Cooking the Books: Why You Just Can’t Trust the Annual Bestseller Lists Anymore
I once knew a man who refused point blank to believe in the truth of the weekly music charts as formerly revealed every Friday night on Top of the Pops. According to him, the whole thing was a marketing scam intended to trick gullible teens into buying the latest worthless ear-noise pumped out by the record companies under the viral influence of peer-pressure. If any given child was brainwashed into thinking everyone else his age was wasting their pocket-money on the same tuneless dirge from Generic Rapper A and Identikit Warbler B, then so would he in his own turn, the theory went. In fact, the true bestselling record each and every week of the year was by my informant’s own personal favourite act, top elderly Irish folk-music duo Foster & Allen, but the music-world PR gurus and their co-conspirators at the youth-worshipping BBC would never admit it.
I must confess, I often think much the same thing about the annual Sunday Times Bestseller Lists, the 2024 variant of which was released in late December. Looking at it, I wonder who precisely buys all those 211,300 copies of The Pinch of Nom Air Fryer Guide, 141,953 copies of Greg the Sausage Roll: Lunchbox Superhero, 148,034 editions of Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart, or, worst of all, 126,714 printings of Intermezzo by (shudder) Sally Rooney. Then again, coming in at number 10 on the list, with 227,539 units shifted, is a crime novel named None of This Is True. Is that title inadvertently revealing?
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If I’m reading this right, the best-seller list according to various organs is a self-fulfilling prophecy compiled in accord with the Met Office school of operational integrity.
Just wondering where Kindle readership numbers feature in all of this and how significant e-books are as a proportion of new-book sales?
The Google search engine operates in a similar way. The results are biased, partially dependent on how much companies pay for their products to show up, but also driven by left-wing bias.
I remember many years ago (way before Covid) I tried to carry out some private research into anti-vax ideas. I didn’t feel strongly about the subject but I was curious to understand the arguments put forward by people who rejected the idea of vaccination. So I tried to find out more.
A few hours of Google search resulted in absolutely nothing but articles after articles denouncing anti-vax people – without any of these articles even describing what the anti-vax people were actually saying. So the only conclusion I could draw was that whatever these people were saying – whether or not they were right or wrong, brilliant or delusional – I was not allowed to hear their side of the story.
Google’s cognitive bias up to usual tricks. The cognitive-bias industry bangs on and on about bias (witness DIE ideology trading), yet expects the recipients of its wisdom not to realise the industrialists are as cognitively-biased as the rest of us.
Argument through seizing the high ground that constitutes much of modern discourse, especially at the self-styled progressive end of the spectrum. Circular arguments have a habit of going round and round.
Circles that need to be broken. Witness Mr Musket taking careful aim at the Commentariat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC9JlG-ZXX0&t=1s
“Excruciating moment Elon Musk turns tables on BBC interviewer over ‘hate’ tweets.”
I have used this sleigh of hand to my advantage when arguing with foam at the mouth pro vaxxers. When you talk to them they sooner or later bring up Wakefield, who is sort of their gold standard vaxx denier and the source of all vaxx denial.
I tell them that Wakefield is totally irrelevant and ask them to Google him, showing that all the sites referring to him are pro vaxx sites and showing not one single anti vaxx site can be found that cites him, thus utterly destroying the notion that his work had any effect on eh anti vaxx movement. This is the point at which many pro vaxxers admit they have no argument B. They either need to admit Google is biased, which they would never do, or need to admit that Wakefield did not have the influence they attributed to him, which they will refuse to do as well. It’s a beautiful checkmate.
It’s increasingly clear that the only things you can trust is what have seen with your own eyes.
And in a world being made deliberately more complex and bewildering by TPTB, that’s a major problem.
No wonder people are continually stressed, and not producing children, and skiving off work.
It’s grim.
What I suspect really happens with these lists – though it is just my guess, is as follows, and explains why so many books carry the phrase ‘Sunday times best seller’ The have so many catagories it’s almost impossible not to be on a list. So there might be a catagory ‘Tending Lawns in early spring’, or ‘Healing RSV using a protocol of liposomal vitamin C’ both of which there will be very few books written, hence they make the list.
I always wondered whether the stacks of Rory Stewart’s book in the shops were being replenished or not. The English Walter Mitty.
Only £2000 to get a book highlighted? If only I’d known… maybe my (self-published) novel could have sold more that the 30 or so that it did sell! It’s called “Anything but a Quiet Life” in case you are curious.
Perhaps I’m just a miserable cynic, but for many years I have been suspicious when I see ‘The New International Best Seller!’
Then there’s Tom Clancy, who somehow continues as a flourishing and highly popular author – despite having died on 1st October 2013!
But then closer inspection reveals that it was some unknown such as Fred R. Bloggs who actually wrote the story, hoping to match the style, and, no doubt, the money, by hopping onto the Clancy bandwagon.
I mutter to myself about the Trades Description Act and move on…
Things like the Obama biography supposedly only made the best seller list because they counted all the free copies they distributed on the campaign trail.