List Inflation

You’ve heard of grade inflation. Well, now we have list inflation.

As of this week, the New York Times will split its paperback bestseller list into Mass Market Paperbacks and Trade Paperbacks. Their reasoning is that splitting the list will enable them to focus more attention on literary novels that are typically printed in trade paperback and that don’t usually have the velocity of sales necessary to put them on the standard bestseller list.

Yet there’s a boon here for genre paperback writers, too, since removing those rare but powerful literary novels that stay on the list for years, such as THE KITE RUNNER, will open up more slots for genre writers. Of course, many non-literary novels are also printed in trade paperback. Nicholas Sparks, for instance. Trade paperbacks have also become the form of choice for houses chasing the success of Philippa Gregory’s THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL. So I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of books with period paintings of headless women in fancy dress on their covers making the new trade paperback list, despite their actual mediocre sales.

The New York Times did this once before. When publishers complained that HARRY POTTER was gobbling up almost half the spots on the list, the Times created a separate list for “children’s books.”

Does all this really matter? Well, yes. Recent studies have shown that while the sales of established writers such as John Grisham are unaffected by their appearance on the list, “hitting the Times” gives a huge push to new, lesser-known writers. Michael Korda actually wrote an entire book on “Making the List” (although I think he used the PW list, since it's been around longer). So making the Times is a Big Deal. Many writers even have clauses in their contracts that call for them to receive a bonus of from $2-20,000 for every week they’re on the NYT.

There are lots of other lists, of course. There’s the PW list, the USA Today list, the Ingrams list, the Amazon.com list, etc. There are even lists for regions or individual cities. This is why you’ll sometimes see a writer referred to simply as “bestselling” without the NYT added. I, for instance, can rightfully call myself a “bestselling” author because my romances regularly used to hit the Ingrams (distributers) list, even though I’ve never been near the NYT list. But despite all the grumbling that the methodology used by the Times is flawed and that the USA Today list is really more accurate, no other list has close to the clout of the Times.

The official List used to be the first fifteen slots. Recently, the Times has also been releasing what they call the extended list, which is slots 16-30. Just making the extended list is a big deal, although not as big a deal as making THE List. Traditionally, a writer needed to hit the real List to be dubbed a “New York Times Bestselling Author.” But lately some publishers have been cheating and bestowing that coveted title on writers who “only” hit the extended list (leading to predictable snide whispers).

For reasons I’m not real clear on (but which probably have much to do with sales and marketing), the Times has now decided to expand THE List from fifteen to twenty. Which means that every week, if you add all the lists together, an extra thirty-five authors will now be able to officially style themselves as a “New York Times Bestselling Author.”

Of course, my opinion of bestselling fiction has never recovered from an extensive study of the List I made several years ago. To the general public, “New York Times Bestselling Author” means “good author.” Once, that may have been (mostly) true. Today, however, it generally (but not always) means “commercial, selling-out-to-the-lowest-common-denominator author.” And no, this isn’t sour grapes. I recently saw a list NYT authors from a date in the 1950’s (Hemingway, Lawrence, Pasternak) compared to a list from the Nineties (Patterson, Cromwell, Steele). Things had definitely changed, even before the Times started proliferating and expanding their lists. As for now?

Am I the only person who thinks that what is inflated is diminished?