At least once a month, a prospective client asks me how to get their book on the New York Times bestseller list. My answer is that it doesn’t matter. Making the list is possible, and it has almost nothing to do with whether their book does what they need it to do. I have ghostwritten 54+ books.
Not one of them needed a bestseller ranking to produce results. My clients have used their books to raise over $30 million in venture capital. To land TEDx speaking invitations. To get adopted as required university reading. To attract traditional publishing deals, launch consulting practices, and generate inbound leads years after publication.
None of those outcomes came from appearing on a list. They came from having a good book and putting it to work.
The bestseller obsession is a hugely destructive myth in publishing. It makes authors focus on a single week of sales instead of the years of value a book can provide. And the lists themselves aren’t what most people think they are.
Are Bestseller Lists Corrupt?
Chasing a bestseller list is among the most expensive distractions in publishing, and it frustrates me to see authors pour a launch budget into a single week of rank. A short, targeted buying push can move a list, and a label won that way says more about the campaign than the book. I’d much prefer to talk about what the book is supposed to do for its author.
A book builds trust with people who have never met you.Share on X
The New York Times bestseller list isn’t a simple ranking of book sales. The Times uses a secretive methodology that pulls data from selected bookstores, retailers, and online sellers, but the selection process has never been fully transparent. Which stores report sales, how books are categorized, and what weight different channels receive are all decisions made behind closed doors.
For more, see AI ghostwriting vs. human ghostwriting.
The result is a list that can be gamed and frequently is.
Bulk buying is the most common tactic. Organizations, political campaigns, and authors with deep pockets purchase thousands of copies of their own book in a single week, often through carefully distributed orders designed to avoid detection. The book appears on the list, the author gets to call themselves a “New York Times bestselling author,” and the actual reading public had very little to do with it.
For more, see a bestseller is the wrong goal for your book.
People consider the Wall Street Journal list more simple because it relies more heavily on raw sales volume. But pre-orders, bulk purchases, and the timing of promotional pushes still influence it. The list treats a book that sells heavily during launch week and then disappears the same as a book that sells steadily for years.
Amazon’s bestseller lists are even easier to manipulate. Because Amazon calculates rankings based on recent sales velocity instead of total volume, a book can hit number one in a niche category by selling a few hundred copies in a short window. This is why you see authors claiming “Amazon bestseller” status in categories so narrow that the competition is nonexistent.
On Amazon, a bestseller means the top of a category, and in some categories as few as five sales gets you there. So pick a category you can top quickly. Skip the ones where the leader sells 15,000 copies, because you’ll never catch it. My book Focus on LinkedIn sold 15,000 copies in three days and reached the top of three categories. That’s how I earned the label.
Even that kind of spike buys less than it used to. Amazon doesn’t publish how its ranking works, but authors who test it constantly report that it has smoothed out sales spikes again and again over the years.
A big free promotion once counted almost like the same number of sales and could hold a book near the top for weeks. Now, by their estimates, hundreds of free downloads count for less than one sale or borrow, and fifty sales in one day lift the rank for a day before it sinks back. One sale every day for a month does more for a book’s visibility than all fifty at once.
In an indie author group this week, an experienced author summed it up. Amazon rewards consistency over bursts. Steady ads, steady promotion, stacked small promos across a week instead of one blast. Another author added a warning about launching new books free. She’d trained her readers to wait for a free or discounted price at every launch, and she was still undoing the damage years later.
None of this is secret. Publishing industry professionals know the lists are unreliable indicators of a book’s actual impact or reach. The general public still treats “bestseller” as a meaningful credential, so the game continues. But as an author, building your strategy around hitting a list is building on sand.
What Makes a Book Valuable
The value I care about shows up in places no list measures. Doris, the author of Gators in the Soup, put it this way: “The moment I held my book in my hands, it reminded me of the first time I held my child.” Nothing in that sentence has anything to do with a sales ranking.
The books that produce the biggest results for my clients are the ones that kept working month after month, year after year, doing things that no other professional asset can do. A book builds trust with people who have never met you.
When someone spends hours reading your ideas, your stories, and your expertise, they arrive at your door already understanding how you think and what you offer. No ad, no social media post, no email campaign creates that depth of engagement. A prospect who read your book before contacting you is a different conversation than a cold lead.
