WSJ Just Killed It's Bestseller List. Do The Lists Even Matter Anymore?

Books are an anomaly when it comes to how "bestsellers" are ranked. Movies are judged by their total box office numbers. Music is rated based on listens and album sales cumulatively. By contrast, a bestselling book generally earns that designation after a single great week of sales. Or in the case of an Amazon bestseller, maybe just $3 and 5 minutes.

The point is, the ranking of books is a notoriously gamified and uneven playing field where books that sell enough to make a list are routinely dismissed by editors while lists are curated by those same editors to only include books which they deem "belong" on their list.

So when the Wall Street Journal announced earlier this week that they would be dropping their bestseller lists, it induced a fireball of angst within the publishing world. Were they just following in the USA Today's footsteps to put their list on a "hiatus" before bringing it back? Is this a negotiating tactic to try and extract better subscription rates from industry sales tracking vendor Circana Bookscan? Or is the WSJ trying to retool their process for doing their list due to the high volume of people trying to reverse engineer and game their way onto it?

For better or (mostly) worse, bestseller lists like these are used as a shorthand metric by consumers for which books to pay attention to. Every time a list with the heft of the WSJ or USA Today list disappears or goes on hiatus, a?reputational void opens up in the book market that needs to be filled somehow.

There is already a solution to this problem. Book awards programs.?

Unlike bestseller lists that pretend to reflect sales but actually incentivize short term thinking (like authors scrambling to line up all their initial sales to hit within the first calendar week of publication) or bullshit claims from people who claim to be bestselling authors after selling a handful of books within an hour in an obscure category on Amazon, why not celebrate the many book award programs that take time and pains to curate the very best books of the year?

As someone who spends much of his time in the world of books and publishing, I have always found book awards to be a much better source of finding the absolute best books to read. I generally discover so many amazing books from the many programs that exist out there to recommend books based on the content of their ideas and the impact they have, rather than how many sales they can drum up from the right mix of outlets over a calendar week.

When it comes to business books, the Axiom Business Book Awards, Porchlight Business Book Awards and our own Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards each curate valuable lists of the best business titles each year. More broadly, there are plenty of other awards programs that recommend all types of books including the Booker Prize, National Book Awards, Foreword INDIES, Hugo Awards, PEN Literary Awards, Independent Publisher Book Awards, National Book Critics Award, OWL Awards, Pencraft Awards, IBPA Awards, INDIE Book Awards, Nautilus Awards, Hoffer Awards and many others.

What if more media properties like Inc. produced book awards instead of bestseller lists? What if bookstores dedicated more store shelf space to award winners as they do to bestsellers? Regardless of whether the WSJ brings its list back or other lists come up - if we really want to find and share the absolute best books, we might all be better served by spending more time browsing the books that win awards and less time on the so-called bestsellers.?

CC - Porchlight Book Company , Booker Prize Foundation , National Book Foundation, Presenter of the National Book Awards , foreWORD Ink , PEN Foundation , National Book Critics Circle , BookPal , Next Generation Indie Book Awards , Inc. Magazine , Jenkins Group, Inc.