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Why Doesn't Sci-Fi Hit the Bestseller Lists?
Pomeranian writes "Sci fi readers often deplore book bestseller lists -- because review editors actively ignore many sci-fi sales, since they don't consider that stuff "popular", even though sci-fi titles often sell in far greater numbers than "serious" highbrow lit. But this all might change soon, with the launch of Bookscan: New technology that tracks actual sales at the cash register with greater precision than ever before. When similar technology launched in the music industry ten years ago, it proved the popularity of "new country" and hip-hop overnight. This story in the Washington Post wonders: Will Bookscan do the same thing to sci-fi? NOTE: this is a *shameless* self-aggrandizing plug, because I wrote the Washington Post story! But I figured it'd be of particular interest to Slashdot readers"
CD: While I'd love to see lists that are more reflective of reality, I don't think that a pure unadulterated list is in the interest of the reading public. When I worked at Waldenbooks many moons ago, we would commonly receive copies of one book, Dianetics, from the publisher, with our (And our competitors) sales stickers already on them. While this was an extreme case, it does serve as a cautionary tale about the lengths some will go to manipulate the numbers.
In Hardcover?
Mind you, I've never bought a harlequin novel, but I always assumed they went straight to paperback.
Now, most Sci Fi is sold in paperback, as well, but my belief is that it'll make more of an impact on the hardcover sales than romance novels, and I assume that these best seller lists will still be hardcover only.
Incidentally, I'm not hugely pleased by the emergence of the new, better marketing of music. I worry that accurate figures will drive the publishing industry to be (more) driven by marketing research. Does this mean that I think that culture-distributors should not have access to the information they need to make smart sales decisions? Well, they will only use that knowledge to do evil, so yes.
Of course, Garth Brooks contaminates the radio, and N'Sync has taken away my MTV. No-one forces you to read tripe, but if this sales data causes someone to decide that C-SPAN's book-TV is a commercially valuable resource... well, that'd be too bad.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Years ago, the PTB reformed the process that music sales were recorded & how albums would thereby be certified as ``Gold" or ``Platinum."
One week, the best-selling record was some forgettable group created by the music industry & heavily hyped on MTV. (ISTR it was a group called ``Poison.") The next week . . . Nirvana was king. And Seattle suffered for it.
Just remembering a bit of history.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Pfui. Snow Crash. Neuromancer or almost anything else by Gibson. Many titles by Gregory Benford.
Herbert, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein had much less of an idea of how technology would affect society. For example, Asimov's robot stories are brilliant, but the connection to real life is subtle, because so much else of society is going to change radically before we have sufficient AI to get Asimov's robots.
"Modern authors" have been "rehashing the same old plots" for thousands of years. Read Joseph Campbell.
Aw rats. I been trolled...
Back in the early nineties I used to work in a now non-existant bookstore, that had the task of compiling the list of bestsellers for the local newspaper. The bestseller list was compiled in order using the following rules:
1. The number of copies we had of the book in stock (not the number sold). This true for fiction only - our best selling books were always stuff like "Introductory Accounting Book 1" - which we never bothered listing. Sci-fi was not exempt - we had a hardcore Scifi customer base - although we weren't a genre bookstore.
2. If the book was selling poorly it was placed higher in the list to try to boost sales!
3. Some random book that the manageress liked would be in the top ten regardless of sales (in many cases we didn't have any copies of it - embarrassing).
At least these where the rules as far as I could figure them! Scientific huh?
It might be interesting to see how the Bible holds up (or doesn't hold up) against sci-fi and other titles among American retail bookstores.
The Harry Potter books are a good example of the NYT's biases, in fact. You see, Rowling was taking up "too many slots" on the NYT Best-Sellers list, so they suddenly decided that they really needed a separate list for childrens' books (apparently to keep fantasy cooties away from the "good stuff").
This despite the fact that the Harry Potter books sell to adults as well as children.
Monitoring online activity, though, necessarily involves knowing where the endpoints of the transmission are. So it's a matter of surveillance almost by definition. And I can find out a lot about you by tracking where you go even if I don't know the specifics of what data you've downloaded. But I can tell a lot less about where a book goes after a sale no matter how much I know about its contents.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
The $cientologists aren't the only ones who did this sort of thing.
The way the New York Times bestseller list works (or at least used to work, not sure what they do now), is they get the sales figures from a few stores. Since they are (or used to be) the same stores all the time, intrepid authors/publishers used to go out and buy as many copies from those few stores that they could find. Instant bestseller list, which becomes self-perpetuating as people buy it because it was on the list.
IIRC the books usually were those non-fiction business fad books (How to Drive Your Company to Just Unbelievable Success by Shouting Slogans at your Salesforce kinds of things).
If we really tracked best sellers we would probably see coloring books, shopping catalogs or other weird things showing up in the lists as well. We may even see the one thing that publishers never want known: the biggest determining factor is what is and what isn't a best seller could well be price.
A lot of the built in prejudices of the best seller lists is that the dime novels of yester year were out selling literature, largely because of price.
I highly reccomend actually reading the bible.
It's got some pretty strange shit, like a race of giants having children with earthly women.
And Jesus didn't exactly advocate the American Suburban life.
I'm not saying you should take it as God's word or anything, but it's pretty interesting. Especially if you can find an edition that includes the non-canonical books.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Adjusted for Inflation, Gone with the Wind is still #1. Titanic is #7.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted/
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