A New Best Seller List Featuring Black Writers and The Black Book Accelerator

Last week, I was alerted to a brand new bestseller list from a long time trusted resource-- African American Literature Book Club. AALBC has been one of go-to resources to find great books by Black authors since I became a librarian; they have been around longer than that! And have always done great work.

The resource is BLK Bestsellers List: America's Bestseller Books Written by Black Writers from January 2024 to the present, sortable by month

They use the following data and methodology for this list as clearly stated on the bottom of the page:

Sales Data Source: Circana BookScan, January 2023 – May 2025, U.S. print sales, from thousands of retailers including national and regional bookstore chains; independent bookstores; mass merchandisers (e.g., Walmart, Target); Online retailers (e.g., Amazon); and supermarkets and specialty retailers.

Methodology: Books are categorized and filtered for Black Authors by the African American Literature Book Club. This bestsellers list is a sneak peek into a much larger effort led by the Black Book Accelerator (Learn More).

Here is why I love this bestseller list as a tool for us to do our work suggesting books to readers AND as a way to be actively anti-racist. This is not a list of the best selling books by Black writers. Rather it is a list of books by Black writers which were bestsellers. 

In other words, this is not a list others can try to disparage or even ignore because it is WOKE. This is a list of straight up bestsellers that were bestsellers on the white dominated lists in the last 18 months which happen to be written by Black people.

So when people tell me and Robin in our Actively Anti-Racist Service to Readers training programs (click here to sign up up for the next live offering) that people in our town don't read "those books," or, well we only have money for the bestsellers and it is not our fault that those titles are overwhelming white, or....insert lame and useless excuse here-- well here is proof that every single one of those excuses holds no weight.

Public libraries always buy the bestsellers. It is the first thing we do. As someone who did collection development for a community of 60,000 people, I understood that my job was to maintain a circulating collection of popular fiction. That meant having every book on the bestsellers list. It also meant exposing my readers to books that they would not find without my help, but which I knew they would like, be that up and coming writers, mildest stalwarts, small press stars, or books just like the white bestsellers but written by marginalized voices.

This new list, showcases that Black books are for everyone (which, has always been true). However, it also showcases the years of work done by AALBC to promote Black authors, in particular the Black Book Accelerator. From their homepage:

Empowering the Black Book Ecosystem

 

Mission

The mission of the Black Book Accelerator is to strengthen the Black book ecosystem and measurably increase overall stakeholder revenue. 

The Black Book Bestseller list not only celebrates cultural representation but also influences market trends, empowers readers to support Black literature, and inspires emerging Black writers by showcasing successes that might not have otherwise received recognition.

Methodology

Our data is based on monthly print unit sales provided by Circana BookScan. You may read more about Circana.

Since the book publishing industry lacks a definitive source of data on how authors identify themselves, we determine books by Black authors using a combination of BISAC codes and manual research.

We are actively collaborating with organizations in the book publishing industry to improve how authors can share information about their personal identities.

Blackness

The primary requirement for inclusion on the bestseller list is that the author self-identifies as Black or African American. We respect and uphold individuals' self-proclaimed racial and ethnic identities.

For our definition of “Black or African American,” we refer to the U.S. Census Bureau’s classification. This includes individuals with ancestral roots in any of the Black groups of Africa. It encompasses those who identify as “African American” as well as those who associate with more specific African ethnic groups, such as Nigerian, Afro-Cuban, Ethiopian, or Somali.

While we have established these criteria to highlight and promote authors of Black and/or African American descent, we recognize the vast diversity within this community. We are committed to ensuring that our selections reflect a broad spectrum of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives. We also acknowledge that definitions and categorizations evolve over time.

But the best part of the Black Book Accelerator project is how honest they are with themselves. From the FAQ:

Q: Couldn’t this information be used for bad purposes?

A: Yes, but we think the good outweighs the bad, and to do nothing is to reinforce the status quo, which is unacceptable.

Q: Don’t you think continuing to focus on race is a problem? Suppose someone published a list of the bestselling white writers; wouldn’t that be racist?

