Self Pub Bestseller Lists

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I could be wrong, but I thought to make the USA Today bestsellers list you needed to distribute through more than just Amazon.

I've heard that you need to be on more than one sales channel, but have also seen bestsellers that I was sure were KDP select exclusives.

You should be very proud of 11,000 copies sold in that period of time, even if you didn't make a bestseller list. To make a bestselling list, I would imagine you would need at least 5K copies sold in a week. I say this because an author I know of sold something close to 4200 copies in a week, and was hoping to get a last day push to put her on the charts.

Also, the charts and the number of books required to reach them fluctuate weekly.

There's no single number you have to sell to get onto any best-seller list: it all depends on how many copies other titles are selling. If it's a slow week you can top the best-seller lists with relatively few sales; if it's coming up to Christmas, for example, or if a huge author has a new book out, then you'd have to sell thousands more.

Most of the people I'm familiar with who hit the bestseller lists (as self-publishers, primarily publishing ebooks), hit it with books ranking in the top 100 of Amazon--not genre categories, but all ebooks in the store. I'm sure some may have ranked in the hundreds, not necessarily 99 or above, but the ones springing to mind all got well above 100 and stuck there for at least a short time.

I'm thinking that one of the lists (out of NYT and USA Today) only ranks books for sale at more than one retailer, and the other doesn't care. Completely could be wrong about that. I think Sara Fawkes' breakout hit made the bestseller lists while it was in KDP Select. That's when it shot into the very top sellers, at least.

As far as how many, yeah, it varies. It's just a whole, whole lotta books in a short amount of time.

Based on my experience, 11K should have gotten you onto the bottom of the list in some cases. Here's the thing with point of sale lists like USA today, though---it depends entirely on the other books on the list. It's ranked by percentage of all books sold that week, in all categories and all formats. Ebook fiction competes with paperback cookbooks and hardback self-help.

So to make the list mid-month in April, for example, when no bestsellers have new releases out is an entirely different number than the first week of June, when every publisher puts out their lead titles. What would be considered the number of sales that would guarantee a #1 slot for a bestseller list filled with mid-list titles, would be a #10 slot in a list filled with lead titles, and might put that very same book at #100 when the list is filled with super-leads.

The trick is timing your releases within your genre to maximize your potential on lists if you have a solid fan base. How do you do that? Easy. SPs have an advantage to release books when their competitors aren't. Trade pub authors have their publishers make that decision. You have the advantage of flexibility. There are four weeks in a month. The lead paperbacks usually release in the first week of the month. Hardbacks release in the third. Watch for mid-month slots for your best advantage, but definitely do some research. If you don't know what authors your potential fans are reading between your releases, and when those authors' next books come out, you need to start keeping an eye out. Twitter is your friend, and so are author websites and book blogs/magazines. Research, watch and pounce when you have the advantage.

Cathy C said:

Based on my experience, 11K should have gotten you onto the bottom of the list in some cases.

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But it's 11,000 since October, split between two books.

shelleyo said:

But it's 11,000 since October, split between two books.

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Ah! Right you are. I misread it as happening all at once. It would probably need to be at least 11K in a week to have it show up, even in a slow week. More likely would be 20K or more in a week.

A friend of mine who is a best-selling crime writer routinely sells 2,500 copies in hardback in his first week of release, and expects a lot more in paperback. That's in the UK, though, where the market is significantly smaller than the US, so it takes fewer sales to hit those top slots.

11k split between two books over several months is good, but it's not best-seller numbers in my experience. My books (trade published) usually sell 50k or so each in America in the first year or eighteen months following publication and while a few have hit those best seller lists, they've not all done so.

Old Hack said:

My books (trade published) usually sell 50k or so each in America in the first year or eighteen months following publication and while a few have hit those best seller lists, they've not all done so.

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Having not gone the trade publisher route, that is actually fascinating to know. What listing are those sales? I mean is that considered a midlister or?

I ghostwrite books (of a very specific type), so it's difficult to tell: the sales might be what you'd expect of a midlist writer, but as they're published with different names on the cover, there's not necessarily a list to speak of here. In other words, I don't know where my books would fit!

Dani said:

Having not gone the trade publisher route, that is actually fascinating to know. What listing are those sales? I mean is that considered a midlister or?

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The trick with this question is that there are two levels of "sales." Sales to the public are driven by sales to the booksellers. Not counting ebook sales, the quantity ordered in the months before the release determine how many books will be on the shelf in any given store. If Barnes & Noble orders 50,000 books to be printed, they're going to scatter them in large quantities among their individual stores, meaning that they anticipate a large supply needed to fill sales to customers. So an individual store might have 20 copies of the book on hand and will stack the shelves and/or endcaps with copies. This signals to the public (unconsciously, of course) that there is likely a reason why there are so many. Even if it's an author they've never heard of, if the cover is awesome, they'll probably pick up a copy to buy.

On the other hand, let's say Barnes & Noble only orders 5,000 copies. They have around 700 stores nationwide, so each store is probably only going to get 4-5 copies of the book before the branch has to reorder. Even if the book is selling like wildfire, it won't ever hit a bestseller list because there aren't enough copies on the market to get there.

All of that is explanation of how it used to be. A 30K print run (because of preorders by bookstores) was considered the minimum necessary to be offered a next contract. Often that was the total number that bookstores would sell after returns were counted. When my first book hit USAT, the print run was around 68K. My first book should have hit, because the print run was around 65K but it was released in December--which is the death knell for anything non-holiday related. My bestseller dreams on the first book were plowed under by the Polar Express.

Ebooks changed all that, of course, and now any reader who wants a copy can download it in an instant. That's put SP books on a much more level playing field, along with midlisters. Print runs today are more likely to be 15K-25K for a midlister, which used to make publishers shudder.

