About two years ago, we made a decision at ScrollWorks that felt, at the time, slightly heretical. We stopped caring about bestseller lists. Not in the performative way where you say you don’t care while secretly refreshing the rankings every Tuesday morning. We actually stopped. We removed the BookScan tab from our browser bookmarks. We stopped including bestseller list performance in our quarterly reviews. We told our authors that we would not be using list placement as a metric of success.

Some people thought we were being naive. A few thought we were being arrogant. One industry colleague told me, point blank, that we were “leaving money on the table.” Maybe we are. But I think the money we’re supposedly leaving on the table was never really there, at least not for a publisher our size, and chasing it was costing us in ways that didn’t show up on a spreadsheet.

How Bestseller Lists Actually Work

Most readers assume that bestseller lists are straightforward: the books that sell the most copies appear on the list. This is roughly true for some lists and completely false for others. The New York Times bestseller list, which is the one everyone talks about, uses a methodology that is famously opaque. They survey a selection of bookstores and wholesalers, apply editorial judgment, and produce a list that reflects sales but is not a simple ranking of units sold.

What this means in practice is that the list can be gamed. There’s an entire cottage industry built around manipulating bestseller list placement. Bulk purchases through specific retailers. Strategic timing of release dates. Pre-order campaigns designed to concentrate sales into a single reporting week. I’ve seen marketing plans from other publishers that are essentially elaborate schemes to trick the tracking system into registering more sales than actually occurred in organic demand.

This isn’t a secret, by the way. People in publishing talk about it constantly, usually in tones that range from resigned acceptance to bitter amusement. Everyone knows the system is imperfect. Everyone participates anyway, because the alternative, ignoring the lists entirely, feels too risky. Or at least, that’s what we used to think.

The Cost of Chasing

Here’s what happens when a small publisher decides to chase bestseller lists. First, you start timing your releases around the list calendar. Instead of publishing books when they’re ready and when the market conditions make sense, you publish them during weeks when you think the competition will be lighter. This sounds strategic but it’s actually just guessing, because you rarely know what other publishers are planning.

Second, you start spending marketing money on list manipulation rather than on reaching actual readers. You buy ads designed to concentrate sales into a single week. You offer steep pre-order discounts that eat into your margins. You focus on the bookstores and retailers that you believe are tracked by the list, rather than on the ones where your actual readers shop. All of this costs money, and for a publisher our size, that money comes directly from the budget we’d otherwise spend on editing, design, author advances, and the other things that make books good.

Third, and this is the one nobody talks about, you start making acquisition decisions based on list potential rather than book quality. You look at a manuscript and instead of asking “Is this a good book that deserves to exist?” you ask “Can this hit a list?” Those are very different questions, and they lead to very different publishing programs. The first question builds a catalog of books you’re proud of. The second question builds a catalog of books that look like other books that have hit lists, which is how you end up with an industry that publishes the same fifteen types of book over and over.

I watched this happen at a previous job. A small literary publisher, one with a genuinely interesting backlist, started chasing the Times list after one of their books landed on it almost by accident. Over the next three years, their acquisition strategy shifted. They started passing on the weird, wonderful, hard-to-categorize books that had been their identity, in favor of more commercial projects that had “list potential.” Some of those commercial projects hit. Most didn’t. And the publisher ended up in an awkward middle ground: too commercial for their original audience, not commercial enough to compete with the big houses. They’re still around, but they’ve lost something.

What We Measure Instead

Abandoning bestseller lists as a metric didn’t mean abandoning all metrics. We still care about sales. We’re a business, and businesses need revenue. But we shifted our focus from peak-week performance to what I call “long tail health,” the question of whether a book continues to sell over months and years rather than whether it spikes in a single week.

A book that sells 500 copies in its launch week and then tails off to nothing is, by list standards, more successful than a book that sells 200 copies a month for five years. But the second book has sold 12,000 copies total, which is more than enough to be profitable for a publisher our size, and it’s built a readership that will be there when the author’s next book comes out. The first book made a splash and vanished. The second book built something lasting.

We also started paying much more attention to reader engagement. Not in the social media sense of likes and shares, though we track those too. I mean actual engagement: Are people finishing the book? Are they recommending it to friends? Are they coming back to buy the author’s next title? Are they leaving thoughtful reviews that suggest they genuinely connected with the material? These things are harder to measure than list placement, but they’re better indicators of whether a book is doing what books are supposed to do, which is matter to the people who read them.

Our author for Still Waters is a perfect example. The book didn’t come anywhere near a bestseller list. It sold modestly in its first month. But it kept selling, month after month, because readers who found it loved it and told other people about it. Two years later, it’s one of the most profitable books in our catalog, and its author has a dedicated readership that will show up for the next book without any marketing at all. That’s the kind of success that doesn’t make headlines, but it pays the bills and builds a career.

