, so that relative sales among these catagories can be ascertained. Lists from Amazon.com, the dominant on-line book retailer, are based only on sales from their own Web site, and are updated on an hourly basis. Wholesale sales figures are not factored into Amazon's calculations. Numerous Web sites offer advice for authors about a temporary method to boost their book higher on Amazon's list using carefully-timed buying campaigns that take advantage of the frequent adjustments to rankings. The brief sales spike allows authors to tout that their book was an "Amazon.com top 100 seller" in marketing materials for books that actually have relatively low sales. Eventually book buyers may begin to recognize the relative differences among lists and settle upon which lists they will consult to determine their purchases. The weight and price of a book may affect its positioning on lists. The Amazon.com list tends to favor hardcover, more expensive books, where the shipping charge is a smaller percentage of the overall purchase price or is sometimes free, and which tend to be more deeply discounted than paperbacks are. Inexpensive mass market paperbacks tend to do better on the New York Times list than on Amazon's. Book Sense and Publisher's Weekly separate mass market paperbacks onto their own list. Category structure affects the positioning of a book in other ways. A book that might be buried on the Book Sense hardcover fiction list could be positioned very well on the New York Times hardcover advice list or the Publisher's Weekly religion hardcover list. VerifiabilityBestseller reports from companies such as Amazon.com, which appear to be based strictly on auditable sales to the public, may be at odds with bestseller lists compiled from more casual data, such as the New York Times lists' survey of retailers and publishers. The method for ranking the New York Times bestseller lists is a closely-guarded secret. This situation suggests a similar one in the area of popular music. In 1991, Billboard magazine switched its chart data from manual reports filed by stores, to automated cash register data collected by a service called SoundScan. The conversion saw a dramatic shake-up in chart content from one week to the next. Today, many lists come from automated sources. Booksellers may use their POS (point-of-sale) systems to report automatically to Book Sense. Wholesalers such as the giant Ingram Book Group have bestseller calculations similar to Amazon's, but they are available only to subscribing retailers. Barnes & Noble and other large retail chains collect sales data from retail outlets and their Web sites to build their own bestseller lists. Nielsen BookScan U.S. is perhaps the most aggressive attempt to produce a completely automatic and trusted set of bestseller lists. They claim to be gathering data directly from cash registers at more than 4,500 retail locations, including independent bookstores, large chains such as Barnes & Noble, Powell's Books, and Borders, and the general retailer Costco. Unlike the consumer-oriented lists, BookScan's data is extremely detailed and quite expensive. Subscriptions to BookScan cost up to $75,000 per year, but it can provide publishers and wholesalers with an accurate picture of book sales with regional and other statistical analyses. The making of a bestsellerUltimately, having a great number of buyers creates a bestseller, however, there is a distinct "making of" process that determines which books have the potential to achieve that status. Not all publishers rely on, nor strive for, bestsellers, as the survival of small presses indicates. Large publishing houses, on the other hand, are like major record labels and film studios, and require consistent high returns to maintain their large overhead. Thus, the stakes are high. It is estimated that 200,000 new books are published each year in the U.S., and less than 1% achieve bestseller status.[4] Along the way, major players act as gatekeepers and enablers, including literary agents, editors, publishing houses, booksellers, and the media (particularly, publishers of book reviews and bestseller lists). In the U.S., the five major publishers—Random House, HarperCollins, Time Warner, Penguin USA, and Simon & Schuster—are responsible for about 80% of bestsellers; the five majors together with the next five largest publishers—Von Holtzbrinck, Hyperion, Rodale Press, Houghton Mifflin, and Harlequin—control around 98% of all United States bestsellers.[4] At least equally influential are the marketing efforts, including advertising, promotion, and publicity. The high visibility of an established and best-selling author is paramount in the equation also. In addition to writing the book, an author has to acquire representation and negotiate this publishing chain.[5] At least one scientific approach to creating bestsellers has been devised. In 2004, Didier Sornette, a professor of geophysics and a complex systems theorist at UCLA, using Amazon.com sales data, created a mathematical model for predicting bestseller potential based on very early sales results. This information could be used to identify a potential for bestseller status and recommend fine tuned advertising and publicity efforts accordingly.[6] Cultural roleWhile the basic dictionary definition of bestseller is self-evident, "a popular, top-selling book", the practical cultural definition is somewhat more complex. As consumer bestseller lists generally do not detail specific criteria, such as numbers sold, sales period, sales region, and so forth, a book becomes a bestseller mainly because an "authoritative" source says it is. Calling a book a "top-selling" title is not so impressive as calling it "the New York Times bestseller". Although the former phrase is assumed to be derived from sales figures, the latter benefits from the high profile of the particular list. A book that is identified as a "bestseller" greatly improves its chance of selling to a much wider audience. In this way, bestseller has taken on its own popular meaning, rather independent of empirical data, by becoming a compromised product category and, in effect, attempting to create a marketing image. For example, a "summer bestseller" is usually determined long before the summer is over, and signals a book's suitability for millions of lounging pool-side readers. The use of the marketing phrase, underground bestseller further illustrates the independent-from-sales, self-defining aspect of the term. For example, publisher HarperCollins suggested the bestseller potential of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel by announcing "...four years after her award-winning, underground bestseller, Little Altars Everywhere..." in the promotion. The book went on to achieve bestseller status in the 1990s. In reviews of the 2002 film of the same name, the novel's bestseller status was cited routinely, as in "compelling adaptation of Rebecca Wells' bestseller".[7] The famous Diogenes Publisher at Zürich (Swiss) started to talk about its own Worstsellers in 2006, and therewith brought a new mode-word into the German speaking european countries (carreer?). Connection with the movie industryBestsellers play a significant role in the mainstream movie industry. There is a long-standing Hollywood practice of turning fiction bestsellers into feature films. Many, if not the majority, of modern movie "classics" began as bestsellers. On the Publisher's Weekly fiction bestsellers of the year charts, we find: #2. The Godfather (1969); #1. Love Story (1970); #2. The Exorcist (1971); #3. Jaws (1974); among many others. Several of each year's fiction bestsellers ultimately are made into high-profile movies. Being a bestseller novel in the U.S. during the last forty years has guaranteed consideration for a big budget, wide-release movie.[8] See alsoReferences
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