As noted a couple of months ago, we have been experimenting with putting filters on top on our big database of national bestseller lists (now over 12 years deep) to extract some comparison info over time. With the year complete, we thought it would be interesting to generate a calculation of NYT “bestseller share” by major publishers. To simplifyy things, the figures below are based on the printed lists only, and calculate total “slots.” (A single title can capture multiple slots on NYT lists in a given week; we track by both titles and slots, but it’s easiest to keep the lens […]
Bestseller Radar
The Print Bestsellers of 2015
As usual, here is our round-up of the top-selling print books of 2015, sold in outlets tracked by Nielsen Bookscan. They year recorded the same number of books selling 1 million units or more — six — as did 2014, but the distribution shifted, with four of those top sellers in adult fiction (whereas a year ago, five of the top six were juvenile/YA titles). Notably, Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel sold more than four times as many print copies in 2015 as it did in 2014, when the book was first published. And with Veronica Roth and John Green giving up their […]
Amazon Bestselling New Books for 2015, and Apple’s Best
Amazon has released their annual package of the year’s bestselling, newly-published books for 2015, across multiple categories. Note in particular that, as usual, the publicized lists cover books published during 2015 only. So if you are interested in the titles that sold the best at Amazon during the year, you want to refer to their product bestseller lists that show the most popular print books and ebooks. In the lists released today, these are their top 20 new books for 2015, with combined print and ebook sales: 1. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins 2. Grey: Fifty Shades […]
New Stats: A Glimpse At “Bestseller Shares”
We mentioned earlier in the week that we have all kinds of new things in the works in our development pipeline and idea laboratory. Here is just a taste of one little thing we are playing around with. Our comprehensive bestseller database tracks 10 lists all the time (and has well over half-a-million records from more than a decade) — some of which we already supply to publisher portals under license through a private API. That means we can create a broadly elastic set of bestseller-share calculators (and output lists of bestsellers by house, also available through a private API), […]
NYT to Make Printed Middle Grade and YA Bestseller Lists Hardcover Only
The New York Times is making what it calls “a significant change” in their children’s bestseller lists, starting with the issue dated August 30. The middle grade and young adult lists will count hardcover sales only going forward – positioned as similar to the adult fiction and nonfiction lists. The paper says the goal is to “better reflect the exciting range of novels for children and teenagers that are newly published.” Separate paperback and ebook bestseller lists for both middle grade and YA books will appear online only, rather than books from across all platforms. As a result, in the first set […]
Surprise Bestseller: Self-Published Picture Book that Prompts Yawns to Put Kids to Sleep
Swedish psychologist Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin’s crude-looking self-published picture book The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep: A New Way Of Getting Children To Sleep finds itself at the top of Amazon‘s bestseller list more than a year-and-a-half after publication. It seems to have caught on in the UK first, drawing media attention that spread to the US and has lifted sales here within the last week. (It’s currently No. 1 on Amazon’s hourly list and No. 30 at Barnes & Noble, but until recently was selling just low single digits per week according to Nielsen Bookscan.) Director of Books and Entertainment […]