The End of The USA Today Bestseller List

It’s a bleak time in the professional world of media and book publishing.

The Harper Collins Union remains on strike after more than a month, and HarperCollins is refusing to negotiate. Publishing shuts down at Christmas, so it’s likely they’ll be on strike into next year. (You can sign an open letter and donate to their strike fund – or shop their Bookshop store to help their fund).

There are layoffs happening at so many publications, too, including in books coverage. BuzzFeed has laid off a portion of their workforce, including their books editor, Farrah Penn.

And Gannett, parent to USA Today, laid off a portion of their workforce, including Mary Cadden, who compiled the USA Today bestseller list:

Sad to say that after 26 years at @USATODAY, I’m among Gannett’s layoffs. I am so proud of my work at USA TODAY, especially covering Books and the USA TODAY Best-Sellers list. I wish the best for my colleagues who are also leaving and those who remain.

— Mary Cadden (@MaryCadden) December 8, 2022

(Tweet transcribed for screen readers in case Twitter embed technology doesn’t work with screen readers:)

Sad to say that after 26 years at  @USATODAY, I’m among Gannett’s layoffs. I am so proud of my work at USA TODAY, especially covering Books and the USA TODAY Best-Sellers list. I wish the best for my colleagues who are also leaving and those who remain.

Cadden had been compiling the USA Today bestseller list for more than 10 years, possibly closer to 15, and that’s a lot of institutional knowledge exiting the newspaper.

Aconite Cafe, among others on Twitter, noticed that the USA Today bestsellers list wasn’t being updated, prompting Laura Trujillo, Life and Entertainment Editor, to announce in a reply:

“As the end of the year approaches, USA TODAY Books List will be on hiatus. We look forward to sharing an update in 2023.”

 

The “hiatus” was confirmed by spokespeople from Gannett, and covered in Publishers Weekly, the AP, and elsewhere – the end of the USA Today bestsellers list was big news, especially in publishing.

The USA Today list was unique in publishing for a lot of reasons. It was 150 items long, it included data from audio, print, and ebooks, it included indie and small press, and it was a better representation of sales in a given period, though not entirely complete.

It was used by booksellers and librarians to gauge interest in different titles patrons may want. It was used by publishers and authors as a marketing and promotional tool, and a way of seeing a larger picture of book sales beyond a specific house’s own sales data.

What about the New York Times list?

Well, funny enough, its bestseller lists have been A Topic lately, too. Sophie Vershbow wrote about the New York Times bestseller list for Esquire and quoted a LOT of pseudonymous insiders about how the Times list, well, often smells like bullshit (my words, not theirs) because it may be heavily curated by individuals inside the Times:

“Sarah went so far as to suggest that the Times’s curation goes beyond a preference for books acquired at independent retailers—a theory posited by many I spoke to. “It’s frustrating when you get the actual numbers of what every book on the list sold and a book with lower numbers is higher on the list,” she said. “You know it’s because of connections or The New York Times preferring one read over another…”

“In the past, when I had access to BookScan, I sometimes did an exercise with authors where I’d show the sales figures for the books on the list in any given week. They often did not correspond to the position on the list—for example, the #5 book on the list may have sold fewer copies than the #9 book on the list.”

NB: I am not the “Sarah” quoted above.

So the alleged curation of the New York Times “bestsellers” list is now being discussed in Esquire, which means it’s news outside of the industry. Industry professionals have been saying quietly for years and years that the allegedly data-driven list does not correspond to earthly mathematics verifiable through known data sources like BookScan.

(Disclosure: we also host a bestseller list here every other week. We compile it through our affiliate sales data and share the top 10 titles purchased through our links – with the exception of Harper Collins titles since November 10, when the union went on strike. It’s neat to see how many copies of a book are sold through our affiliate channels, which is the data we can track internally.)

When talking about the USA Today and NYT lists, it’s critical to note that for self-published or small press authors, hitting the NYT list is quite unlikely, even if a book is a #1 bestseller everywhere else and is a sales blockbuster.

