Bestsellers are preordained.

I've been actively ordering new bestsellers weekly for about a year now. Most of them sell at least once, some sell many times. The trick is to know when to back off. 

But one thing has become completely clear to me during the process: bestsellers are preordained. 

They are selected in advance by The Powers That Be, and then propagated by lists from organizations like the American Booksellers Association, the book buyers from the big chains, and the recommendations from the media, especially NPR and the N.Y. Times. 

This bestseller status is cemented by how many copies are actually available to buy: even on the advance lists, some books are bulked up and others are pretty skimpy. This becomes even more transparent as the sales results come in. If a book doesn't take off right away, the quantities available shrink also. 

I suppose there are some out-of-left-field winners, but I haven't seen any so far. I believe even such outliers as "The Martian" become preordained as soon as they gain a little ground; that is, the Big Boys pick them up and add them to the "preordained" list. 

How do you become a bestselling author? By paying your dues or having an interesting background story or having credentials that make you part of the "club." The intellectual elite, if you will. I assume that powerful agents and editors are really the ones who decide. As I say, Preordained

I'm not saying this as sour grapes. It's frankly hard to see how it could work any other way. Back in the days when the market depended on small independent bookstores, I believe there was a wider range of "midlist" books that sold well enough to pay off the advance and give the writer a possible career.

But midlist books are vanishing. The bets are on bestsellers each week, which pay for everything else. There is probably much less independent ordering of books nowadays.

I'm influenced as much as anyone else, though I do tend to take a slightly more wait and see attitude to bestsellers. If a book is an obvious bestseller, it will still sell after it becomes obvious--sometimes for a full year or more.

I also tend to order a lot more "backlist" books than most bookstores. I think this because I created my bookstore out of backlist books from the beginning (books that have a solid history of interest) and only later added the gamble of new bestsellers.

Because that's what it is: a weekly gamble, no matter how preordained the books are by The Powers That Be. Not all bestsellers actually become bestsellers, though they have a much higher chance of being so once selected for that spot. I believe that most bookstores on are this rollercoaster, depending on those new bestsellers to raise enough cash to buy the next way of bestsellers.

I mean, this is somewhat obvious, but the full extent of it is a bit of a surprise to me. 

And so it goes.