5 ms·
The murky math of the New York Times bestsellers list
- gnicholas 3y agoI pay zero attention to this list. If it’s not actually a list of best-selling status, it’s just another recommendation from the NYT. I don’t need a “Wirecutter for books”, since I already have plenty on my list.
- xhkkffbf 3y agoLooks just as manipulated as view counts on YouTube or like counts on social media. Sad, really.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago> Looks just as manipulated as view counts on YouTube Can you elaborate? I thought they are mostly accurate nowadays.
- a_bonobo 3y agoor University Rankings, similar murky maths all the way to outright fraud See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_college_and_university_rankings_(North_America) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_college_and_unive... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Higher_Education_World_University_Rankings#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Higher_Education_World_U...
- voisin 3y agoI have started looking at Goodreads ratings as a good proxy for well written books but there are a lot of bizarrely high rated pop culture books so it’s not perfect. Another strategy is to look at books shortlisted for the major awards. That’s how I came across North Woods by Daniel Mason (Pulitzer short list) which is by far the book I enjoyed most this year. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71872930 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71872930
- thfuran 3y ago>I have started looking at Goodreads ratings as a good proxy for well written books Based on my experience looking at Goodreads reviews, I think you'd have just as much luck with a random number generator.
- voisin 3y agoI think it is better for ruling things out rather than shortlisting. A rating below 4.0 is a guaranteed bad read (IMHO) but above 4.0 is not guaranteed of a good read.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoMany books I've liked have <4.0 on Goodreads. But you're kind of right that I will usually take that as a bad sign that needs to be outweighed by some other reason to read it (like a personal recommendation or whatever).
- tikhonj 3y agoA lot of my absolutely favorite books are rated below 4.0. A few examples: 1. White Noise at 3.86 2. Catch-22 at 3.99 3. Dhalgren at 3.77 4. At Swim-Two-Birds at 3.86 5. Midnight's Children at 3.98 6. Омон Ра at 3.90 7. Never Let Me Go at 3.84 Drawing the line at 4 rules out some of the most interesting books. In my experience, you really have to fall below 3.5 to get consistently bad books, and even then it's not 100% guaranteed.
- hotnfresh 3y agoWoolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando are under a 4. But under a 4 is guaranteed bad? LOLWUT. And that’s just the first author I checked. Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick (less of a crowd pleaser than his handful of biggest books, but certainly not in the bottom tier of his works) is under a 4. The A Man Without a Country collection, which is more of interest as a curiosity than because much of it’s good, is over a 4. Yeah, you may as well flip a coin.
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- forgingahead 3y agoA total work of fiction basically, like almost everything else written in the NYT.
- jjeaff 3y agoThe NYT doesn't get everything right, but they still have a strong reputation for factual reporting. when they do get something wrong, they generally print a retraction and it is a big deal. I don't think it is fair or factual to say that almost everything they write is fiction.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y agoThe problem is they consistently make mistakes in the rush to get the story out first. I suppose that's not much different than many other publications, but the NYT is the most visible. It tends to erode their "strong reputation for factual reporting," and for large swaths of the nation (mostly conservative), they're little better than a tabloid.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoHere[1] is a detailed, thoughtful article demonstrating specifically that many outlets — including the NYT — make extremely significant errors increasingly often, using a recent major mistake as an example. And not only do they generally not publish retractions, but nobody reads retractions. Willingly erring in specific, predictable ways repeatedly and then occasionally issuing retractions is a great way to manipulate the perception of readers, which is one of their goals. Almost everything they write is fiction: they only report facts in the approximate area of the truth that support their preferred frame. This combination of omission and slight of hand is enough to craft stories that are, in the final analysis, completely false. [1]: https://www.silentlunch.net/p/did-the-entire-media-industry-misquote https://www.silentlunch.net/p/did-the-entire-media-industry-...
- matt006 3y ago
- tenpies 3y ago[flagged]
- w0m 3y agoIt seems slightly better than that, but true. They seem to be trying to weed out anyone trying to game the system, which unsurprisingly leads to an uneven distribution of squelching when sorting by ideology.
- dynm 3y agoOff by a factor of 100 here: > Making the list is a herculean task. Consider the number of books, more than 3m, published every year. And then consider that the number of slots on the NYT’s coveted lists is ~6240. That gives authors a coolly aspirational 0.00208% chance to snag one.
