How to Make the Best Seller List

By Margo Baldwin, MobyLives. Posted November 4, 2004.

Last month, my publishing company managed to do the impossible: put a book on the New York Times best seller list (as well as on several regional lists).

The book is "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate – The Essential Guide for Progressives," written by George Lakoff, University of California professor of cognitive science and linguistics, founding senior fellow of The Rockridge Institute, author of "Moral Politics" and other books, and, according to Howard Dean, "one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement." Why? Because he talks about language and how it's used to frame the issues and political debate, something that the conservatives figured out long ago and a major reason why they are now in power.

In short, it is a revolutionary kind of book.

I say we did the impossible for many reasons. One is that we're a small, independent book publisher, not a corporate conglomerate media company.

Another, that we published and launched the book in a mere five weeks, from draft manuscript to finished book. We did it with no advertising budget or the services of an outside promotional firm, and two weeks before the publication date, we had no advance sales (neither commission sales reps nor key account buyers had even heard about the book).

Finally, we achieved the impossible because even as the book was climbing onto the Times paperback nonfiction list (35 titles long), it was deliberately bumped and dumped into the "Advice/How–To/Miscellaneous" category (15 titles long, and so off that week's list): the publishing world's version of the book–ghetto.

Of course, if we had actually published a How–To/Self–help title, we'd be ecstatic, but we didn't. We published a political book, which is now #9 on this list — slightly below "The Sweet Potato Queens' Field Guide to Men," immediately following "Fix–It and Forget–It Lightly" and just before "Relationship Rescue."

Naturally we protested this categorization and naturally the Times, in all its elitist, arbitrary and arrogant "wisdom," refused to change it. (Read the entire e-mail exchange.) Luckily for us, the trade e–mail newsletter of PulishersMarketplace.com, Publishers Lunch, picked up the story and ran with it, making it clear to all in the publishing industry how capricious and decidedly unscientific (dare I say political?) this list selection is. Also cloaked in secrecy.

There appear to be no objective criteria for deciding how a book is categorized beyond what Rich Meislin, the editor of News Surveys, the department at the Times in charge of these lists, declares is the judgment of "people of good will."

People of good will?

How about people lunching with editors and others from the big New York houses with lots of ad money to spend? How about people who don't particularly appreciate the upstart progressive views of independent media? When challenged by Jennifer Nix, the book's editor, on why Ann Coulter's book, "How to Talk to a Liberal," was not similarly categorized, Meislin wrote, "We made it past the 'How to' in the title of Ann Coulter's book and discovered that it was a collection of her essays and didn't read like a how-to book at all. (In much the same way, we discovered that Jenna Jameson's 'How to Make Love Like a Porn Star' isn't a how to book, either, despite its title.) That's why, when they had the appropriate level of sales, they made it onto the nonfiction best seller list."

Margo Baldwin is the publisher of Chelsea Green Publishing.

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