The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
washingtonpost.com
The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
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Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#2The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed?
If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.
Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#3These lists can be manipulated. There was a case a few years back involving bogus bookstore sales of Lani Sarem’s "Handbook for Mortals" to trick the New York Times:
Stamper and other YA writers, including Jeremy West, began to investigate. Stamper shared messages he had received from bookshop staff who said they had been contacted to see if their store was an NYT-reporting shop – the paper’s lists are collated from information supplied by a confidential group of stores – before a bulk order was placed. Another bookshop shared similar information with West, while Publishers Weekly reported that a shop outside Las Vegas had a customer who ordered 87 copies after learning it was an NYT-reporting shop.
(Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-m...)
I'm also skeptical of data from Amazon, whose KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited ebook platform is notorious for scams designed to ensure rank or extra payouts for authors. See http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-nee... for an explanation of how one scam worked, and the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212.
Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#4They should just get rid of bestseller lists. They exist purely for marketing and for tricking chumps into buying mediocre books.
Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#5Kudos to the Post for attempting to produce an objective list. The New York Times doesn't:
> In other words, The New York Times best-seller list is not a best-seller list -- which even The New York Times once acknowledged. In the early 1980s, William Peter Blatty, author of the monumental best-seller "The Exorcist," sued The New York Times for only listing his novel on the list one time, even though it sold in the millions. In defending itself before the court, as reported by Book History, the annual journal of The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (Penn State University Press), The Times said, "The list did not purport to be an objective compilation of information but instead was an editorial product."
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/04/17/the-...
Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#6The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed? If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.
Someone probably did, and the person they told didn't take it any farther. The chain broke somewhere.
Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#7The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed? If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.
I misread it the first time as one month (May->June) but it was May 2018 to June 2019(!).
Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#8They should just get rid of bestseller lists. They exist purely for marketing and for tricking chumps into buying mediocre books.
Discovery is challenging, how would you propose finding something new to read?
Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#9The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed? If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.
This is the same publication staring down a $250m libel lawsuit for their inability to fact check before publishing.
You expect too much from them.
Re: The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
#10The process was broken for seven months before anybody noticed? If I were the Washington Post, I'd wonder why nobody brought up discrepancies with other lists during that time.
This is the same publication staring down a $250m libel lawsuit for their inability to fact check before publishing. You expect too much from them.
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