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Understanding The Times

Behind the New York Times Best-Seller (‘Not Best-Reviewed’) Lists

In an effort to shed more light on how we work, The Times is running a series of short posts explaining some of our journalistic practices. Read more of this series here.

Here, the New York Times best-seller lists staff answers frequently asked questions about how the lists are put together, and how they’re scrutinized for accuracy and impartiality.

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Credit...Kent Rogowski

How many best-seller lists does The New York Times have?

We currently have 11 weekly lists and five monthly lists. This includes our new monthly audiobook fiction and audiobook nonfiction lists. The number of lists, as well as the number of books on those lists and the kinds of books tracked, has changed over the years to help reflect trends in the bookselling industry and to best inform our readers about what is being read now.

The best-seller lists reflect sales from the previous week’s Sunday-to-Saturday time period. They are posted online on Wednesday nights for our digital subscribers and many of them appear in the Sunday Book Review 11 days later for our print readers.

The lists are divided into categories — such as fiction; nonfiction; advice, miscellaneous and how to; and children’s — so our readers can see how a book is selling relative to other books in that category.

The number of categories and rankings make the lists more useful to our readers, and also make competition between authors more fair. This way a picture book, for example, isn’t going against a cookbook or an adult fiction title.

Are there other credible best-seller lists that compete with The Times’s lists?

Our lists represent sales from tens of thousands of brick-and-mortar stores of all sizes, as well as from a large number of online bookselling vendors, in order to best represent what is selling across the United States.

Other lists may favor certain segments of the bookselling universe. Indiebound’s lists cover what is happening at independent bookstores, while USA Today has a single list that covers a sample of larger retail stores.

How do authors get on The New York Times best-seller lists? Do their books have to be sold at certain stores?

The New York Times best-seller lists are very competitive, which is what gives them the cachet they have within the book industry and with the public.

Our lists reflect the reporting from our confidential panel of tens of thousands of retailers. We do not reveal those sources, in order to circumvent potential pressure on the booksellers and to prevent people from trying to game their way onto the lists.

A number of variables go into whether a book will rank on a given week. Weeks where there are blockbuster debuts in multiple categories will be different from quieter weeks.

Do the books have to be published by certain publishing houses? Can they be self-published?

Because we receive data across the spectrum of booksellers on a national level, the lists tend to skew toward books from the large publishing houses, but small press and self-published books make appearances on our lists with regularity.

Do the books have to have been reviewed in The New York Times?

Books that get ranked may or may not get reviewed by the Book Review and vice versa. Our best-seller lists and the editorial decisions of The Times’s book editors and critics are entirely independent.

This means our lists are not a judgment of literary merit made by the editors of the best-seller lists, who remain impartial to the results. These are best-seller lists, not best-reviewed lists.

How can a book be listed at No. 1 on another list but not be at the top of The Times’s list?

Other organizations might use different reporting stores and reporting periods. Some use Monday-to-Sunday periods. (A single day can create a huge difference in data.)

And some might not apply the same rigorous standards for inclusion: Part data scientists, part investigative journalists, our best-seller list editors scrutinize sales reports with a practiced eye to uncovering manipulation.

How do The Times’s ranking methods ensure objectivity?

The best-sellers desk is staffed by three full-time editors who work independently from our news, opinion and culture desks; from the Book Review and the books desk; and from our advertising department.

Our nonfiction lists feature books from authors across ideological and political spectrums. In the last year, politicians and commentators who identify as conservative have performed as well as, if not better than, liberal ones on our lists.

Trends depend on publishing schedules and what is happening in the cultural zeitgeist.

The authors with the most weeks on our hardcover nonfiction list in the last 10 years are Bill O’Reilly (438 weeks, 330 of them as a co-author), Laura Hillenbrand (203 weeks), Malcolm Gladwell (200 weeks), Chelsea Handler (147 weeks, 18 of them as a co-author) and Michael Lewis (119 weeks).

How often and why does The Times remove books from its lists?

This happens only rarely. Since the lists began in 1931, it has occurred only a few times.

Twice technical issues were involved. In another instance a title was removed from our middle-grade hardcover list when a preponderance of reporting stores anonymously conveyed that the sales fell far outside our standards for inclusion.

We feel strongly that the best-seller lists should reflect the sale of books to individual end users. In other words, they should be sales to actual readers.

Strategic bulk or other purchases made by an author or an entity working on behalf of an author with the intention of skewing the lists happen with frequency. We receive anonymous tips about authors who have purchased their own books at stores across the country in attempts to make their sales seem organic. Those books were then shipped to climate-controlled storage units to be potentially resold in smaller numbers elsewhere, given away free to friends and associates, or ground into pulp.

While these practices are not illegal, they do not accurately reflect public interest in a book. They are also unfair to other authors who may not have hundreds of thousands of dollars at their disposal to do this or who earn their rankings based on actual sales.

Follow the Reader Center on Twitter: @ReaderCenter.

A note to readers who are not subscribers: This article from the Reader Center does not count toward your monthly free article limit.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: We Don’t Have to Like ‘Best Sellers’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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