There’s less love in the air for bestseller lists these days: USA Today pulled resources from their weekly list, which has affected its composition, and the Wall Street Journal just announced it would no longer run bestseller lists at all. We’ve still got the New York Times bestseller list, of course, but it offers highly curated lists that cater to the NYT audience and don’t reflect what’s selling in the self-publishing realm.
It’s long overdue that someone in the industry celebrates the authors and books selling well that aren’t getting much attention from mainstream outlets.
In partnership with Bookstat, we are proud to offer three distinctive monthly bestseller lists, starting with October 2023:
- Top 50 Self-Published Ebooks
- Top 50 Self-Published Print Books (online sales only)
- Top 50 Hidden Gems (print, online sales only)
Bookstat is a paid service that grew out of the once popular Author Earnings reports. (Here’s our coverage of that development from February 2018.) Bookstat’s goal is to provide real-time information to publishers about what’s selling online. It tracks ebook, audiobook, and print book sales through online retail only. BookScan, by contrast, tracks print book sales through retail channels, whether online or through brick-and-mortar stores; its ebook and audiobook sales tracking relies on publisher reporting.
One thing that makes Bookstat unique is that it incorporates ebook subscription sales into its model in addition to à la carte sales. Overall, Bookstat says it captures 90 percent of the ebook market and 62 percent of the print book market. Like no other service today, it can reveal what’s happening in the self-publishing market.
More about the logic behind these three lists: What’s interesting about the two self-publishing bestseller lists is that fiction (romance!) largely dominates the ebook list, but nonfiction dominates the print list. Showcasing ebook and print bestsellers separately gives a fuller picture of what’s succeeding.
The Hidden Gems list excludes Big Five publishers as well as other publishers of significant size (for example, Norton and Scholastic). For now, Sourcebooks remains, although one might argue it ought to be excluded as well now that Penguin Random House has a majority stake in it. However, Sourcebooks remains quite interesting to follow because of its Bloom Books imprint, which partners with self-publishing authors on print distribution. It’s no accident that some of the top 50 self-published ebooks can also be found on the Hidden Gems print bestseller list under Bloom Blooks.
Unlike other bestseller list compilers, we aim to provide transparency about what you’re seeing. While the self-publishing bestseller lists we receive from Bookstat will remain untouched (unless an error creeps through), we have done some light curation of the Hidden Gems list. For October 2023, we’ve excluded test prep guides (such as those from Kaplan), atlases from Rand McNally, the Bible, and blockbuster cartoon compilations from Andrews McMeel (Calvin & Hobbes). We’ll let you know every month what we’ve excluded or changed in the list methodology.
The Hot Sheet bestseller lists are free at the Hot Sheet website. Anyone can read, share, and enjoy these lists. For subscribers, we’ll include a teaser (like what you see below) that shares the top 10 from one of the lists, with links to view everything at our website.
Top 10 Self-Published Ebooks: October 2023
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
