A common misconception about the New York Times Best Sellers List is that reviews have a significant impact on determining the rankings, but they are not a factor at all. Instead, pre-sales make up a large portion of the “sales” used to determine rank on the bestseller lists for new releases. Exact sales are not stated on the NYT site or in print, but trusted sites like Publishers Weekly report their own ranking based on disclosed sales.
The Best Sellers list has received harsh criticism for not providing an accurate measurement of best selling books. One of the main critiques is that authors or publishers can buy large quantities of their own books before they are released so that they will make the list upon their release, since the list only accounts for the number of sales of a book in a given week. The New York Times marks any books that are potentially "fraudulently" placed on the list, and the following visualizations reveal trends in the data of these books as well as the list as a whole.
The marking of a book as potentially fraudulently placed on the list is at the discretion of the Best Sellers list editor, so there may or may not be more books that meet the fraudulently ranked criteria.
These are the top 10 longest charting books on the NYT Best Sellers List of all time. Hover over a bar to see more information about each book! This data spans back to 2013.
This visualization depicts the genre breakdown of books suspected of bulk buying each year. Hover over a color to see which genre it represents. As we can see, the primary genre for suspiciously placed books in 2020 was Political Science.
This is a bubble chart to show which words are used most often in the descriptions of books suspected to be fraudulently placed on the Best Sellers List. Hover over a bubble to see the word it represents and the frequency the word was used! From this visualization, we can see that the top three words used in the suspicious book descriptions are 'former,' 'president,' and 'host.'