#5: The NYT List Rewards Categories that are Wildly Different If you buy 10 of your favorite book on Amazon to give as gifts, the online retailer will only report one copy sold to the NYT list. #4: The NYT List Doesn’t Count All Copies of Books Sold At Once Amazon does report to the NYT list, but most Internet retailers don’t. Considering there are more than 10,000 of just those three stores, that’s a lot of books that don’t count toward the list. This includes Target, Costco, and Walmart. Some don’t, even if they are huge book sellers. Only “certain vendors” with a relationship with the NYT report their sales to the list. #3: The NYT List Doesn’t Count Books Sold At All Stores Your friend’s book about George Washington released six months later might skyrocket up the list with half the sales because it didn’t go up against such strict competition. Your book about Abraham Lincoln might sell 50,000 copies, but not make it on the list because the others sold so much more. Say it’s released the same week as a biography of Steve Jobs, a Michelle Obama cookbook, a huge TV show tie-in book, and a book by the Navy SEALS who took down the Taliban. Say Bill Clinton releases his autobiography. #2: The NYT List’s Relativity Means Some Bestsellers Might Not Get On At All Getting on the list is not an indicator of overall sales or success, but merely a marker of who-was-buying-what in a certain time period. A book will land on the NYT Bestsellers list if it sold “the most” books in a certain category in a certain week. It’s easy to judge someone’s success based on if they got a “Gold Record” (for selling 500,000 copies) or “Platinum Record” (1 million copies sold). In the music industry, awards are given for the amount of copies sold. #1: The NYT List is Relative to a Specific Week And while it is a great honor to be on it, it is not the end-all, be-all for many reasons. There’s a lot of confusion and mystery surrounding the venerable New York Times bestseller list. How to Get Writing/Editing/Proofreading Help for Your Work.How the New York Times Bestseller List Works.How Long Should Your Book Be? Word Counts by Genre.Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Getting Your Own Book Published (But Couldn’t Get Anyone To Tell You).The Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Sixties Cookbook.The Competition: Sample from Skinny Italian Table of Contents: Sample from Skinny Italian How To Write a Non-Fiction Book Proposal.Guide to Getting Your Own Book Published.

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