The New York Times are cutting their down their Bestsellers lists. A note leading the advance Bestseller List edition sent out to subscribers said, “Beginning with the advance BSL edition that will be delivered toward for February 5, 2017 there will be revisions to multiple categories in the publication. These changes will span weekly and monthly lists.” Among the changes are the elimination of the Graphic Novels/Comics and Manga Bestseller Lists.
“In recent years, we introduced a number of new lists as an experiment, many of which are being discontinued. We will continue to cover all of these genres of books in our news coverage (in print and online). The change allows us to devote more space and resources to our coverage beyond the bestseller lists,” the Times said in a statement.
After reaching out to the Times Digest, who distributes the list, we were told that the “Best Sellers List has chosen to focus on its core lists,” starting with the February edition.
The Times measures sales by culling sales numbers from vendors around the country, including “many hundreds of independent book retailers; national, regional and local chains; scores of online and multimedia entertainment retailers; supermarkets, university, gift and big-box department stores; and newsstands.” In short, they measure actual numbers, rather than the comic industry’s usual way of measuring a book’s success. Diamond, the main distributor of Direct Market comics, charts their numbers based on how many books a store or retailer purchases. Once your LCS orders a book, Diamond considers that book sold, and don’t care as much about how it does on the stands. Which is why you can see a book has sold out first thing Wednesday morning, but your local shop has three thousand copies of it on the rack.
Taking a look at the New York Times list, for instance, shows much of the list is owned by Raina Telgemeier, but her books are no where on Diamond’s Top 50 Graphic Novel lists. With their real numbers reporting, the Times list had been a much stronger indicator of what comics were selling than what comics were available.
Many in the industry have felt this way, too. Reported by Publishers Weekly many are reaching out to the Times to reconsider their decision. “If we have to compete with the sales numbers of fiction and nonfiction, it’s only going to be the outlier titles that will hit the list,” said Charles Kochman, Abrams Comic Arts’s editorial director. “We can’t compete with the numbers of, say, the self-help category or mass market airport fiction. Comics need to be measured against themselves, not the larger whole of books.” According to the Publishers Weekly article, Kochman claims to have reached out to Norton, Scholastic, Fantagraphics, First Second, and Oni Press to help canvas The New York Times in bringing back the list.
Among the other lists being cut: middle and young adult ebooks and the mass market paperbacks list.
