Analyzing the New York Times Best Sellers List

Introduction

I work at a used bookstore, and people bring us in new books for the store everyday. Of course, not every book that someone brings in will sell, and the trick is only keeping the books you think someone would buy within a certain period of time (let’s say a year). Otherwise, these books are just wasting shelf space. In this blogpost, I explore the NYT’s Best Sellers List for hardcover and paperback fiction from the years 2012-2022. You can see how I gathered this data in my blogpost here. We’ll explore which publishers and authors have been on the NYT Best Sellers List the most in the past decade, among other things. Hopefully, by the end of this blogpost I’ll be able to use some of this information at my local bookstore. (Hint: I will) Let’s get started!

Exploratory Data Analysis

Let’s start off with getting a basic grasp of the data we’re working with. The NYT Best Seller list ranks 15-20 books each week (usually 15, but in the past it has occasionally been 20). A book is a NYT best seller if it ranks anywhere on the list, and the more consecutive weeks it’s on the list, the more impressive it is. I wanted to start off my exploratory data analysis just looking at the typical range for number of weeks a book has been on the NYT best sellers list.

This graph shows that if a book was on the NYT’s best seller list the previous week, it is most likely that it was ranked higher the week before than it would be ranked during the current week. This makes sense because often a book is very popular the first few weeks it comes out, but then its popularity decreases as time goes by.

This boxplot shows that there is quite a huge range when comparing how many weeks books have been on NYT’s list; in the past decade books have been on the list ranging anywhere from 0 weeks to 375. That means that there’s a book that has been on the NYT’s list for over 7 years! Obviously, looking at this boxplot, we can see that this is not the case for most books. Fifty percent of the books only stay on the list for a week or two. Almost all of the books only stay on the list for less than 40 weeks, and it is only the exceptional few that stay on the list for over a year (let alone seven). If you’re curious about which books are the outliers, keep reading!

Popular Publishers

But first, let’s look at the top publishers that have books on the NYT’s list. The above graph shows the top 25 publishers that make it on the NYT’s Best Sellers list. Among these, there are 5 publishers that really stand out: Grand Central; Putnam; Little, Brown and Company; Scriber; and Atria. These aren’t the same book publishing companies that come up if you google which publishing companies are the most popular, so this is helpful information. Clearly, if a book by one of these publishers comes into the bookstore, it would be a good idea to keep it. Although these publishing companies might not be the most prestigious, they sell books that have become massively popular.

Because I hadn’t heard very much about the publishing company Grand Central, I wanted to take a closer look at their data. Looking at the authors that have made it onto the NYT’s list within this publishing company, it looks like the genres they publish the most are romance (Nicholas Sparks), thriller (David Baldacci, James Patterson), or a mix of both (Colleen Hoover). The books that have stayed on the NYT’s list the longest under Grand Central are usually their romance; we can see that their top two books in terms of length on NYT best seller list are by Colleen Hoover and Nicholas Sparks. We can also see that Grand Central Publishing has a few authors that consistently make it on the NYT best sellers list: Nicholas Sparks, David Baldacci, and James Patterson (as a co-author). These authors are popular prolific authors, meaning that they will write a lot of books that people will buy simply because it has their name on the front cover. These authors would be great to have in a used bookstore.

Popular Authors

Many of the top authors that appear on this graph we saw previously when looking at the authors published by Grand Central. However, there are some new authors that show up as well. For example, E.L. James is the third most popular author on this list, known for her “Fifty Shades of Grey” books. Other top authors include Stephen King, Liane Moriarty, and Jojo Moyes. All of these authors have written quite a few books, and so although each individual book might not have been the most popular, the sheer number of their books that get on the New York Times list is what makes these authors so massively popular. In my bookstore, it would be smart to display books by these authors, because they are highly likely to sell quickly because of their popularity. The author that has been on the NYT list the most within the past decade is the queen of booktok herself, Colleen Hoover.

Taking a closer look at Colleen Hoover’s books, we can see that although she was a big author for Grand Central, most of her books have actually been published by Atria. In addition, she has even had a self-published book make it on the New York Times list, which is a very impressive feat. This graph made me curious about which books have been published under the different publishers, so I decided to make a slightly different graph to take a closer look.

Looking at both the publishers and their titles, we can see that only one of Colleen Hoover’s books that made it on the NYT’s best seller list was published under any other publisher than Atria. Her book “Verity,” which she originally self-published, was then picked up by Grand Central and made it on the NYT’s list for over a year. However, all of her other books have been published under Atria. Her most famous book, “It Ends With Us,” has been on the NYT’s list for over a year as well.

Most Popular Books of the Decade

And now, we answer the long-awaited question: which books were the most popular books of the past decade? From the table above, we can see that the book that was the most popular, the same one that has been on the NYT’s best seller list for over seven years, is “The Alchemist” by Paolo Coehlo. This book has been on the NYT’s almost list 3x longer than the next most popular books. We see that although Colleen Hoover barely made it into the top 10, she has a number of books that made it into the top 30 most popular, which is why she is the most popular author on the NYT’s list. Comfortingly, the books included in this list are are all books that we consistently display on our bestsellers shelf at my local bookstore, which means our bestsellers data coincides with the data from the New York Times.

Conclusion

In this post, I performed an exploratory data analysis on data from the New York Times bestselling fiction list from the past decade. Through this data analyses I learned that the most popular publishers on this list were Grand Central; Putnam; Little, Brown and Company; Scriber; and Atria. The most popular authors were Colleen Hoover (who publishes through Grand Central and Atria), David Baldacci, E.L. James, Nicholas Sparks, and Stephen King. The most popular book was “The Alchemist” by Paolo Coehlo, followed by “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Milk and Honey,” “All the Light We Cannot See,” and “Where the Crawddads Sing.” This information was useful to me in learning what used books I should keep at my local used bookstore from the books that people bring to trade, and it could be useful to you to see what books you might be interested in reading/buying/selling. Let me know in the comments if you have read any of these books and what you thought of them!

Here’s a link to my github repo link