Bestsellers

Amazon Charts

/ rtrube54 / 4 Comments
Amazon Charts

Screenshot of Amazon Charts page for week of May 14, 2017

Did you get a new type of email from Amazon last week? I did, with a link to the new Amazon Charts website. For years we have been able to see real-time sales rank information on any book on Amazon’s site as well as hourly updates of print and e-book best sellers.

Now Amazon is taking on The New York Times and other venerable best seller lists with a weekly best seller list of fiction and non-fiction books. With a twist.

The twist is that Amazon breaks this into “most read” and “most sold.” “Most read” uses all the information it collects from users of its Kindle e-readers and those using Audible to listen to audio books. “Most sold” includes print, e-books, and audio purchases through its marketplace.

On the one hand, this utilizes the immense amount of data Amazon is constantly collecting to compile its own bestseller lists. At the same time, it is a list that only reflects those using Amazon to buy and read or listen to books. By contrast, The New York Times compiles its lists from a sampling (according to its own secret formula) of independent and chain booksellers and only tells us what people are buying. Truthfully each is selective.

One thing that Amazon does is provide these lists side by side on its “Best Sellers & More” page that includes its Charts lists side by side with The New York Times best sellers. Granted, the books on the Times list also are linked to Amazon’s site. This page also provides editors picks, hourly updates of print, Kindle, and Audible best sellers, and a list of 100 books to read in a lifetime, curated by Amazon’s editors.

Back to Amazon Charts. For each book on the top 20 “most read” and “most sold” lists, you can see reviews, purchase the book, and read a preview. On some books, such as Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Wings and Ruin we have a comment like “unputdownable.” There are also indications of whether the books are eligible for “Prime Reading” (a program where Prime Members can read the book for free) or “Kindle Unlimited” programs.

Obviously, this is designed to drive sales on the Amazon site for those wanting to buy the latest best sellers. Why not? I am not usually that interested in best sellers, unless it is something I want to review, in which case I want to get the book and review it while it is trending. (So such lists do have uses beyond driving sales).

My wife does something online that suggests another use for Amazon Charts. She uses online sites to “pre-shop” so she can decide whether she wants to buy a particular item at a local store. I think Amazon Charts is a great way to pre-shop for books that you might want to browse at a local store and purchase. But then, I think brick and mortar stores are a cultural good that ought to be preserved. Whether or not you agree with my book buying preferences, “Charts” offers another site to learn about the latest and best in books.

When There are No Blockbusters

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Oh the places you'll go

This is an interesting season in bookselling. There are no blockbuster bestsellers like The Martian or The Girl on the Train (still selling well). So you know what has been on the top of the bestseller lists lately? None other than Dr. Suess’s Oh! The Places You Will Go! a graduation gift favorite. Actually, his Green Eggs and Ham also made the top 20 in print sales this year.

adult coloring book fractalsWhat else is selling well right now? Well, adult coloring books continue to lead sales growth, though not at last year’s pace. My son has even gotten in on the action with his Adult Coloring Book: Fractals. Coloring books continue to lead the way in non-fiction sales, although self-help and religious books and Bibles also saw healthy increases. Currently Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is number 2 in Bookscan’s Top 20 Print Books. It is curious to speculate on what the combination of these trends means. Is life sufficiently stressful that the diversion and mental engagement of coloring, the quest for spiritual understanding, and caring for our own nests are our ways of responding? Or, apart from the tidying up aspect, are we attempting some kind of return to childhood? Maybe Marie Kondo is kind of like the voice of our mothers getting us to clean up our rooms!

It is interesting that during periods when there are no blockbusters that back list books appear or re-appear. For example, Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages was originally published in 1995 (I remember discussing this in a church small group around that time!). It has been re-packaged and re-published more recently. Tom Rath’s Strength Finders 2.0 also continues to sell well, perhaps due to its popularity among professionals in helping them identify the things they want on their resume’s. Several books with Harry Potter tie-ins are also in Bookscan’s Top 20. The only new work with significant sales is Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air, the story of a neurosurgeon in training diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer, who must reassess the meaning of his life as death approaches.

The big drop has been in the fiction category. No new book by Harper Lee or movie tie-ins like Andy Weir’s The Martian is driving sales. The closest thing is Jo Jo Moyes Me Before You, a love story that has been turned into a motion picture. The other fiction works are backlist from previous years. On the other hand, both juvenile fiction and non-fiction saw growth, led by the “holidays/festivals/religion” category.

One wonders with all the terrible world events and turmoil at home whether there is indeed some form of turning to spiritual values or turning inward. It is interesting even in the adult fiction categories that religion, science fiction, and graphic novels showed the greatest growth. Are we giving more time to contemplating dystopian futures or looking for some place to find hope?

Maybe I’m reading between the lines too much. It’s clear that in adult fiction, nothing has come along in terms of great writing or on popular themes similar to books in the recent past. Maybe this is a good occasion to catch up on some of the classics we’ve been meaning to read or re-read. I’ve noticed you can always find these at any good bookseller and they would be glad to help you find something good!

 

A Different Best-Seller List

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seven-habits-highly-coveyI’m a sucker for a book list–any book list. I’m always curious about what others find interesting enough to read. Best-seller lists tell me about what lots of people are interested in reading. That doesn’t mean I run out to buy the book, but rather that it gives me some ideas, when I talk to readers, what they might be reading. For lists that include “backlist” books, I’m always interested to find out how many of these books I’ve read, and the “holes” in the list give me ideas for things I might want to pick up some day.

AbeBooks, an Amazon company specializing in used, rare, and out of print books, came out with an interesting list recently that combines “book list” and “best-seller” list. It was their list of the 100 bestselling used books since 2000. The surprise for me was that at the top of the list was Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. They had an interesting explanation of why this came in ahead of more significant literary works like To Kill a Mockingbird (number 2) or one of my favorites that I did buy at a used bookstore, East of Eden (at number 44). They said, “This is a book that many people want to read, but no one wants to keep.”

Actually, that is an interesting statement, because to some degree, this must be true of every book on this list, because these all are used books. For various reasons, the original purchasers didn’t want to keep them, but others want to read them. Truthfully, there are a number on the list I would agree to this being true: Khaled Hosseini’s books, The Five Languages of Love by Chapman, One Hundred Years of Solitude, to name a few. I’m glad I read them, but had no desire to read them again or have them hanging around.

There are some I’ve read that I wouldn’t part with (my heirs might or probably will however!): East of Eden, and anything by Hemingway would be on the list as well as C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. And there are some I’d never touch, including the recent novels of Stieg Larsson and Eat, Pray, Love. (Sorry if that offends anybody–books are like ice cream and everyone has their own taste).

Then there were some I would like to read or re-read someday. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby are up on myu list of re-reads. Believe it or not, I’ve never made it through Gone with the Wind and given my love of all things Civil War, I probably should some day. Freakonomics and The Tipping Point are on one of my TBR piles. I’ll probably re-sell them as soon as I read them (if I do).

One of the most interesting things this reflects is the whole world of used bookselling. The truth is that probably over two-thirds of the books I read are used, or from a used bookstore. The new books I get, I almost always buy at significant discount or get free. I think one of the commandments in my universe is “thou shalt not pay full price for a book”. This means that the person who wants to read a book but not keep it is one of my best friends!

So, are you curious how many of the books on the AbeBooks list are ones I’ve read? To make this fun, I will invite you to guess, and post the answer on Friday.