What makes a bestseller?
Firstly, we need to establish the terms of reference and ask: what is a bestseller?
A bestseller has a nominal numerical value attached — by industry standards a book has to have sold more than 10,000 copies in the traditional book trade (that is, brick and mortar shops) to make the Nielsen Bookscan bestseller list.
The sales data is provided by title, by genre, by publisher, by channel. Every possible data set is supplied back to publishers on their own titles and also their competitors. It is a data rich game which is why we see so many copy cat trends: outback noir, misery memoirs, vampires, LGBTQI+ themes as the major houses vie to duplicate each others bestsellers.
The latest 2022 data shows adult fiction grew by 5% to represent 29% of the market, adult nonfiction declined by 5% and represents 42% of the market and Children’s, which represents 29% of the market, fell by 4.4%.
Genre fiction tops the bestseller lists very year: crime, thriller, romance all by brand name authors keep the fiction market booming. Think Harlen Coben, Stephen King Marian Keyes and Sarah J Maas. This is why publishers typically put all their resources behind the big-name fiction authors and leave emerging writers with a tiny marketing spend.
I witnessed this transformation when I was a publisher at Macmillan in the 1990s. A fiction author was anointed to be ‘made’ with a massive marketing spend, love-in dinners with key retailers, sponsored sessions at the Booksellers conference and a massive push by the rep force to dominate the bookshops with mountains of stock — just as the PR blitz began.
This is how Matthew Reilly went from being the self published author of Ice Station to being feted by the book trade. He was ‘made’, in the same was that Trent Dalton was made by Harper Collins, Diana Reid was made by Ultimo, and Pip Williams by Affirm.
How to self-publish a best-selling book
OK, I hear you ask, how do I do this without being bigged up by a trade house?
You can do it. And there has never been a better time.
During lockdown as we turned online for entertainment and shopping, Instagram and TikTok became a means to create awareness and demand. US novelist Colleen Hoover, the #booktok lockdown sensation was the Australian bestseller of 2022, having sold 1.2M books when the average literary fiction book would struggle to sell 2000. In fact, anything more than 1000 copies for an indie debut is good.
An entire ecosystem of demand from readers was created that was not managed by the marketing department of a major publishing house.
Looking at three of 2022’s top five Australian bestseller titles proves this. Aforementioned Colleen Hoover was relatively unknown before #booktok propelled her books into million copy sales. Local bestseller Scott Pape created demand through his own Barefoot Investor newsletter, not by starring at a bookseller convention. Similarly, Nagi Maehasi of RecipeTin Eats started by sharing her recipes online and the resultant book Dinner was 2022s bestselling book by value selling $4.4M and 164K copies.
A bestseller is simply a book which captures the consumer zeitgeist.
I believe for all authors, framing the terms reference of what a bestseller means is an important exercise. You can and should value your work by other measures. Many books that changed history were not “bestsellers” in the author’s lifetime (Emily Bronte, Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Steig Larson, Zora Neale Hurston ... the list goes on).
Once you see bestseller status as a construct of the publishing industry, you will be liberated form the self-imposed judgment game. And who knows you’re your future holds?
