[HN Gopher] The murky math of the New York Times bestsellers list
___________________________________________________________________
The murky math of the New York Times bestsellers list
Author : Anon84
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-10-29 12:42 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thehustle.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehustle.co)
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Looks just as manipulated as view counts on YouTube or like
| counts on social media. Sad, really.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > Looks just as manipulated as view counts on YouTube
|
| Can you elaborate? I thought they are mostly accurate nowadays.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I pay zero attention to this list. If it's not actually a list of
| best-selling status, it's just another recommendation from the
| NYT. I don't need a "Wirecutter for books", since I already have
| plenty on my list.
| voisin wrote:
| I have started looking at Goodreads ratings as a good proxy for
| well written books but there are a lot of bizarrely high rated
| pop culture books so it's not perfect. Another strategy is to
| look at books shortlisted for the major awards. That's how I came
| across North Woods by Daniel Mason (Pulitzer short list) which is
| by far the book I enjoyed most this year.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71872930
| thfuran wrote:
| >I have started looking at Goodreads ratings as a good proxy
| for well written books
|
| Based on my experience looking at Goodreads reviews, I think
| you'd have just as much luck with a random number generator.
| voisin wrote:
| I think it is better for ruling things out rather than
| shortlisting. A rating below 4.0 is a guaranteed bad read
| (IMHO) but above 4.0 is not guaranteed of a good read.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Many books I've liked have <4.0 on Goodreads. But you're
| kind of right that I will usually take that as a bad sign
| that needs to be outweighed by some other reason to read it
| (like a personal recommendation or whatever).
| tikhonj wrote:
| A lot of my absolutely favorite books are rated below 4.0.
| A few examples:
|
| 1. _White Noise_ at 3.86
|
| 2. _Catch-22_ at 3.99
|
| 3. _Dhalgren_ at 3.77
|
| 4. _At Swim-Two-Birds_ at 3.86
|
| 5. _Midnight 's Children_ at 3.98
|
| 6. _Omon Ra_ at 3.90
|
| 7. _Never Let Me Go_ at 3.84
|
| Drawing the line at 4 rules out some of the most
| interesting books.
|
| In my experience, you really have to fall below 3.5 to get
| _consistently_ bad books, and even then it 's not 100%
| guaranteed.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Woolf's _To the Lighthouse_ and _Orlando_ are under a 4.
| But under a 4 is guaranteed bad? LOLWUT.
|
| And that's just the first author I checked.
|
| Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick (less of a crowd pleaser than his
| handful of biggest books, but certainly not in the bottom
| tier of his works) is under a 4. The _A Man Without a
| Country_ collection, which is more of interest as a
| curiosity than because much of it's good, is over a 4.
|
| Yeah, you may as well flip a coin.
| cratermoon wrote:
| There was an article on HN recently, "Apex Books of Goodreads"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970307, in which the
| author uses a Pareto frontier to attempt to account for the
| recency bias. It was not entirely successful, as the result
| includes four of the Harry Potter series and five Calvin and
| Hobbes collections, including the highest-rated _The Complete
| Calvin and Hobbes_ , from 2005, and second is Brandon
| Sanderson's 2014 novel Words of Radiance (The Stormlight
| Archive, #2)
| ryan93 wrote:
| the way to use goodreads is to follow people you like and see
| what they read.
| forgingahead wrote:
| A total work of fiction basically, like almost everything else
| written in the NYT.
| jjeaff wrote:
| The NYT doesn't get everything right, but they still have a
| strong reputation for factual reporting. when they do get
| something wrong, they generally print a retraction and it is a
| big deal. I don't think it is fair or factual to say that
| almost everything they write is fiction.
| dynm wrote:
| Off by a factor of 100 here:
|
| > Making the list is a herculean task. Consider the number of
| books, more than 3m, published every year. And then consider that
| the number of slots on the NYT's coveted lists is ~6240. That
| gives authors a coolly aspirational 0.00208% chance to snag one.
| mtlynch wrote:
| For anyone else who's as bad as me at mental arithmetic:
|
| 3,000,000 / 6240 = 0.00208 = 0.208%
| Agingcoder wrote:
| No it's 6240 / 3 000 000
| tempaway11751 wrote:
| The murky math of someone trying to write about the New York
| Times bestsellers list and getting it wrong by a factor of 100
| blululu wrote:
| What's wild here isn't that the list is totally bogus, but how
| little money it takes to game the system. People spend $150k on
| an MFA in creative writing when $60k will buy a consulting
| service to land you on the NYT best seller list.
| cratermoon wrote:
| be$t$eller$ li$t
| dehrmann wrote:
| Startups do the same thing. They spent too much on R&D when
| they should be spending the money on marketing.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Paul Graham's Submarine article talks about this:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| I had to stop reading at "Latinx". Stop trying to make latinx
| happen, nobody wants it.
| bdzr wrote:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
| spandextwins wrote:
| You're not their audience. Mission accomplished.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It works as a tribal marker.
|
| Using it shows you're willing to humiliate yourself to show
| tribal loyalty.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
| or post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| brnt wrote:
| I know that among Dutch writers, it is a public secret that one
| does not have an English translation because the US (and rest of
| Anglosphere) is an interesting market, but it's a requirement for
| getting on the NYT bestseller list. This means worldwide
| visibilty and worldwide sales. I never managed to get hard
| numbers from anyone, but reading between the lines, Dutch and
| American book markets appear to be on the same order of
| magnitude, not necessarily in favour of the US.
| ignite23 wrote:
| 788 million us, vs 44 million, taking top google hits.
| BenFeldman1930 wrote:
| I like (current) bestseller lists: they usually contain all books
| not worth reading.
| sparcpile wrote:
| PACs have been doing these bulk buys for years to get people on
| the list. As the article mentioned, Mitt Romney did this.
|
| Mike Pompeo did it as well.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2023/02/21/mike-pom...
|
| Mike Pence
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2023/01/09/mike-pen...
|
| Members of the Trump family did this multiple times.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-tri...
|
| It's common practice for political parties and PACs to do these
| bulk buys and then sell them or give them away during events or
| conventions.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| The numbers are wrong, 6000/3000000 is 0.2% not 0.002%. I stopped
| reading after this.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-29 23:01 UTC)