Authors spend a lot of energy considering, dreaming, and working on making their book a best seller. The general consensus is that if you want to make your way onto a best-seller list, any best-seller list, you have to sell at least 5,000 books in a week, or maybe 10,000. Beyond that, things get complicated depending on which best-seller list you’re looking to land.
Fun Fact: all best-seller lists are not created equal. Different lists use different data. No one has access to all of the sales made by every single book published in the US in a given week. It takes months for publishers to assemble that data and it’s impossible to get it all in time to publish a weekly best-seller list. “At the end of the day, the publishers will have a hundred percent understanding of what was sold,” says Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly, “but they won’t have it by the end of the week.”
This project followed the unrecorded life cycle of a best-selling novel – not only its height of popularity but how these works slowly disperse through a bewildering number of outlets both as new books but even more interestingly as used books – one of the last uncountable retail activities.
This is a hunt for novels on the loose, untethered from expectations, dropped from the sales radar of both the publisher and the author herself. A book once enthroned on the front table at Barnes and Noble is now down and out, lurking in the unalphabetized wilds of the Goodwill shelf, the lower stacks of a Friends of the Library outlet, a specific memento mori for any reader.
For my project UnConscious Words – Bestselling Edition I hunted down the top bestsellers of 2011 to 2021, ten years, ten books, including Fifty Shades of Gray, The Help, and Game of Thrones. The project includes the poetry technique (I learned this, I did not invent this) of searching through a book and recording the words that “jump out”. I write down about a page of words. Using just those words, with a few helping words like A, The, An – I create about five to seven poems from each novel.
Do we want to measure worth and value through the single lens of economics? If a book contributed to the GDP does that anoint it as a work of art? That is part of the question I ask while researching and creating the list of books. Did they all end up on the shelves of used books? Yes, they did, a fate that not only connotes fame but also value. In 2012 enough copies were purchased from enough official outlets for the book to be included in the best-selling number count. By 2021, the book was still at large but now circulated from yard sale to Goodwill to a Little Free Library. Visit a used bookstore and note the number of multiple copies of the same book. Did all the book club members re-sell their copies? What are the criteria for keeping a book?
with this collection, I hope to give a former best-selling book, a second chance to be heard.
Collins, Susanne, The Hunger Games, Scholastic Press, New York, NY 2008
The series reached into the best-seller lists through the decade, beginning with The Hunger Games which I used for this project as it was the first. I read all three Hunger Games novels and watched the first film version. This series as well as Twilight (reasonably) influenced a number of young authors who have recreated the love triangle trope featuring the strong talented woman making the choice of who to love but winning the game on her own. A welcome literary change.
Words by Suzanne Collins -Hunger Games 1
an idea- say- blue
both grasped exactly
In tangled confusion ahead
Ahead, Back, Locked
the hurt
Several toiled because
The last option was silence
