How Do The New York Times Bestseller Lists Actually Work?

The NYT has 11 bestseller lists every week and five other ones that are monthly – and that’s rather a lot of work to maintain. The staff who put them together say they consult “tens of thousands” of retailers across the country. “The number of categories and rankings make the lists more useful to our readers, and also make competition between authors more fair. This way a picture book, for example, isn’t going against a cookbook or an adult fiction title.”