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When is a NYT Bestseller not really a NYT Bestseller?


kairparavel

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Apparently when something like this happens:

http://www.pajiba.com/book_reviews/did-this-book-buy-its-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list.php

This is absurd. Gaming book sales for a movie deal. Well, you can't fool YA social media. Especially when it knocks off the best YA book of the year from the top spot. They will set you straight. 

I expect this is common in other genres? 

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Apparently it is a normal practice in non-fiction. But if I understood correctly the NYT is usually quite good at asterisking those entries.

edit: apparently they use a dagger, fittingly

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I read that article yesterday.  It was a fascinating read on the process.

I didn't know it took so few sales to get on there.  5,000 sounds like barely a blip.

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This blog post has some excerpts if you're curious about the quality. It's not as terrible as some of the books that have got some dubious promotion on here in the past but it's definitely not great writing.

On 25/08/2017 at 3:11 AM, kairparavel said:

I expect this is common in other genres? 

Apparently it's quite common for political memoirs, one of the other articles was pointing out that past culprits of suspiciously large orders include books by Ted Cruz and (of course) Donald Trump.

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EW.com has some coverage on this as well. I went so far down the wormhole on this I forget where I read it, but Lani Sarem is suspected of writing some terrible Harry Potter fanfic called My Immortal which has a passage that apparently lines up with a passage in the book. And the cover art looks stolen from another image. Again, forget if I read it on Twitter or the Pajiba article.

Just amazing stuff, linking together so much early 2000s pop culture pieces. Also, The Hate U Give is on of the best books I've read this year, YA or not. 

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The cover art was in the comments of the Pajiba article. The My Immortal thing was twitter, but I think that was just a joke- the passages had some similarities but not enough to go that's the same author! right off the bat. It was pretty much just because they both mentioned hair colour.

 

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