- test77777 3y ago[flagged]
- heyjamesknight 3y agoWhat? 6240/3,000,000 = 0.00248, which is .248%. No convention ever says you can put the % next to the raw ratio.
- Aloisius 3y agoI think you mean 0.208%. The infographic also has a different number from the article (6040 vs. 6240) which is confusing.
- test77777 3y ago[flagged]
- satvikpendem 3y agoWhat kind of logic is this? Just because you think it's correct does not make it actually correct. I can think 1+1=3 but that is not so. Now that I look at your profile, it's more obvious that you are simply trolling, given your other comments. Even your bio alludes to this irony.
- netsharc 3y agoDo/did you work for Verizon? http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-...
- blululu 3y agoWhat’s wild here isn’t that the list is totally bogus, but how little money it takes to game the system. People spend $150k on an MFA in creative writing when $60k will buy a consulting service to land you on the NYT best seller list.
- cratermoon 3y agobe$t$eller$ li$t
- dehrmann 3y agoStartups do the same thing. They spent too much on R&D when they should be spending the money on marketing.
- satvikpendem 3y agoPaul Graham's Submarine article talks about this: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- paulddraper 3y agoTbf you can get it for a lot less than 150k
- coolhand2120 3y agoI had to stop reading at "Latinx". Stop trying to make latinx happen, nobody wants it.
- bdzr 3y agohttps://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/ https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
- spondylosaurus 3y ago[flagged]
- spandextwins 3y agoYou're not their audience. Mission accomplished.
- BurningFrog 3y agoIt works as a tribal marker. Using it shows you're willing to humiliate yourself to show tribal loyalty.
- dang 3y ago"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- brnt 3y agoI know that among Dutch writers, it is a public secret that one does not have an English translation because the US (and rest of Anglosphere) is an interesting market, but it's a requirement for getting on the NYT bestseller list. This means worldwide visibilty and worldwide sales. I never managed to get hard numbers from anyone, but reading between the lines, Dutch and American book markets appear to be on the same order of magnitude, not necessarily in favour of the US.
- ignite23 3y ago788 million us, vs 44 million, taking top google hits.
- AlbertCory 3y agoI've wondered about that as an author, actually: Given how little Americans read books, might there non-English-speaking countries where there are more book readers than the US? It would be simple to get a BAD translation of my books into Spanish, say, but a good translation would cost me a lot. And I wouldn't know how good it is without showing it to several other native Spanish-speakers.
- andrehacker 3y agoI was surprised that some author said that on the Dutch TV show "Lubach" earlier this year. He stated that the (absolute) number of copies sold to get in the top list of the Dutch market is about the same as the number of copies that gets you in a NYT list. He explained this by saying "Americans don't read much" and you seem to imply the same. But it appears that in the US about 300,000 titles are published per year (2013 data) versus 16,000 in the Netherlands. So is this an apples-to-apples comparison ? (source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_...)
- brnt 3y agoIt wasn't about the size in terms of titles, but total market in currency, AFAIK.
- BenFeldman1930 3y agoI like (current) bestseller lists: they usually contain all books not worth reading.
- sparcpile 3y agoPACs have been doing these bulk buys for years to get people on the list. As the article mentioned, Mitt Romney did this. Mike Pompeo did it as well. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2023/02/21/mike-pompeos-pac-spent-42000-on-books-the-day-his-memoir-was-published-it-became-a-bestseller/?sh=3093c17f3c1b https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2023/02/21/mike-pom... Mike Pence https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2023/01/09/mike-pences-pac-spent-91000-on-his-book-it-became-a-bestseller/?sh=381556f522a9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2023/01/09/mike-pen... Members of the Trump family did this multiple times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-triggered-sales.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-tri... It's common practice for political parties and PACs to do these bulk buys and then sell them or give them away during events or conventions.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y agoCurious why you chose only conservative politicians. Do progressive politicians refrain from the practice?
- cafard 3y agoJim Wright (D-TX), then Speaker of the House, got some grief over bulk purchases of his memoirs. The Wikipedia article on him mentions this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Agingcoder 3y agoThe numbers are wrong, 6000/3000000 is 0.2% not 0.002%. I stopped reading after this.
- g-b-r 3y agoPlenty of "internet marketers" sell each other a way to make it into the list cheaply, and it seems to work given that their bs does make it..