In recent years, I think the NYT bestseller list has seemed more and more curated to reflect flatteringly upon itself. Like The Today Show or GMA, the NYT appears to focus on upholding a narrative about itself, and that narrative is more often myopic and focused on serving the desires of its audience (in part, people in the NY area who want to feel a particular way about themselves).

And, as Vershbow and others have reported, it is very possible to game the system. Forget all the right-wing jackholes buying copies of their own books to make them bestsellers.

Remember back in 2017 when The Handbook for Mortals debuted at #1? 

(That was such a wild ride, especially when Blues Traveler showed up.)

If the NYT list is easily manipulated by external parties, and very likely curated from inside the Times building, too, it’s clearly not “data-driven” unless the “data” in question is, to quote Bree Bridges, “vibes and what they think should be a bestselling book.”

This is something I think a lot of people outside the industry don't understand; USA Today tracked what books people were actually buying.

NYT is a secret formula that is mostly vibes and what they think "should" be a bestselling book. https://t.co/HgD6Z3of0Q

— Bree On a Deadline (@mostlybree) December 12, 2022

 

The USA Today list was bigger, was more inclusive in terms of format and publishing method, and also, by virtue of being in the USA Today, had a wider reach in terms of circulation and access to a general audience. USA Today used to land every morning outside every hotel room at conferences – remember that? It was called McNews in part because of its ubiquity.

So why put the USA Today list on hiatus if it’s an important resource for publishers, authors, librarians and retailers? Probably because it isn’t of financial benefit to Gannett any longer. It’s not valuable as an asset if it’s not making them much money.

It’s certainly a publicity and branding tool, what with all the book covers proclaiming authors USA Today Bestsellers. And it’s valuable to book publishing, an adjacent industry. But for Gannett, I suspect one component of the decision was that the list simply didn’t make money for them.

The loss of the list itself to the publishing industry, however, is massive and the reaction highlights for me how little cohesive and current data exists within the industry, and how siloed different readerships are by retailer, and by platform. The USA Today list featured a lot of genre fiction, especially romance, and putting the list on pause eliminates one major method of book discovery and promotion that spanned different genres, communities of readers, venues of discovery, and retail locations.

It’s contextually important to note that the USA Today hiatus is happening alongside publication layoffs that include books and arts coverage, and it’s happening alongside a bigger shift in where people talk to one another online, particularly about books.

With Twitter circling the drain of the right wing White supremacy toilet and users leaving in droves, that’s the potential loss of another method of discovery and bumping into books. (I was introduced to a lot of books on Twitter.)

Facebook groups devoted to specific genres, authors, or particular tropes are thriving, and are effective marketing and promotional venues, but again, are often very siloed into a specific theme. Plus, you have to be on Facebook.

And while TikTok is extremely powerful lately, TikTok is also a very specific silo which prioritizes a few specific types of books, more often talked about by White creators and written by White authors.

To quote Farrah Rochon:

I swear the only thing brown on the B&N BookTok table is the hand in this graphic. pic.twitter.com/YZEyyOV3xI

— Farrah Rochon (@FarrahRochon) January 14, 2022

Image description for embedded tweet: Farrah Rochon says “I swear the only thing brown on the B&N BookTok table is the hand in this graphic,” above an image of a brown hand holding a smart phone with pictures of books on it beneath a #BookTok banner.

Blogs (hello) are an older technology, and it is indeed the time of year when I file an annual report and think to myself with pride, “Yup, still here.” Our 18th anniversary is coming up in January, and our longevity is not something I take for granted, especially right now as the way in which people spread the word about books and learn about new options for reading shifts and contracts so significantly.

I know a few people have suggested that another publication should take up the work of the USA Today list and publish their own. Alas, I don’t think there’s another publication like USA Today that has the reach and/or recognition outside the publishing industry. I don’t have any predictions, either, as to what might replace that list because I don’t think it’s replaceable – and neither are the people who were laid off across so many publications.

The Times, and the USA Today, they are a-changing, and not entirely for the better.