A book opens doors that stay closed otherwise. Speaking engagements, media appearances, podcast invitations, university adoptions, board positions, advisory roles. Those opportunities go to people with proven authority, and a book proves authority better than any other professional tool.
A book’s value grows over time. Years after publication, a good book is still sitting on Amazon where the right person can find it and get in touch. That’s a professional asset that keeps working without any more investment of time or money. No bestseller ranking is required for that to happen. The book just has to be good and available.
What is the one-week bestseller trap?
Services that sell authors a guaranteed bestseller label are selling a week of vanity, and I think they should be embarrassed. The author gets a badge for the cover, the book slides off the list a few days later, and the budget that could have paid for a year of real marketing is gone.
Chasing a bestseller list forces you to concentrate all your marketing energy into a single week.
Everything becomes about launch week sales: the pre-orders, the promotional blitz, the social media push, the email campaign, the favors called in from everyone you know. If the numbers hit, you make the list. If they don’t, you feel like you failed.
This approach is backwards. A movie lives or dies on its opening weekend, and a book has years to find its readers, so promote it steadily over months and years.
The most effective book marketing is sustained effort. Sending copies to prospects before meetings. Pitching podcast appearances. Creating content from chapters. Getting the book into the hands of people who can open doors.
Authors who focus on launch week often burn out their audience and their budget in a single push. Authors who focus on sustained use of the book as a professional tool get more value from it every year.
What Does “Bestselling Author” Signal?
Less than people think. A short, targeted sales push can buy the label for a week, and readers and buyers have learned to look right past it.
The credential I’m proudest of on my own shelf never touched a list. Purdue used my consulting book as a course textbook four years in a row. That’s a book doing a job, year after year, for readers who needed it.
Heard elsewhere
The mechanics behind one of Richard’s own bestseller runs, a BookBub ad that moved nearly five thousand copies in three days, came up on The Kelly Kelly Show.
When you see “bestselling author” on someone’s bio, it could mean they sold 500,000 copies of a book that changed an industry. It could also mean they bulk-purchased 3,000 copies of their own book to hit a list for one week in a narrow category. The credential has been so diluted by gaming that it no longer communicates what it once did.
What does communicate is the book itself. When a prospect holds your book and reads it, they don’t care whether it was on a list.
They care whether the ideas are good, whether the writing is engaging, and whether you clearly know what you’re talking about. A well-written book that never appears on any list will outperform a mediocre book that hit number one for a week in every business outcome that matters. Your credibility comes from the quality of your ideas and the clarity of your writing, and a ranking anyone can buy adds nothing to it.
What to Focus on Instead
I tell clients up front that they’re very unlikely to earn their investment back through book sales. The return comes from using the book as the foundation of their marketing: the talks it opens, the credibility it carries into a sales meeting, the prospects who read it and call. Build a plan around that and the list stops mattering.
Write a book that’s good. That sounds obvious but it’s where most authors go wrong. They rush the process to hit an arbitrary launch date, or they cut corners on the writing because they’re focused on marketing. A book that’s well-written, informed, and generous with real expertise will outperform a rushed book with a bigger marketing budget every time.
Put the book to work. Every chapter is content you can share. Every copy you hand to a prospect is a marketing piece that keeps working. Every podcast appearance tied to your book extends its reach. Publication is where the book starts working for you. Think in years. The clients who get the most value from their books are the ones who are still actively using them two, three, five years after publication.
They keep copies on hand. They keep pitching speaking engagements. They keep sending the book to new contacts. The book keeps working because they treat it as a permanent asset instead of a one-time event.
The book on this: Sell Your Books is 660 pages on marketing a book without the hype, drawn from the launches that worked and the ones that flopped across 113+ titles.
The list-chasing industry does real harm to authors who believe a week of rank will change their careers, and I’d steer every client I have away from it. Spend the effort on the readers who’ll still be using your book years from now.
If you have a book worth writing and want to build an asset that works for years instead of a credential that lasts a week, start with a conversation.
Bestseller Lists FAQ
From the review library: Master Lists For Writers.
