2 Responses to “Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Paperback)”

1. Shonka
   September 24th, 2009 @ 1:34 am

   This book is below the standard of many other volumes in the VSI series, and also a bit shorter (116 pages of text). Early on there’s an interesting compare and contrast of the US and UK “bestseller” markets. After some discussion of what is a bestseller, and the history of lists, the bulk of the book is a kind of gossipy recitation or series of capsule descriptions of the main bestselling novels in the US (Chap. 4) and the UK (Chap. 5) during the 20th Century. The focus throughout is on the content and genres of these books. There is a short Chap. 6, about 4 pp., about digitization and e-books.

   Notwithstanding that this is a VSI and therefore of necessity concise, there are many unfortunate shortcomings of the approach taken here:

   (i) no discussion of other countries’ bestsellers, or even of the influence of Anglophone books on the bestseller lists in other EU countries, to say nothing of Japan, Latin America, etc.;

   (ii) next to no discussion of the business aspects of bestsellerdom, including, among other topics: agents and advances, the relationship of bestsellers to the backlist, and media tie-ins and merchandising; and

   (iii) no discussion of non-fiction. This last is puzzling: since the thesis of the book is that one can learn something about the preoccupations of an era by looking at its bestseling novels, one might think its best-selling non-fiction would be at least as transparent a gauge of the Zeitgeist. And some lines on the history of the self-help and business book genres, for example, would also have been reasonable to include in a book so titled.

   All in all, this book might be of most interest to someone looking for a chatty bit of “cultural studies” fluff as a kind of sorbet course between more substantial books. If you’re expecting a book about the publishing business, or even a more serious cultural analysis, you will probably be disappointed.

2. Hailey
   September 24th, 2009 @ 4:41 am

   This is a recent addition to Oxford’s superb but inexpensive “Very Short Introduction” series, which tend to be handy to use, brief in duration, but packed with information (i.e., the perfect “plane book”). I have read other books on this subject, which largely focus on various past bestseller lists. The author here is attempting something more useful–to really explore the concept of what is a bestseller and what factors account for some books becoming bestsellers and others not. The author is British, so his focus is the U.S. and the UK, but he well explains how some common factors have impacted both countries. One of the more interesting findings is that due to the late agreement in the US to abide by British copyrights, many of the bestsellers in this country during the 19th century were cheap unauthorized reprints of British works. The author also discusses how the unique British marketing controls on books (essentially, no discounts; all sell at the same price) had an impact there. Separate chapters are devoted to American (with which the author is quite conversant) and British bestsellers. In the American chapter, the author suggests common factors which determined whether a book might be a bestseller, and establishes some analytical categories for this phenomenon. The text runs 113 pages, including some quite interesting and helpful illustrations, and also includes a short bibliograpy and index. The high production values associated with OUP are present here as well. While this book will never itself become a bestseller, it certainly provides an informative introduction to that topic.

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