My finances are limited, so I use Overdrive to find most of the stories I read. The advertisement on most of those books describe the novel as having been written by a New York Times best-selling author. The writing, however, runs from excellent to good to... well, in those cases, I'm always surprised the author found an agent who was able to find a publisher who was willing to put it on the market. My evaluation of a novel is a mix of subjective and objective criteria. And perhaps the books on Overdrive don't measure up to books marketed elsewhere by writers who are on the NYTBS list. But (there's always a but, isn't there?) I encounter readers who, like myself, are also writers with more than a few years of experience and who therefore have some valid, objective things to say about the same books I read. So, I'm curious about the criteria the NY Times uses to put an author on their best-selling list. I've been told that it's not difficult for an author to get on the list, and that a large percentage of them are there because they have sold so many copies of their books. Which makes me curious about the criteria the average reader uses before purchasing a book.
I don't know a lot about it, so at risk of talking about something I know little about, I've heard that some publishers will buy some copies of a book in bulk from stores to pad the sales to get it on the NYT best seller list. This probably isn't sustainable for a long time, but just getting a book on the list for a week or two can get it a lot more exposure. So I would think that once an author 1) gets an agent and 2) gets their book sold to a major publisher, perhaps it's easy to get on the NYT list for at least a brief period. Doing this will get it in stores, and if the padding trick is real, that helps even more. But accomplishing 1 & 2 aren't easy or we'd all be doing it. Don't know how online sales factor into this.
Ah, thanks for calling attention to the padding trick, and yeah, 1 and 2 are difficult. But we all want to reach a wider audience than family and a few friends so we keep on trying!
Thanks for the link. Lots of interesting advice. I've saved the link for future use. The following was particularly interesting: "Traditional publishing with the aim of appearing on an internationally recognized Bestseller list like the Times versus self-publishing with the aim of achieving personal / business goals (and potential Bestseller status just not in the Times) is a tradeoff you’ll have to consider." I've self-published quite a few of my fiction and non-fiction books on the Amazon KDP and Smashwords platforms. But my goal has always been to find a wider audience for my writing, not a best seller rating. And my books on self-publishing platforms are just a tiny needle in a very large haystack. Ditto for books available at my website. So, I've recently began sending queries to agents as an alternative approach to satisfy my writing goals, which has led to my comments on the Rejection thread. We just keep on keeping on, don't we?