The whole publishing world has truly changed, and it's not a bad thing.

It's also useful to understand that the bestseller lists of the major publications are for the week in question, not for 'all time'. If the lists were for 'all time bestsellers', every book would probably still be competing with all of the Harry Potter and Twilight books (for starters). Not to mention the bible.

That is, your cumulative number of 11,000 sales, while really good for self-published books (and congratulations!), doesn't come close to some of the major releases of print books in just a single week. For one extreme example, think 25 million copies of HP and the Deathly Hallows on release day.

Old Hack said:

I ghostwrite books (of a very specific type), so it's difficult to tell: the sales might be what you'd expect of a midlist writer, but as they're published with different names on the cover, there's not necessarily a list to speak of here. In other words, I don't know where my books would fit!

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I didn't know you ghostwrote! I never understood...why would someone ghostwrite? And why would an author want a ghostwriter? Is it because they have a story but no time to write it? Or so many stories at once, they need to have someone working on them all?

Cathy C said:

The trick with this question is that there are two levels of "sales." Sales to the public are driven by sales to the booksellers. Not counting ebook sales, the quantity ordered in the months before the release determine how many books will be on the shelf in any given store.

[...]

Ebooks changed all that, of course, and now any reader who wants a copy can download it in an instant. That's put SP books on a much more level playing field, along with midlisters. Print runs today are more likely to be 15K-25K for a midlister, which used to make publishers shudder.

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Very cool info, thank you! I knew something about the preorder of books, but not how it fit into the bestseller selection. So, a runaway hit from an unknown wouldn't actually make a bestseller for a while because the copies wouldn't have been ordered beforehand?

Dani said:

I didn't know you ghostwrote! I never understood...why would someone ghostwrite?

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I'm good at it, I enjoy it, and I earn good money doing it.

And why would an author want a ghostwriter? Is it because they have a story but no time to write it? Or so many stories at once, they need to have someone working on them all?

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Those reasons can be valid but usually it's because they can't write well enough themselves. Writing well takes a lot of work and very few people have the talent or aptitude for it.

I remember a thousand years ago when I worked in the warehouse at Penguin Books Canada and the Princess Diana bio came out.

We shipped maybe 50 HUGE skids full of books out to so many bookstores that my head spun. Thousands of books, maybe hundreds of thousands. All on release day and it slammed into the lists.

... 30 days later, just like clockwork, we got over half of those skids back. Unopened. Unsold.

So, a runaway hit from an unknown wouldn't actually make a bestseller for a while because the copies wouldn't have been ordered beforehand?

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It depends. If the sales were all ebook, it could hit immediately. But "runaway hit" means that someone will order physical copies eventually, and a lot of them. So yeah, it could be a while. Or it might not EVER hit the bestseller list if it's just a steady stream of moderate sales, but not enough in any one week to make the list (or it's up against leads or super leads for the first few months, and simply can't ever break onto the list.) Our Blood Singer first book was like that. Great sales, tens of thousands of them. We earned through the advances of all three books in the contract in the first year. But simply not enough in any one week to hit a list.

Interesting thread. Cathy C and Old Hack, thank you for weighing in. You both are a wealth of information.

tethys77: Congratulations on your 11K sales!

Dani said:

I didn't know you ghostwrote! I never understood...why would someone ghostwrite? And why would an author want a ghostwriter? Is it because they have a story but no time to write it? Or so many stories at once, they need to have someone working on them all?

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Mostly, people using ghostwriters don't have stories to tell; they have non-fiction expertise to share. Very few experts in one area are also experts at writing. A lot of the non-fiction books published by experts are actually ghostwritten. Would you really want the heart specialist who's going to be operating on you to be spending great wodges of their time on learning how to be a professional writer? Or would you rather they spend that time on learning more about heart surgery?

And if someone is a writer with a penchant for non-fiction, it's not a far stretch to imagine them becoming a ghostwriter. For the reverse reason. They want to write, not become an expert at a bunch of different subjects. Would you want the person operating on you to be a writer who's learning how to be a heart surgeon so they can write about heart surgery? Or would you rather they be someone who has a passion for heart surgery?

The other area where you see a lot of ghostwriters is memoirs. Many people have interesting life stories -- interesting enough for a book to be written -- but don't have the ability or interest to write to a professional level. Those folks need ghostwriters, too. I've just started my second project with someone in this category. The subject about whom I'm writing was removed from school very early in life. Her life story is compelling, and she can talk about it (and has talked about it, as high up as addressing the United Nations) compellingly, but she's not very good at the mechanics of writing.

Ahem. I could say more, but really, this is pretty off-topic to the OP's actual question, so I'll shut up now.

Old Hack said:

I'm good at it, I enjoy it, and I earn good money doing it.

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No judgement! I think it's cool. I'd always be trying to make something explode or tell them to kill someone. Or worse, be like, 'your character wouldn't do that!'.

Cathy C said:

Our Blood Singer first book was like that. Great sales, tens of thousands of them. We earned through the advances of all three books in the contract in the first year. But simply not enough in any one week to hit a list.

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That seems unfair, but as I went through to argue that they should tally the lists from release to week-to-date, I realized why that wouldn't work either.

Seems a tough business making the top of lists, even when you sell a lot. =/

Terie said:

Mostly, people using ghostwriters don't have stories to tell; they have non-fiction expertise to share. Very few experts in one area are also experts at writing. A lot of the non-fiction books published by experts are actually ghostwritten.

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My brain must still be on hiatus. I can't believe I didn't think about memoirs or textbooks or other non-fiction books. I just kept thinking about James Patterson and my mind went to fiction automatically. doh!