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Cate Paterson faced a familiar publishing problem: Her work was locked out of the bestseller lists. As fiction editor at Pan MacMillan in Australia, Paterson frequently published fantasy titles -- books in the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien, filled with typical Dungeons-and-Dragons nerd fare like enchanted beasts and dark castles. Though the books would sell very well, often in the range of 30,000 to 40,000 copies, they'd never be reported in Australia's bestseller lists, since major newspapers there, like their counterparts in the United States, compiled their lists based not on actual sales figures, but on a poll of a small selection of favored, elite bookstores. And they didn't pay attention to sf bookstores, where Paterson's fantasy titles sold in high volume. She was flying under -- or above -- the radar. "Mainstream adult fantasy titles," Paterson complains, "would never have made it onto one of those old snooty, snobbish bestseller lists."
Or so it was until December 2000, when a new high-tech service called Booktrack launched in Australia. The pioneering firm uses scanners to track each book purchase at the "point of sale" -- the cash register -- providing a never-before-seen snapshot of which books actually sell. The Sydney Morning Herald began basing one of its lists on the Booktrack info.
Bingo. The following summer, Paterson published Cecilia Dart-Thornton's fantasy tome The Ill-Made Mute and watched as it hit the Herald's bestseller list, ranked next to major mainstream authors like Sue Grafton and "serious" fiction such as Zhou Wei Hu's novel Shanghai Baby. Paterson was exultant. The technology had, in one swift blow, destroyed a decades-long bias against her genres. "It's showing that what people are really buying was simply not reflected in the old bestseller lists. They weren't even vaguely reflecting reality."
Now the American market is poised to experience the same uneasy revolution. In the last few months, the American version of Booktrack -- called Bookscan -- has been slowly gathering steam. When these point-of-sale tallies begin showing what's really selling in this country, U.S. bestseller lists may never look the same again. "Once the info is there, it'll necessarily change the way bestseller lists are reported," predicts Rob Cisco, executive vice president and general manageer of the VNU retail entertainment and information group, which runs Bookscan and Booktrack. Washington Post Book World editor Marie Arana says that "if Bookscan works, the idea of a bestseller list might become moot very soon."
Newspaper bestseller lists have long been a sore point, rife with charges of bias and skulduggery. To assemble their lists, organs such as the New York Times and The Post typically call up a list of bookstores and ask them for their top sellers. But they almost always ignore stores that sell "genre" books -- e.g., spirituality or science-fiction titles -- which makes the list a reflection of cultural consensus, antiseptically cleansed of the reading that's done outside the traditional range of the nation's cultural capitals.
For years, these lists thus ignored the seismic popularity of books such as the Christian apocalyptic Left Behind series, as numerous critics of bestseller-compiling have noted. These books will hit the bestseller list for a few weeks, then quickly vanish, even though they continue to enjoy brisk sales in Christian bookstores nationwide. "The book industry is like the only industry where you can't get definitive numbers on what's selling. You can massage the numbers any way you want," complains Dan Balow, director of business development for the Left Behind series at Tyndale House Publishers. That a single series has its own designated business director is itself testimony to its market power: By the end of 2001, Tyndale had sold more 50 million copies in the series.
Not that major newspaper editors particularly deny this. As most admit, their goal is not to replicate reality but to provide a snapshot of the culturati, a demographic that is considerably more likely than the rest of the country to be obsessed with, say, the problems of the ionospherically wealthy. That'd explain why The Nanny Diaries -- a tell-all roman {grv}a clef written from the perspective of a nanny in the employ of a well-to-do Manhattan couple -- stormed the New York Times fiction list (at the number 6 slot in early April) while netting only 20th place on Bookscan's nationwide tally. "I don't think we're missing the boat on popular books. We're missing the boat, calculatedly so, on things like religious books," says Chip McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review. "I don't think we have to apologize for that."
