- Here on "It's Lit," we spend a lot of time pontificating on the high canon of books.

Your Shakespeares, your Tolstoys, your erotic beast wars fan fiction.

But today we're craving something a little lighter, a little fluffier, you know, novels you pick up just for the sake of having something quick.

Your beach reads, your airport novels, your books of the month.

Books that while you might never have to read them for a seminar or a class or that sweet, sweet clout, somehow managed to dominate most water cooler discussions around literature.

We're talking your Dan Browns, your Jodi Picoults, your "Where the Crawdads Sing."

Seriously, how has this book been on top of every bestseller list for like three years straight?

Like, I don't even know what it's about.

I just know it is the mortal enemy of myself and everyone I know.

These are your blockbuster books, the best sellers of the best sellers.

And whether or not you read them or turn your nose up at them, for better or worse, they are the tent poles that support the publishing industry.

(mellow rock music) So what do we mean when we say bestseller?

Because I'll be real, it's actually a pretty nebulous term.

Technically I am one.

Don't read too much into it.

According to American literature professor Sarah Garland, "The term best-seller, or bestseller as it is used by the press, is, in a sense, always hyperbole.

To call a book a bestseller already indicates that the book has come through a series of decisions about whether to count it.

The bestseller represents the highest sales, but the highest in sales where and when?

And for how long?"

It won't surprise you to know that bestseller lists like the ones you see in the "New York Times" or "USA Today" are fairly modern inventions.

But to really trace the origin of mass literature, we must go back to look at everybody's favorite fulcrum of literary history, the printing press.

So prior to its invention in the mid-15th century, books were a precious commodity that took serious time, effort, and money to create and to buy.

But even with the printing press bringing down costs of bookmaking, most people, if they could read and afford books, usually owned mass-produced prayer books or heavily spiritual titles.

Books like John Bunyan's "Pilgrim Progress," a whip-cracking 100,000 words of heavy religious metaphor about perdition and hell.

You know, a fun beach read.

All this is to say that popular books then were functional must-haves for the soul.

And they were usually short, very short, for production costs.

Which ironically meant the Bible itself didn't particularly sell well until the 19th century.

But in the 18th century, as the novel began to take off, literary critics noticed almost cult-like devotion to titles by authors like Voltaire, whose "Candide" reportedly sold a then-staggering 20,000 copies in its first month.

And Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," which was so popular, it had merchandise, from prints to porcelain to perfume.

Your move, "Twilight" promotional body spray.

America didn't get hip to this until the mid 19th century, when publishers started realizing they could gamify the industry by following suit and also publishing books to the taste of audiences, and not necessarily by what the intelligentsia deigned to disperse to the rabble.

And then the real American bestsellers, like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," start flooding bookstores.

Books that dealt with highly topical, highly emotional subject matter became must-reads that everyone could get their hands on because of highly strategic but bold publishing maneuvers.

But unlike, say, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," most of these blockbusters eventually fell into obscurity.

The first published American bestseller list appeared in 1895 in a new monthly magazine called "The Bookman."

This magazine was imitating its London counterpart, also called "The Bookman," which had been publishing a bestseller list for several years, and used sales information from the leading bookstores in 16 cities, later extended to 30 cities in the United States and Canada, to gain information for its list of the six best-selling titles for each town.

And then in 1931 came the absolute game-changer, the "New York Times" bestseller list.

Initially it only had a grand total of five fiction and four nonfiction books on it, and it only reflected numbers from the city of New York itself.

But by the 1950s, the controversial proprietary ranking method had become the list for tracking book sales.

And by the 1970s, bookstore chains began using business models that highlighted books with four words that have changed everything.

"New York Times Bestseller."

So despite competition for movies and television, more people were actually reading novels than ever.

As literary critic Peter Swirski has highlighted, "More than half of all of the books ever published came out after the first hydrogen bomb.

More than half of all wordsmiths who ever put pen to paper did so after the birth of TV.

The number of new titles released each year in the United States quadrupled between 1950 and 1991."

So now that we're here, you might be wondering, how does one get their book on a bestseller list?

How did you do it, Crawdads?

Does it have to be a masterpiece of emotion, wit, and craft?

No.

So if you're thinking that publishers decide who's a bestseller before anything even goes to print, you're kind of right.

According to very important lawyer agent Morton L. Janklow, "Self-fulfilling prophecies play a large part in book publishing.

What makes a publisher decide that a first printing should be 100,000 copies rather than 65,000?

If a publisher buys a book for $5,000, it'll be a miracle if anything happens to it.

because in the mind of the publisher, it has already failed."

Well, let's create a hypothetical author.

His name is Jimmy Squibbles, and he is a high-profile Poke beauty influencer.

And he's ready to go ahead with his debut novel, "Hype House Blood Bath."

So let's put aside talent and suppose he has a good literary agent who manages to net him an advance from a big six, big five, big four publisher, say one and a half million dollars.

Jimmy Squibbles is in luck, because the higher the advance, the more his publisher will push "Hype House Blood Bath" harder from a marketing standpoint, which means more mainstream coverage, which translates to more sales.

Argues professor of sociology, Laura J. Miller, "The self-fulfilling nature of the list thus comes from the fact that the reading public is constantly bombarded with information about and opportunities and incentives to buy books on the list, and buy they do."

And this works, sort of.

That push has to coincide with some sort of demand in the market.

A good recent example of this is Jeanine Cummins' "American Dirt," which focuses on the topical topic of central American migration to this proud land of dirt.

"American Dirt" got a seven-figure advance from its publisher, Flat Iron Books, and not one but two reviews in the "New York Times," which is exceedingly rare.

And while one of those reviews was glowing, the other absolutely trashed it.

Said "New York Times" book critic, Parul Sehgal, "I found myself flinching as I read, not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English language receives.

