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Bestsellers and Our Reading Lives
Sunday Times, 13 April 2014
On April 14, 1974 — 40 years ago tomorrow — a curious little article appeared in The Sunday Times. It probably wasn’t immediately seen as a big deal. After all, there were plenty of other things to think about. The Masters golf tournament was coming to an end in America, Abba had just won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, and the world population had passed 4bn. And it was the 1970s, a bleak, conflict-laden decade.
The article, by Peter Harland, was only a few hundred words long. It was illustrated by pictures of book covers: Nicole Nobody, an autobiography by the Duchess of Bedford (don’t ask me); Jaws by Peter Benchley; and The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. The first was the biggest-selling nonfiction book of the week; the second, the top fiction title; and the third, the paperback. Below were three tables: the top 10 in each category.
“The Sunday Times,” began the low-key Harland, “today begins publication of what will be a weekly list of Britain’s bestselling books. It will, we hope, become the definitive British books list, more up to date and accurate than any other.”
That tentative hope was more than fulfilled. From day one to today, our weekly bestseller lists have been the book business’s gold standard. “The Sunday Times has been the most important benchmark for sales success throughout my publishing life,” says Alan Samson, of Orion. “At our end of the market,” concurs James Daunt, boss of Waterstones, “it reflects almost exactly what we sell, and the Culture section remains the most prominent in which books are exposed. The only media outlet that affects sales in all 290 of our shops is The Sunday Times Culture. And Radio 4.”
In Britain, it is the longest-lived and most comprehensive book bestseller list. That of The New York Times may be older, published since 1931; but ours is the most reliable, longest-lasting and most comprehensive weekly guide to what people in Britain are actually reading.
As a cultural archive, therefore, it is unique — and full of meaning. The first thing it tells you is how fleeting literary fame can be. Most of the nonfiction books from that first list in April 1974, for instance, sold precisely no copies last month. The World at War by Mark Arnold-Forster shifted two. Apart from that, zero. The picture is better for fiction. Wilbur Smith’s Eagle in the Sky sold 220 copies; Papillon, by Henri Charrière, 191. But Iris Murdoch’s classic The Sacred and Profane Love Machine? Just four desultory copies.
Another thing the list tells you — and this is a pleasant surprise — is just what ambitious readers we can be. Cultural commentators may wring their hands about the dumbing-down of Britain, but who would have thought that the nation’s most popular general read from the past 40 years of The Sunday Times’s lists would be Stephen Hawking’s famously complex A Brief History of Time? A clue to why that might be lies further down the list, at 32, with Jostein Gaarder’s surprise 1995 hit Sophie’s World, which promised to do (in novel form) for philosophy what Hawking did for science — give readers a guide to a seemingly intractable discipline in one easily digestible gulp.
This ambition in British readers — taste, I suppose — strikes you as you look down the top 100. The list may have its fair share of clunkers — John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (6) and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It (9) spring to mind — but few could complain about the qualities of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (3) or Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (5), which was good enough, remember, to pick up a Pulitzer. And how about Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, in at 72, or (perhaps the most surprising book on the whole list) Claire Tomalin’s life of Samuel Pepys, 91st on the tally?
Other trends stick out. One of the most prominent is the influence of film and television on our book-buying. Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days (11), David Attenborough’s Life on Earth (14), Hannah Hauxwell’s Seasons of My Life (15) and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (16) are all in there solely because of the television series that spawned them. There’s a fair chance, too, that Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs wouldn’t be as high as it is — 77 — without the film adaptation.
But again, before the cultural pessimists rush to cry woe at our literary dependence on film and TV, it’s worth pointing out that this pattern has been unchanged since that very first list back in 1974, which contained Papillon (film), The Exorcist (film), Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File (film) and The World at War (television).
Do the most popular titles of the decade tell us anything about the concerns of the time? The top seller in the 1970s was The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden; in the 1980s, it was Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence — both, in their way, dreamy, good-life self-help guides. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, lording it over the 1990s, launched a decade of obsession with science both in readers and publishers. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code dominated the Noughties, perhaps because of a mounting climate of conspiracy and suspicion driven by the internet; and, so far, the leader in the 2010s is James Bowen’s A Street Cat Named Bob, perhaps a “modern” bestseller in that it is driven by the internet, cute cats having become the most popular way of wasting time online.
Other things occur to you as you run your finger over familiar names. One is the influence of prizes — more acute now than ever, maybe, but the people at the Man Booker will be quietly hugging themselves at the prominence of Yann Martel’s 2002 winner, Life of Pi (27), and 1984’s pick, Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (64). Another is the succession of publishing fads that has peppered the past four decades — not just science, but travel books, biography, history, misery memoirs and celebrity. Each of their high-water marks is registered in the top 100.
One more thing is noticeable — the relative lack of overseas names. We may think we’re a nation in hock to American culture, but — if we claim Bill Bryson, living permanently somewhere in the south of England, as a Brit — American voices do not drown out domestic ones. The list may confirm our eurosceptic tendencies — there’s hardly a name in there to cheer readers across the Channel — but we’re still happily listening to voices from our own islands.
All of this, of course, raises a crucial question: how accurate are the lists? In Harland’s original article, he was proud of the hundreds of bookshops that were taking part (in the early days, he and some very patient assistants phoned more than 200 of them every week), but, of course, that was in the years of retail innocence. Now we have the almighty Epos — electronic point of sale — system, which tracks every book purchase and can report with absolute precision, daily.
“We get the bookshops’ Epos data in raw format,” says Andre Breedt, of Nielsen Book Research, the company that compiles The Sunday Times lists. “Then we map that against a database that includes every branch of Waterstones, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and so on.” Breedt reckons the charts cover about 90% of retail activity. The unrepresented 10% may be from independent shops that do not have Epos, or from church bookshops, which probably just chuck their cash into a tin. The other unfathomable source of sales is Amazon, a naturally secretive company that does not disclose its sales figures for physical books or, more controversially, ebooks.
Ebook sales are included in The New York Times lists, says Patrick Janson-Smith, formerly of Transworld and HarperCollins. “So the precedent has been set. I’d welcome an ebooks chart, but my sense is that most etailers, Amazon especially, are reluctant to reveal their numbers.” This secrecy is holding back our inclusion of ebooks. “We are keen,” says Andrew Holgate, the literary editor of The Sunday Times, “and have been for a long time, to include ebooks in the listing. All we need is a desire by the online retailers to share their information.”
How have 40 years of our bestseller lists changed the book trade and readers? Before our chart was created, it was all guesswork. Now we know almost exactly how many books are being sold. So what does it all mean? “It’s important to publishers,” says Janson-Smith, “because both agents and authors pay close attention to who and what is on the lists. It’s also an internal motivating force — that was my experience at Transworld. The more books on the list, the better the company felt about itself.”
He adds that big publishers tend to be followers, not leaders, of fashion, and use the lists as taste barometers. Then there are the authors, some of whom obsess about the lists. This can turn them into complete pests, but, as Janson-Smith says: “Publishers who underestimate their authors’ fragile egos do so at their peril.”
The lists, when broken down, are like a vast photo album. There are sepia-tinted images from the past (The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady), holiday snaps (A Year in Provence), mind-bending pictures of the universe (A Brief History of Time), fantastic shots of aliens and monsters (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and paranoid conspiracy thrillers (Dan Brown). Taken together, they form a single big picture, a teeming composite of the nation’s habits, fascinations, aspirations and fads. It’s a landscape of Britain, the greatest literary nation on earth — and still reading as we always did, in spite of the mad world of automated distraction in which we now live.
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