Oscar Season may have finally reached its glittering conclusion, but the natural desire to know what is finally, conclusively, objectively the best spans both season and medium. For literature, there are two measures: major prizes and best-seller lists.
While the results of the former may be debated, sometimes bitterly, it is difficult to argue that the prize winners are utterly unqualified. Whatever your literary preference, it is unlikely that you find either Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, or Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which received the 2009 PEN/Faulkner award, to be lacking in merit.
This is not the case with best-seller lists, whose methods and results are fiercely contested. The most well known list is published by the New York Times, and divided into various categories by genre—fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and, depressingly, “advice”—and by format—paperback, hardcover, and mass-market. (For the uninitiated, mass-market books are small, cheap paperbacks, unique both in their limited genres—most mass-market books are science fiction, romance, or mystery paperbacks—and their return policies, which require bookstores to return only the front cover, not the entire book, to receive credit.)
These divisions address issues of practicality—if you’re looking for a best-seller to give to a history buff, you’re likely to be annoyed by having to sift through books on healthy relationships, and if you’re trying to remember the name of the newest, hottest diet plan, it would be a pain to scan an unsorted nonfiction list. There’s another, snobbier impulse at work: Having compared sorted and unsorted best-seller lists, I’ve seen that mass-market fiction sales tend to trump those of trade paperback fiction. If the Times didn’t separate the two, it might risk not being able to print “quality” fiction titles in the few top spots on its lists.
Sometimes, though, the divisions are less straightforward. Just as booksellers do, bestseller lists struggle with deciding where to place books. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series was a teenage phenomenon, but adults are catching on, and Meyer’s “adult” book, The Host, is currently No. 3 in the Times’ hardcover fiction category. What does this mean for Twilight’s placement on the list and on the shelf? Do you take it for granted that fans will look in more than one place for their favorite authors? A concrete example: How many Michael Chabon fans would find Summerland lingering in the young adult section?
Problems of classification extend into the literary world at large, but other, simpler questions are isolated to the lists—for instance, concerns about how the best-seller lists are compiled. Some consider Internet sales, some don’t. Some restrict themselves to independent bookstores, excluding big names like Borders. Most don’t even rely on actual sales, but on supplier’s orders: If a bookstore orders hundreds of copies of a particular book, that number is counted before the store itself reports a single sale. That’s how Harry Potter books showed up on best-seller lists weeks early, if anyone was wondering.
It’s a divisive issue, this notion of the “best-seller.” Culture wars are waged over this kind of thing. Perhaps hoping to avoid the conflict, the New York Times refuses to divulge details of its selection process, which isn’t such a bad idea. After seeing this year’s crop of angry articles on the Academy Awards in response to Departures’ beating The Class and Waltz with Bashir for Best Foreign Language Film, I’m okay with some best-seller secrecy. In this case, obscurity, served with a dash of elitism, is better than righteous fury.
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