John: Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday so my book, Everything Is Tuberculosis, has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 14 consecutive weeks which is astonishing to me, like that's twice as long as my previous book The Anthroposine Reviewed was on the bestseller list. And this is a book about tuberculosis so it's wonderful to know that Everything is TB is continuing to find so many readers but what does that actually mean like what does it mean to be a New York Times bestseller does that mean you're selling 12 books a week 1,200 12,000 well it depends so first off Everything is Tuberculosis is called a number one New York Times bestseller because for the first couple weeks after its release it was the number one best-selling non-fiction book in the United States at least according to the obscure and somewhat opaque tabulations of the New York Times which involved asking lots of bookstores toward independent ones what's selling each week everything is tuberculosis was almost guaranteed to be a number one New York Times bestseller because I signed over a 100,000 copies of the first printing and also a ton of people pre-ordered it like a 50,000 and if you sell 50,000 books in a single week you're almost guaranteed to be a number one New York Times bestseller unless you're up against something like the Hunger Games but I wasn't up against The Hunger Games even though the new Hunger Games book came out the same day as mine because that book is fiction for kids whereas my book is non-fiction for adults and there is more than one New York Times bestseller list there's the non-fiction list but there's also the advice how-to and miscellaneous list and graphic novel lists and audio book lists and so on so actually just this week there are 15 different number one New York Times bestsellers and some of those books sell or 8,000 copies in a week i think the Hunger Games book sold 750,000 copies in a week so number one New York Times bestseller doesn't actually tell you that much about sales what it tells you is sales relative to its category and over the course of a year there will be hundreds of different number one New York Times bestseller so you might think of it as a kind of unimpressive accomplishment like you might go to Walmart and see that almost every book there says number one New York Times bestseller but it's important to remember almost no books end up in Walmart about 85% of traditionally published books like books published by big publishers sell fewer than 5,000 copies and only about 0.4% sell more than a 100,000 my first novel Looking for Alaska was widely reviewed and won a major award and never came anywhere close the New York Times bestseller list at least not until the success of The Fault in Our Stars many years later so just to be clear the vast vast majority of books published by major publishers don't become New York Times bestsellers and even for those that do while New York Times bestseller is certainly a career milestone and an important designation it it isn't like necessarily life-changing money i first reached the New York Times bestseller list with my third novel Paper Towns which spent three weeks on the young adult hardcover list and sold about 20,000 copies during those three weeks now that's a lot of books and it meant I made a lot of money in those three weeks but then it fell off the list and in total the hard cover of Paper Towns made around $105,000 which again is a lot of money but it did take 3 years to write the book so that was about $35,000 a year now listen that's a modest living just from writing which is incredible but it might be less than you expect from the phrase New York Times bestseller sometimes New York Times bestsellers involve selling 10,000 copies a week for like 200 weeks in a row in which case you become quite wealthy sometimes it involves selling 1500 copies a week for one week in which case you don't then there's the famous quirkiness of the New York Times list itself books that objectively should be on the list sometimes aren't either because they don't sell well at independent bookstores or because they were published too long ago or for obscure reasons that no one understands if you really want to see what's like selling overall each week the USA Today list combines all books and gives you a pretty good sense of where things are like on that list Everything is Tuberculosis is number 80 right now, whereas on the New York Times non-fiction list it's number six now. To be fair to the New York Times only five of those 79 books that are in front of everything as tuberculosis would be considered uh for the non-fiction list so it's actually pretty accurate in that way but that's not always the case also there are other lists like the independent book sellers bestseller list where uh right now everything is tuberculosis is number two which reminds me thank you independent bookstores and speaking of independent bookstores if you only read New York Times bestsellers you're missing out on a lot of the breadth and quality of books in the world today like my favorite way to read is to get recommendations from book sellers and librarians and other people who've read a lot more than I ever will like that's how I've discovered some of my favorite books i didn't find out about Paul Batty's Tough or Morin Johnson's early books because they were bestsellers i found out about them because they were recommended to me by librarians and book sellers and some of my favorite books are among those 85% that sold fewer than 5,000 copies so at the risk of undermining my own career I really encourage you to read both on and off the bestseller list i've tried to answer most of the questions I commonly get about the New York Times bestseller list but if you have more leave them in comments and I'll try to be there