Author Maya Cross wrote on a message board recently about a problem she noticed with her books on the Barnes & Noble bestseller list on its website.
Her book, Lockout, jumped up the charts all the way to number five, but then she noticed something strange happen.
I noticed something weird with book one, Locked. Sales for it spiked pretty dramatically when book two came out. It was sitting around #300-400, but it gradually began to rise. Except, once it hit #126, it stopped. And it held that position for over 24 hours. Never moving, never going up or down by even one place, despite the fact that it was moving a ton of books. I have multiple screenshots of it sitting in that exact position, while everything else shifts around it.
Then, sometime during the night, it happened. I woke up just now to find Lockout has gone from #5 in their whole store, to #126. They aren’t even being clever about it. Locked is now at #127. They’re both just sitting there pinned next to one another. There’s no way in hell the book went from #5 to #126 in eight hours organically.
To read more about the situation from Maya Cross herself, click here to check out her blog on Goodreads.
Other authors on the KBoards noticed the same coincidence. Their books rose on the list until hitting number 126.
These are rather strange coincidences for several authors and, if true, rather troublesome for B&N. It means its list isn’t decided strictly on sales, and that perhaps there are certain “rules” for certain authors.
B&N isn’t likely to reveal the way it decides how its best seller lists are ranked, but there are certain rules all lists should follow because this is a rather deceptive process if it’s true.
As booksellers talk about discoverability, if they are manipulating lists, they are performing a disservice to customers and not actually helping readers find new authors. They are promoting certain books based on metrics that readers and authors do not understand—which brings a slew of questions where it seems no one is going to like the answers.
Companies such as B&N, Amazon and The New York Times should be transparent with how their bestseller lists are calculated. Publishers and authors should know what they’re dealing with—how else will they understand what they’re genuinely facing when attempting to sell their books?
If the lists are not based on sales alone, what other metrics are being used to calculate bestseller lists? At the very least, it seems disingenuous to call something a “bestseller” if the list isn’t determined by best sales.
Aside from the most likely cause — classic screwed-up programming at BN.com — another possibility is that maybe this stems from recent B&N moves to keep adult content out of the bestseller lists that are displayed on NOOKs. B&N’s taken a lot of heat from parents over the past few years.
I ran a Waldenbooks – Store bestseller lists have always been “manipulated” – spots are sold to the publishers as store placement. Same with endcap features, table features, etc.
My guess is that B&N finally wised up and started selling the spots on their digital list, just like they do for the placement at the physical stores. So they probably use some wacko algorithm to fill the spots that aren’t sold.
And it wouldn’t surprise me to know that erotica gets automatically shoved down so that it doesn’t show on devices.