A book becomes a best seller simply by leading the pack in sales for a period. It is a metric. A scoreboard. This designation acts as a rough index of popular literary taste and judgment, even if that judgment is flawed.
The practice began in earnest in 1895. Bookman, an American magazine focused on literature and criticism, started publishing its first lists that year. They compiled data from sales reports across bookstores nationwide. The trend spread. Other literary magazines and metropolitan newspapers soon followed suit.
Today, two lists in the U.S. hold the most sway. Publishers Weekly and The New York Times are the authorities. Globally, the standard shifts. The British public generally trusts The Sunday Times in London. Then there is Amazon. In the early 21st century, its algorithms provided a real-time snapshot of global sales, bypassing traditional editorial gatekeepers entirely.
These lists serve publishers and booksellers primarily. Marketing tools. Inventory guides.
There is also a persistent myth here. Critics and the general public alike often assume that because a book dominates sales charts, it lacks literary merit. That assumption is wrong. It is not necessarily true. Success does not equal poor writing. It just equals high demand.
Students of popular taste have mapped out the usual suspects. The top categories in sales are predictable. Religious and “inspirational” books. Self-improvement guides. Romantic novels. Semihistorical fiction. Novels focused on sex and sensationalism.
Notice what is missing. Shakespeare is not on these lists. The Bible is excluded. Direct-mail sales and book club bundles are stripped out of the data.
This exclusion creates a strange anomaly. The all-time best seller in the English-speaking world is the Bible. It is said to be unequaled in sales history. In the first half of the 20th century, the only book estimated to match the Bible’s monthly sales figures in the U.S. was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). A historical novel set during the Civil War and Reconstruction. It sold like crazy.
Look at the other giants of the all-time charts. Charles Monroe Sheldon’s In His Steps (1897). Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe (1942). Henry Morton Robinson’s The Cardinal (1950). These reveal a deep cultural hunger for religious themes.
American readers also buy self-help in droves. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) sits near the top. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). Thomas Harris’s I’m O.K., You’re O.K. (1969). Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life (2002). They offer comfort. Advice. A sense of control.
Cookbooks perform similarly. The Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book (first published in 1930) moved more than 18 million copies in the middle decades of the 20th century. Crime fiction and nonfiction dominate too. Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969). Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men (1974). Thrillers like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) also punch above their weight.
The taboo around sexual explicitness vanished in the second half of the 20th century. Censorship and moral disapproval gave way to market demand. Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966) made the top 20 all-time best sellers in the U.S. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1969) joined it. They addressed desire directly.
The format matters. The mass-produced paperback arrived in the late 1930s. It changed everything. By 1976, separate paperback best-seller lists were necessary.
Decades later, the lists fractured. They tracked sales by format. Hardback. Mass-market paperback. Trade paperback. They segmented by genre. Broadly. And narrowly. Fiction. Nonfiction. Children’s books. Manga.
E-books disrupted this structure in the early 21st century. The New York Times added electronic formats to its lists in 2011. The newspaper began reporting best sellers in 20 specific categories. “Combined print and e-book nonfiction.” “E-book fiction.” “Paperback graphic books.” “Hardcover advice and miscellaneous.”
The categories expand. They get more granular. The sales data becomes more complex. But the core question remains. We still use these lists to gauge what the culture is reading. Even if the metrics exclude the things that have sold the most copies in history.