Publishers' Weekly executive editor Daisy Maryles, too, argues that her magazine's lists are "a form of reporting -- they're not based on absolute numbers." PW solicits information -- sometimes raw sales numbers, sometimes just rankings of the top sellers -- from chains and independent booksellers across the country. To cover spiritual literature, PW runs a monthly religion-books list, polled from the religious bookstores that aren't covered in the main bestseller rankings. At The Post, the lists are compiled by a selective polling of Washington stores; as Arana notes, "Our lists are adamantly regional."
This cultural landscape could change dramatically under Bookscan data -- particularly when you consider the enormous impact its sister company, Soundscan, created in the music industry. When Billboard adopted Soundscan's high-tech tracking information of CD sales in May 1991, the Top-40 charts were transformed in a single evening. Country music and hip-hop, which elite trendsetters had previously regarded as backwaters, suddenly shifted far higher up the list, reflecting their previously unrecognized popularity among the rural and urban populations who had gone unpolled in Billboard charts.
This sudden shift then sparked the inevitable feedback effect of all bestseller lists; the more Americans saw this stuff on the lists, they more they bought, and a virtuous cycle began. "New Country" was born overnight, an unexpected product of high-tech tracking. Soundscan "had a huge effect on music," says Rick Richter, president of sales and distribution for Simon & Schuster, and a strong supporter of Bookscan, who anticipates a potentially similar impact on publishing.
Of course, it's still too soon to know what Bookscan's full impact might be. No American newspapers have yet adopted its data for their bestseller lists. Indeed, Bookscan currently only has 65 percent of national bookstores online, so its data still aren't complete. (And its primary goal is to sell its data to publishers, hungry for hard numbers that tell them, among other things, how the competition is faring; media are only a secondary market, from Bookscan's perspective.) Recent history suggests, in any event, that the American media will eventually begin to use the technology for their own marketing purposes. When Booktrack rolled out in the U.K. in 1996, newspapers initially resisted -- then leapt aboard once they realized that Booktrack would speed up the arduous task of compiling lists, giving them a jump on their competition. British papers also began publishing more lists, including even regional ones, since Booktrack -- like Bookscan -- can burrow down to individual neighborhoods.
"That's what's really interesting to me," says Maryles. "The idea of doing more specialized lists."
This might make Booktrack attractive for another reason: helping media determine whether an author or publisher is trying to bootstrap a book onto the bestseller lists by orchestrating bulk-buying sprees. Editors already try to spot these huge local orders -- such as Washington Post reporter David Vise's recent purchase of more than 16,000 copies of his own book, The Bureau and the Mole (a bulk buy that Vise says was only intended to permit him to sell signed books on his own web site) -- and adjust or annotate their lists accordingly. Last spring, another dramatic local spike for a single title went undetected when the basket manufacturing giant Longaberger "encouraged" its 70,000 sales reps to purchase the posthumously published autobiography of company founder Dave Longaberger, and the title soared briefly to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times list.
This sort of geographic sales-tracking could fuel newly variegated rounds of sociological cocktail chatter, by illustrating the dividing lines of America, much like the infamous blue and red maps of the last presidential election. We might see a heartland that consumes vast quantities of spiritual literature and genre fiction, versus an aggressively secular power axis of New York, Washington and L.A., gorged on lifestyle fare such as Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks's recent satirical sendup of "latte towns" and new suburban shopping enclaves.
On the other hand, we could find that regions are more similar than not. And some editors suspect that the titles that occupy the empyrean realm of the charts -- the top 10 sellers or so -- will remain the same even in Bookscan's data. "When it comes to the big national bestsellers, [most bestseller lists] are all pretty much on the same page, and that's not likely to change with Bookscan," says Maryles.
Either way, we'll find out soon: What, precisely, does popular mean? •
Clive Thompson is an editor-at-large for the Canadian high-tech monthly Shift. His email address is clive@bway.net.
Dead Reckoning (The Washington Post, 8/4/02)
Village People (The Washington Post, 8/4/02)
The Hills Are Alive (The Washington Post, 8/4/02)
Book World