The Author Conversation

The hardest part of this decision was talking to our authors about it. Writers are understandably attached to the idea of being a “bestselling author.” It’s a label that carries weight in the industry, opens doors, and looks good on a book jacket. Telling an author that you’re not going to help them chase that label feels like telling them you don’t believe in their book.

We had to be very clear about what we were actually saying, which was not “we don’t think your book can succeed” but rather “we think success looks different from what the industry has conditioned you to expect.” Some authors got it immediately. Others took convincing. One author left for a bigger publisher, which was her right and I don’t blame her. She wanted the list, and a bigger house had the resources and infrastructure to chase it in a way we couldn’t.

But most of our authors, once they understood the reasoning, were relieved. The pressure to perform in a single launch week is enormous, and it falls disproportionately on the author. You’re expected to do events, interviews, social media campaigns, and newsletter pushes, all timed to concentrate attention into that narrow window. It’s exhausting, and it often doesn’t work, which means the author ends up feeling like they failed when really the system failed them.

Our approach now is to tell authors: your book has years, not weeks. We’re going to support it over time. We’re going to keep it in print, keep marketing it, keep looking for new audiences. The launch is the beginning of the book’s life, not the climax. I’ve watched the relief on authors’ faces when they hear this, and it confirms that we made the right call.

The Industry Reaction

Other publishers have been curious, sometimes skeptical, occasionally dismissive. The skeptics point out that list placement drives discoverability, which drives sales, which funds everything else. And they’re not entirely wrong. A spot on the New York Times list does generate attention and sales. The question is whether that attention and those sales are worth the cost of pursuing them, and for a publisher of our size, I believe the answer is no.

Large publishers can absorb the cost of list manipulation because they spread it across hundreds of titles. If you’re publishing 400 books a year and ten of them hit the list, the revenue from those ten can subsidize the list-chasing efforts for all 400. We publish a handful of books a year. Every dollar we spend on list manipulation is a dollar we’re not spending on making the book better or reaching its natural audience.

I also think the importance of bestseller lists is declining, slowly but steadily. Twenty years ago, the Times list was a primary discovery mechanism. People walked into bookstores and bought whatever was on the list. Today, discovery happens through a much wider range of channels: social media, podcasts, book clubs, TikTok, Substack newsletters, word of mouth amplified by group chats. A book can find a huge audience without ever appearing on a major bestseller list, and an increasing number of them do.

The best books we’ve published are the ones where we focused entirely on making the book as good as it could be and then finding the readers who would love it. The worst experiences we’ve had were the ones where we tried to engineer a launch week spike.

What This Means in Practice

On a practical level, not chasing lists has freed us to make decisions that are better for our books and our authors. We can publish in August, which is traditionally a dead month that serious list-chasers avoid. We can do soft launches for books that need time to find their audience, rather than going all-in on a launch week that may or may not generate the spike we need. We can price our books at a level that makes sense for the content rather than at a level designed to maximize unit sales in a tracking week.

We also spend more time and money on things that improve the reading experience. Better cover design. More rounds of editing. Higher quality paper and binding for our print editions. These are the things that make a reader pick up a book in a store, buy it, love it, and tell their friends about it. None of them show up on a bestseller list, but all of them contribute to the long-term health of a book’s life.

I’ve noticed something interesting since we made this shift. Our backlist sales have gone up. Books that we published two or three years ago are selling more copies now than they did at launch. I think this is because we’re investing in discoverability over time rather than concentrating all our efforts into a single week. A reader who discovers The Last Archive through a friend’s recommendation three years after publication is just as valuable as a reader who buys it during launch week. Maybe more valuable, because that recommendation is organic and carries more trust than any ad campaign.

The Bigger Question

Underneath all of this is a bigger question about what publishing is for. If the goal is to produce as many copies of a thing as possible in the shortest possible time, then bestseller lists are the right metric and chasing them makes sense. But I don’t think that’s what publishing is for, or at least, it’s not what ScrollWorks is for.

We exist to find good books and connect them with readers who will appreciate them. Sometimes those books sell a lot of copies. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, the measure of our success is whether the books we publish are worth reading and whether they find the people who need them. That’s a harder thing to quantify than a list position, and it doesn’t make for a good press release, but it’s an honest description of what we’re trying to do.

I’m not going to pretend that we never think about sales or that we’re some kind of literary nonprofit operating above the grubby concerns of commerce. We need to make money to keep publishing books. But I’d rather make that money by publishing books that matter to their readers than by gaming a tracking system to generate a vanity metric that impresses people at publishing parties.

If that makes us naive or arrogant or guilty of leaving money on the table, I can live with that. The books are better for it. The authors are happier. And the readers, the ones who find us, tend to stick around.

You can see our full catalog at scrollworksmedia.com/books and decide for yourself whether the approach is working.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We publish books worth reading, regardless of what any list says.