Most days we focus on trying to make our own news and analysis as accurate, informed and comprehensive as possible and leave others reporting on the trade to their own approaches. But with a lot of attention on Amazon’s new Charts — too much, probably, since this is a new merchandising initiative for Amazon’s customers, on their site, tilted towards their house product and preferred formats — PW has made the same basic error two weeks in a row, so it’s worth making things clear for our readers at least. The new weekly Charts are not “the company’s first move into tracking […]
Bestseller Radar
New Amazon Charts Show What People Are Reading
Amazon has launched a “reimagined weekly bestseller list” that combines data from across all of their formats — print, ebook, and digital audio. A new Top 20 Most Read list aims to show “what customers are really reading and listening to by looking at the average number of daily Kindle readers and Audible listeners” (of course they have no data on print readers). A companion Top 20 Most Sold list does include print sales data as well (and they still count pre-orders and sales together). On the downside, the “sold” list still has Amazon’s own thumb on the scale, counting digital products […]
NYT Book Review Editor Explains Expanded Coverage Plans
New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul spoke at a Publishers Advertising and Marketing Association luncheon event on Wednesday, previewing forthcoming changes to how books are featured in the newspaper. Paul said their books coverage will be “expanding and becoming more strategic,” an initiative that includes a consolidation of the three desks that handle books (publishing business news, daily reviews, and the weekly review), the hiring of more staff editors and reviewers, and a redesign of The Book Review. That process will eliminate some of the “duplication” of the past, such as the practice of reviewing the same book twice, in the […]
NYT Promises Expanded Coverage of Comics and Graphic Novels
There are a few updates on the big paring of the New York Times bestseller lists that we covered yesterday. Following our observations noting a few significant changes in the posted methodology (including the elimination of weighting sales from indie bookstores, and allowing the counting of sales from Amazon-exclusive ebooks), a NYT spokesperson confirmed to us that indeed “the methodology was updated to reflect changes to the lists.” A follow-up asking for confirmation that they have dropped the ban on counting certain prosaic types of evergreen nonfiction was not answered, but on Twitter yesterday NYTBR editor Pamela Paul did write, “Just to be […]
NYT Eliminates Some Bestseller Lists, Cuts Overall Slots Nearly In Half
The New York Times substantially revised its bestseller lists as of the editions dated February 5 (covering sales through January 21), which were sent out to subscribers on Wednesday afternoon. Where there were once 240 weekly slots in all — 190 regular and 50 extended — now is pared back to 130 positions. The list for mass market fiction and dedicated lists for ebooks only — for both fiction and nonfiction — have been eliminated entirely, which some sectors may consider a double blow, since many fiction titles that used to sell well in the mass market had migrated to primarily digital […]
Kindle Unlimited: The Trend Continues, and The House Is On Top
Amazon made their monthly retroactive announcement of how much money they have decided to allocate to authors who participate in Kindle Unlimited, with November’s bounty following the pattern from the prior month. The pool was boosted by $100,000, to $16.3 million, while the total “pages read” declined, to roughly 3.032 billion (down from 3.122 billion in October, and 3.197 billion in September). On online forums, authors continue to complain that Amazon has not fully fixed glitches in their page counting software. Theoretically that’s leading more authors to opt out of publishing exclusively through Kindle and participating in KU. Increasingly, however, the […]