Finding Books Beyond the Bestseller Lists

A bestseller list is a sales ranking, and sales rankings are produced by publishers' marketing departments. That is not a criticism, it is a description of how the list is made. The consequence is that the list is a good map of what is being advertised this month and a poor map of what is good.

Why the list cannot show you everything

For a book to appear on a bestseller list, a great many copies have to move in a short window. The main causes are pre-orders, a wide retail discount, a large advertising budget, a substantial pre-existing audience, or a genuine cultural moment. None of these is the same as being worth reading, and several of them are actively misleading on their own: a heavy discount can produce a strong chart position for a book that sells nothing at full price afterwards.

Method one: read the review pages properly

The single richest source of under-read books is a review site, provided you search rather than browse. Sorting by most-reviewed returns the same dozen titles every month. Sorting by average rating, or by a filter for a genre you actually read, surfaces a different set entirely, including books with a high average and a small number of reviews.

Method two: follow the award lists, not the sales lists

Literary prizes and genre awards are decided by panels reading a large submitted or nominated pool rather than by sales velocity. A title that wins or is long-listed has been judged by people who read a great many books. The lists are longer, slower-moving and much less marketing-driven, which is exactly why they find different books.

Method three: go backwards from an author you like

If you have found one writer you trust, their publisher's catalogue is a curated list of authors who made similar choices about voice and subject. Publishers continue to sign writers they believe in, and backlist titles frequently have no advertising at all.

Method four: use the back catalogue

Books that have been out for more than a year are outside the window in which a bestseller list is computed, so they are invisible there and often excellent. The booksellers' tables are organised on exactly this basis, which is why the tables are worth reading and the charts are not.

The best single habit

Pick a genre, read its award longlist rather than its chart, and work through the names you have never heard of. You will find that the proportion of books you like is higher than when you follow the charts, and that the discovery process takes about ten minutes longer.