The Real Bestseller List With Self Published Context

I read the Shelf Awareness daily newsletter for Bookseller and Librarians every single day. It is free and extremely useful. Every Tuesday at the end of the newsletter, they post the bestselling self-published books from the last week as compiled by IndieReader.com.

This list allows me-- and all of you who read the newsletter-- to see which self-published books are garnering the most sales. It is a great way to find up and coming voices to add to our collections, especially our ebook collections. At my library we have entire iPads of Kindle books, usually by genre, but also with just over all  bestsellers, that we circulate for people to read these books because some are e only.

But until this week, I never really thought about how the top self-published books stack up against the traditional titles. 

So yesterday, I did some digging. I matched the IndieReader list to last week's USA Today Bestsellers list because that USA Today list turned over today and the IndieReader numbers were from last week. I needed to compare apples to apples.

Before I reveal the list, I want to remind all of you that the USA Today Best-Selling Booklist is the only list out there that looks at every book and their raw sales numbers, anywhere and everywhere. They do not separate out fiction from nonfiction, youth from adult, paperback from hardcover, print from ebooks. So last week's top 5 were the two Rebecca Yarros books, then Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Mitch Album, and the Matthew Perry Memoir from 2022. Click here for the entire 11/22/23 list.

Okay, now that we have the context, here are the self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com w/ USA Today numbers from the 11/22 list. Source Shelf Awareness 11/28/23 (USA Today numbers added by me):

1. Twisted Love by Ana Huang 

    USA Today 35
2. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton

    USA Today 51
3. Love Redesigned by Lauren Asher

    USA Today 52
4. King of Greed by Ana Huang

    USA Today 73

5. The Graham Effect by Elle Kennedy

    USA Today 125
6. A Not So Meet Cute by Meghan Quinn

    USA Today 126
7. King of Wrath by Ana Huang

    USA Today 136

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8. Make-Believe Match by Melanie Harlow
9. After the Storm by Laura Pavlov
10. Good Elf Gone Wrong by Alina Jacobs

Let's think about this. Really think. The top 7 best selling self-published titles in America are all in the top 150 of ALL BOOKS sold last week.

Now I want you to be truly honest here. Ana Huang, you should know. That's no surprise. She is selling enough to make the NYT Paperback list. But do you even know about the other titles or authors. Probably not. But you need to know about them because they are the top selling books in the country.

Now I want to go into an ever deeper dive. Let's look more closely at Huang in particular who last week had the 35th, 73rd, and 136th bestselling books in the country. On last week's NYT trade paperback fiction list, she was 9 and 12. Okay, that's good right. Seems accurate,

But when we dig deeper we see larger issues that hinder our ability to understand how well the self-published books are actually doing. You see, number 1 on last week's NYT trade paperback list was Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree. Again, a book we all know right? But on the USA Today list where Twisted Love was 35, Baldree was 36! One spot below Huang, in real sales, but on the NYT list there are 8 places apart.

I could go on, but you get the point. We know from Colleen Hoover and Rebecca Yarros today, and E.L. James before them, that self-published authors can sell in numbers high enough to matter, but how often are we checking the self-published bestsellers again actual sales data. The numbers are surprising. 

And it matters because it is the devoted readers who are the ones pushing these books to the top of the sales charts. Those devoted readers should be our target audience. And yet, because they don't see the books they love and spend their money on in our collections, they don't think we get them, and they don't think of using us as their pipeline to the books they love. We are losing a large swath of our potential audience simply because we are not paying close enough attention.

Please subscribe to Shelf Awareness' Book Trade newsletter to stay up to date. It is free and you can use much of what they publish  to help you understand the place where book selling and libraries overlap. It will give you a general overview. The Self-Published Bestsellers List is but one specific example.

For those of you who want more than the top 10 self-published titles, there is also a free option from The Hot Sheet, which does a monthly Top 50 of Self-Published eBooks. But that may be a bit overwhelming for some of you who have no self-published titles. Start with the Top 10  each Tuesday from Shelf Awareness and add the newest titles to your collections each week. 

Also as you add more Self-Published bestsellers, market that you have them. Announce on social media, make displays on line and in the library. Promote it. I bet you will see new patrons coming in. And of course, a few months after you start doing this, go back and check the circulation stats on those titles. If they circulate well, which I know they will if you promote them as the best sellers that they are, even say, discover the next Colleen Hoover, in your marketing (or something like that), then you can justify adding more. This will lead you to using the Hot Sheet.

Make it a goal for 2024 to get more serious about adding self-published titles into your collections. They are too "best selling" to ignore.

Tomorrow, I am back with another super useful Attack of the Best Lists.