Bestseller Lists

I assume that the purpose of publishing a Bestseller List is to help readers make informed choices about their next purchases, much like the stock market prices claim to indicate the underlying fundamental value of shares. But I am afraid, like in the stock market, here too the customers end up making uninformed choices. Here is why.

The Best Seller Lists are normally prepared based on the sales information of books in that particular week. Some of them may have been released before the week and some released in that particular week. The Non-fiction top five in a leading newspaper today read like this: India's Unending Journey (Mark Tully), Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer (Yashwant Sinha), India After Gandhi (Ramachandra Guha), India, The Next Global Super Power (Namita Bhandare), and Discordant Democrats (Arun Maira). Now, I will stick out my neck and say that I have serious objections with atleast three of the books finding a place in this list. But given the publishing houses and the specific nature of each of the three books, I am not surprised. I am also confident that, except for maybe two, none of the rest will find place in the list two weeks hence.

Does this list give the potential buyer any valuable insights into his next purchase? I do not think so. In fact, I will claim that given a list of all the releases for the past 4 weeks, the list could have been predicted, and with some luck even the order of sales. Mark Tully and Ram Guha are predictable, though their presence in the list only reinforces their already considerable star power and says little about the quality of the book. (The other three are also predictable, for other reasons) It is also interesting to note that three of the books were released in June and two in the second half of May.

The popularity of a book in the immediate aftermath of its release is undoubtedly a wrong barometer for judging the quality or standard of the book. It is something similar to the first day or week, of the latest blockbuster movie release. Have we not seen numerous blockbuster movies run out of steam within the first week itself? Unlike movies, book demand is more inelastic or sticky, and therefore takes a longer time for the market forces to play itself out and adjust to the real demand. It is understandable that a new book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Bill Gates or Manmohan Singh,would jump straight into the Best Seller list. (In fact if Indra Nooyi or Lakshmi Mittal or even Shilpa Shetty wrote a book, all of them would have to be in the Best Seller List, if only for a week or a month!) We ought to be surprised if it did not. Such a launch would only be a testament to the publisher's marketing skills rather than a judgement on the inherent substance of the book. Therefore, it may not be wrong to say that the Best Seller list ends up distorting the buyers preferences.

In fact, I am inclined to believe that such best seller lists are another marketing tool which helps the publisher drive home a book's instant popularity even higher. (One can argue that there is no contradiction between the publisher's marketing objective and the reader's right to read the "best" book. The publisher knows best, and marketing is anyway all about helping people make the right choices. The only problem with this line of thought is that what is right for the marketer is not always the best option for the customer!) It is also useful for potential publishers about the insights it gives them about the market of book readers.

However, these lists can still be useful for the buyer, in so far as it gives a list of those books we ought to be wary of purchasing! It is similar to the stock market, where we ought to be cautious of over-valued or bubble shares. In light of the above, we can conclude that though the bestseller list can contain the good books, thanks to the nature of the modern marketing machinery it is also likely to contain the not so good ones.

How do we make the Bestseller List more reflective of what is inside the book, so that it can help readers make informed choices? One way is to take into account the sales information for longer periods of say, three months and more, for listing out the Bestseller. Another, is to include only books with a publishing time lag of say, one month, in the list. (This of course has obvious disadvantages, but still helps the buyer) I am sure there are other parameters which can directly measure or atleast be a proxy for the quality of the latest book releases.