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 […]
Bestseller Radar
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 […]
Bestsellers and More Best Ofs: Amazon and Apple
Amazon released their annual package of bestseller lists, and as the etailer continues to gain market share on their competitors, those list take on ever greater significance. As usual, the list that they promote only features new books published in 2016, and it combines print and ebook sales. To see the actual overall bestsellers this year, you need to look at their separate print and ebook charts. Amazon’s top 20 new books are: 1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2, Special Rehearsal Edition Script by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany 2. When Breath Becomes […]
Bestseller Share: Big Five Dominate NYT Lists In First Quarter
You may recall that we recently introduced tools to track “bestseller share” by house, looking at the “slots” on the NYT printed bestseller lists. In our January post, we established five-year benchmarks by publisher as well, to have some basis for comparison going forward. With the first quarter of 2016 completed, we are ready to start following the bestseller landscape through the year. By the first results, the five largest houses extended their dominance of the NYT’s charts to new levels in the beginning of the year. All other houses combined claimed under 6 percent of the NYT slots, with […]