A: The purpose of this list is to address historical and systemic disparities by celebrating the most commercially successful books written by Black writers — whose work deserves more attention.

Q: What about authors who identify as Latino, Asian, LGBTQ+, etc.?

A: We hope our work can serve as a model for similar efforts within other communities. We welcome collaboration and are happy to share our insights with those seeking to elevate underrepresented voices.

They are doing the work AND having the hard conversations about said work. When Robin and I talk about being intention with your anti-racist service to readers-- this is what we mean. We are also constantly called out for being racist in favor of marginalized voices. But here's the thing, if you want to intentionally work against systemic racism, you have to tilt the scales to get there-- INTENTIONALLY. As they say above-- the status quo is unacceptable.

These "questions" listed above are the same things Robin always says are framed as "good faith": questions when really they are just trying to get you to stop doing the work. They are really there as "gottchas," from the asker. We see it all the time. I love that AALBC are very clear, open, and honest, that those questions are not worth exploring further for very good reasons. Full Stop.

This has been a long post, but everything here is important and connected. In order to summarize, here are the 4 points I hope you take away from this post.

1. AALBC is an amazing and longstanding resource 
2. Black bestsellers are everyone bestseller
3. Being intentionally diverse is not racist
4. If you are intentionally diverse over time, the brick wall that is systemic racism can be broken down, one brick at a time. 

Want more help? You can sign-up for the August edition of Actively Anti-Racist Readers' Advisory Service with Robin and I right now.

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

______________________________

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. 

2022 Year in Review: Sales vs Library Checkouts

In preparation for my annual year in review presentation for PCI webinars next week, I have been compiling, comparing and contrasting data from across the book atmosphere.* The slides, which include  many useful links, will be available to all on January 31st but today I thought I would give you a preview of the difference between what books are checked out the most at the average library vs what books sell the most.

You can click here for the article in PW analyzing the top 25 selling print books according to BookScan which includes the below graphic of those titles. But please, click through because the narrative is extremely useful.

I have also looked at checkout data from 5 library systems (specifics in the slides next week) in order to see where the overlap is and is not. Again, I will talk about that more next week, but in the meantime, I also have this article crunching the data of all of the libraries who use Synthetics Unbound. There is a list and some commentary at this link, as well as access to a fun time-lapsed look at checkout stat from Jan 1-Dec 31. Click here or see the embedded image below.

As I said above, I will have even more for you on 1/31, but I thought this was a good place to start assessing 2022. Data is rolling out every day this month and each nugget helps us understand the leisure reading landscape a bit better.

*Credit Robin Bradford for the term "book atmosphere."

Beyond the Bestseller List: El Iliminado

I am not committing myself to a full blown new occasional series yet, but I have been waiting to write about the book in the title of the post for awhile now and couldn't really come up with a reason.

But as it says above-- Beyond the Bestseller List-- is exactly what I am trying to promote.  I talk about the popular new books a bit and the backlist a lot, but there is this whole other area of books that are new, not getting a ton of press, but are totally worth a look.  So for now I am labeling these books with that tag-- Beyond the Bestseller List.

To christen the series, I want to point you to a unique graphic novel that is getting quite a bit of buzz, and it isn't even a memoir.  El Iluminado by Ilan Stavans and illustrated by Steve Sheinkin is Da Vinci Code-esque thriller involving the Crypto-Jews (families of Jewish peoples who have hidden their religious identities for centuries, usually to avoid persecution or even death.)

Click here for the Graphic Novel Reporter reivew

Click here for an interview with Stavans

And click here to see what readers are saying

This is a great option for people who want a compelling story in graphic novel form. Fans of conspiracy thrillers, historical fiction, Jewish culture, hidden religious sects, or stories set in the American West would enjoy this book.

If only El Ilumindo got more media attention, I think it would be enjoyed by a large audience, hence my designation of Beyond the Bestseller List. I hope to bring the series back soon to highlight other worthy titles that need a bit more promotion.

Editor's Note: I first learned of this book from my college's alumni news as Stavans is a professor there, but no one solicited me directly or sent me a copy of the book for review.