“You can set yourself up for NYT best-seller status to a large degree, but ultimately it must be earned.”
~ Debra Hilton
The NYT Bestseller Formula
Recently, I had an enquiry from an agency asking if I could help them put one of their authors on the New York Times best seller list. He already had an Amazon bestseller sticker (which you can achieve quite quickly – and fleetingly – if you know how) but wanted the prestigious New York Times stamp of approval.
I hear this question often because so far, I’ve ghost-written seven NYT best sellers and worked on the marketing for three of those, so I sent them my formula and asked some questions about the book in question.
The response I received was:
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“I’ve read your questions but what I want to know is: Can you get someone on the bestseller list, or can’t you? Does your ‘formula’ work?”
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This told me two important things:
- I don’t want to work with these people no matter who the author may be; and
- The book probably doesn’t meet the criteria I outlined for them.
However, I thought that other people might be interested in the formula I use to determine if NYT bestseller status is a current possibility for an author or more of a future prospect.
The Formula
(Author Status + Book Quality + Topic) x (Distribution Channels + Sales # + Platform)
The elements in the first set of parentheses will determine the level of enthusiasm and shareability a book has. Added together these will provide a number that can be multiplied by the three elements in the second set of brackets and influence your likelihood of success.
It’s one reason why many new authors piggy-back on a well-known name, preferably someone who has expertise in the book’s field. For example, if you want to write about physics, a foreword by Stephen Hawkins is valuable, while one by Vladimir Putin is far less so.
While you can game the system on many best-seller lists, for the more prestigious ones (like NYT) the quality of the book is a non-negotiable. It can be non-traditional (especially if you’re Seth Godin), but it must be valuable in both content and style.
Topic is also important. I have no doubt that there will be an avalanche of books on Trump, Biden, and Harris coming out over the next few months, and they will have an enormous advantage when it comes to the list. Last year, unlikely bestsellers explored solitude, coping with stress, immunology and virology, meditation and mindfulness, productivity at home and a plethora of subjects related to the unusual global events.
The second half of the equation relates to sales because bestseller status is a numbers game. Traditionally published books have a huge advantage because of the distribution channels they can claim, but these days you can work around that as well and even self-published and hybrid books can achieve bestseller status IF you have the platform and sales numbers in other ways. There’s a reason why so many books are launched at conferences: clustered sales numbers are marvellous for Amazon rankings. Total sales also help your NYT potential, but you need to sustain those levels, not merely rely on a single spike.
Can YOUR Book Achieve NYT Bestseller Status?
The first part of the equation probably tells you whether that is a possibility or whether you need to do more work on your status, choice of topic, and the quality of your book.
While you can manufacture an Amazon bestseller sticker quite easily by choosing your subtopics carefully and making sure that you have a catchy title and appealing cover, the bar is far higher for the NYT list.
You need to sell between five and ten thousand books per week for at least one month and those books need to come from a variety of distribution channels – so you can’t simply make a bulk purchase from a warehouse. This is deliberately designed to make sure that books on the list are genuinely valuable by making it much harder to manipulate the numbers and artificially inflate sales.
How Will NYT Bestseller Status Serve Me?
Often, the answer is: not enough!
It’s true that NYT bestseller status will inflate your reputation and authority, and those are good reasons to pursue it… If your book deserves that status.
For most non-fiction business books, the reality is that chasing NYT bestseller status is a distraction, not a core pursuit. Far better to follow an aggressive marketing plan that serves your business and leave bestseller status for later.
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