IP Picks🔎: A Con Love Story, War Rescue and Divorce Dramedy
âž• the father/daughter whose famous fashion brand mainstreamed preppy
Welcome to The Optionist! As always, thanks for reading. Let's start this week with James Patterson, who's feuding with The New York Times over its bestseller list. Patterson's beef is old, but accurate: The New York Times list is compiled using a secret formula rather than measuring raw sales.
Patterson tweeted his complaint in the form of a letter to the Times (a letter he said the paper had refused to run). Unsurprisingly, it generated a ton of news coverage (also here, here and here).
The Times says the list is compiled by surveying a wide cross-section of stores that sell books and is "statistically weighted to represent and accurately reflect all outlets proportionally nationwide." One (good) reason the Times does this is to filter out bulk sales, which is something that politicians and others do to goose their numbers. (Even trying to catch this, the Times often gets taken by bulk sales or authors who hire companies to help them strategically buy at bookstores reputed to be surveyed by the paper.)
Exactly how else the Times weighs sales remains opaque. As Patterson points out, his newest book, Walk the Blue Line: No right, no left―just cops telling their true stories to James Patterson, which the Times had at No. 6 actually sold more copies than all but two other books (per BookScan, which tracks about 85 percent of sales). He also notes that there's a lot more book sales data available now (like BookScan) than in the past and the Times list lags behind other bestseller lists by a week. Patterson's plea to the Times is simple and straightforward: Base the bestseller list on actual sales.
Now, at one level, it’s hard to feel sorry for the bestselling author of the 21st century whose main complaint is that he's No. 6 versus No. 3 on the Times list. But I think Patterson is right here — I long ago stopped taking the Times list seriously. Still, it is the most influential and powerful of its kind in publishing, and making it or not has real economic consequences for authors. Yet few people realize it's not really ranking sales and the way in which it’s created isn't made clear.
Compared to the film and television businesses with their public box office and ratings data, there's little transparency in publishing. The New York Times should take the lead by reforming its list to more accurately reflect actual sales and to be more transparent about how it is compiled.
On to this week’s picks, which include an exclusive first look at a soon-to-be-published twisted con-artist love story that’s also heartwarming in a Ted Lasso kind of way. Here’s the full rundown:
An action thriller set during the fall of Kabul and the withdrawal of American forces.
A history of a famous fashion brand and its influence on American culture.
A black comedic memoir about divorce.
A half-con, half-love story about a fake DEA agent and the woman who loved him despite his lies.
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