Lydia's expression is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent.

It's as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they're all pulling at once.

One from the eyebrow, one from the lip, another at the nose, one from the cheek."

Yes, of course, that expression.

And once that type of negative publicity was coupled with a huge outpouring of backlash regarding Cummins' handling of a sensitive subject matter while not being Latino herself.

Well, who knows?

As in the case of "American Dirt," backlash can actually boost sales numbers a lot.

Some people were curious, and a lot of other people just wanted to support the book to stick it to the woke brigade that took issue with it in the first place.

Controversy, legit or manufactured, is extremely lucrative.

"American Dirt" is one of the top-selling titles of 2020.

(triumphant music) So good job.

One of the other big vehicles for pushing bestsellers, are book club lists.

Things like Oprah's Book Club, for example, which has single-handedly made many debut or relatively unknown authors into stars.

It even made Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel "Anna Karenina" into a bestseller in 2004.

Fordham University marketing professor Al Greco estimates that, "Sales of Oprah editions, aka books slapped with Oprah's Book Club stamp of approval on the cover, have sold a total of 55 million copies in the U.S. alone, while book publicist Patricia Eisemann has referred to Oprah's Book Club as a blessing from the book gods."

And while the list does tend to skew towards a female audience, which probably explains why noted pleasant person Jonathan Franzen pitched a fit when his novel, "The Corrections," was added to it.

If Jimmy Squibbles in his publisher don't care about being marketed to women, then getting on her list is a good thing, Jonathan.

There are, of course, less scrupulous means of getting books into people's hands.

A few years ago, there was the controversy of "Handbook for Mortals" author Lani Sarem buying up her own books through third parties and landing at the top of the New York times list for YA fiction, before being removed once she got called out.

This happens more often than you might think, but usually with nonfiction.

And when it does happen, the "New York Times" puts a little dagger next to it on the list to show that it's a little fishy and it's probably not legit, but we're going to put it on the list anyway.

like, hey, there's Ben Shapiro.

He had a book come out the very same day mine did.

Look, check, there's the dagger.

But here's the other less acknowledged caveat.

Being a bestseller does not always equate success.

Let's return to our friend, Jimmy Squibbles.

He's got that advance.

He's gotten mainstream coverage.

His novel, "Hype House Blood Bath" has been added to a bunch of book lists.

And hey, let's even say he already has a huge built-in audience as a Pokemon beauty guru influencer, and it's enough for him to get on both the hard covered list and the combined print and e-fiction "New York Times" list for several weeks.

Success?

Well, no.

None of that means his book has found a staying audience, nor does it necessarily mean that he's earned back that huge advance.

And unfortunately for Jimmy Squibbles, the math is not on his side.

With a standard boiler plate royalty rate and an MSRP of, let's say $28, you might be thinking, "Oh, okay.

So he only needs to sell 1.5 million divided by 28, which is about 53,000 books."

And he's a Poke influencer with 20 million YouTube subs and 9 billion Instagram followers.

That should be easy, right?

Well, no.

That's not how royalties work.

With an MSRP of $28, his royalties are only going to be a tiny percentage of that.

He actually needs to sell closer to maybe about 360,000 books.

And that's a lot of books.

Those are some, like, Michelle Obama numbers.

So if Jimmy Squibbles sales 20 to 30,000 copies per week for about 10 weeks, that is not only more than 99% of books that will ever sell, it's also nowhere near enough for him to earn out his advance.

And if interest in "Hype House Blood Bath" peters out, then he will probably never earn it out.

So that book was technically a bestseller, but not exactly a success.

Don't read into this.

And so like so many 19th century authors who had their moment in the sun, Jimmy Squibbles and "Hype House Blood Bath" fade into obscurity, never to reach the heights of "The Sun Also Rises" or "The Great Gatsby" or "Where the Crawdads," seriously, who is reading this book?

Mom, stop.

If all this sounds labyrinthine or intimidating for any aspiring author out there, well, there is some truth to that.

Book publishing trends are finicky and wild, with publishers hedging their bets on what they think will sell, and not necessarily with any regard to a writer's talent.

If "Hype House Blood Bath" becomes the next American classic with a multi-million dollar movie deal starring Logan Paul, you can be sure that literary agents will be looking for manuscripts that are similar to "Hype House Blood Bath" to hop on that sweet, sweet Poke influencer gravy train.

But it need not always be like this.

It's not always large publishers that pick authors out of obscurity.

There have been many notable titles that have found larger audiences via a growing indie publishing industry or through less Orthodox means.

Margaret Atwood's first published book of poetry, "Double Persephone," was published as a pamphlet by a small press in 1961, winning her in E.J.

Pratt medal.

Andy Weir's "The Martian," which sat on the bestseller list for 76 weeks, 19 of those at number one, which is nothing like them crawdads, but hey, good job, Andy, started as a series of blog posts that he compiled, self-published, and sold for 99 cents.

Lisa Genova's "Still Alice" was originally self-published on a digital self publishing platform, iUniverse, with copies literally being sold out of the trunk of her car.

And "Fifty Shades of Gray."

Yeah.

Point being that getting a book published is incredibly difficult, saying nothing about turning it into a hit.

And this is not to dunk on authors who do make it onto the list.

Hello.

Or suggest that there's no merit to a bestselling novel.

For those who do make it, it's often the result of years of sculpting away at an idea, hundreds of hours of revising and revising and completely rewriting out of a labor of love or devotion to storytelling.

But more often it's just who the publisher thinks should be there.

Sorry about it.

So good luck, Jimmy Squibbles.

I hope "Hype House Blood Bath" does well, but it probably wouldn't hurt to throw some singing crawdads in there, or whatever that book is about.

I don't know.

I don't care.