this: bestseller (disambiguation) A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and specialties (number one best selling new cookbook, novel, nonfiction, etc.). The New York Times Best Seller list is one of the best-known bestseller lists for the US. The New York times does not include sales from Internet retailers or box stores such as Walmart or Target. It is not uncommon that a book that appears as number 1, will fall short in actual sales. The New York Times Best seller list only tracks National and Independent book stores.

In everyday use, the term bestseller is not usually associated with a specified level of sales, and may be used very loosely indeed in publisher's publicity. Bestsellers tend not to be books considered of superior academic value or literary quality, though there are exceptions. Lists simply give the highest-selling titles in the category over the stated period. Some books have sold many more copies than contemporary "bestsellers", but over a long period of time.

Blockbusters for films and chart-toppers in recorded music are similar terms, although, in film and music, these measures generally are related to industry sales figures for attendance, requests, broadcast plays, or units sold.

Particularly in the case of novels, a large budget, and a chain of literary agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, retailers, and marketing efforts are involved in "making" bestsellers.

Early bestsellers

'Bestseller' is a relatively recent term, first recorded in print in 1889 in the Kansas City newspaper The Kansas Times & Star, but the phenomenon of immediate popularity goes back to the early days of mass production of printed books. For earlier books, when the maximum number of copies that would be printed was relatively small, a count of editions is the best way to assess sales. Since effective copyright was slow to take hold, many editions were pirated well into the period of the Enlightenment, and without effective royalty systems in place, authors often saw little, if any, of the revenues for their popular works.

The earliest highly popular books were nearly all religious, but the Bible, as a large book, remained expensive until the nineteenth century. This tended to keep the numbers printed and sold low. Unlike today, it was important for a book to be short to be a bestseller, or it would be too expensive to reach a large audience. Very short works such as Ars moriendi, the Biblia pauperum, and versions of the Apocalypse were published as cheap block-books in large numbers of different editions in several languages in the fifteenth century. These were probably affordable items for most of the minority of literate members of the population. In 16th and 17th century England Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and abridged versions of Foxe's Book of Martyrs were the most broadly read books. Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) were early eighteenth century short novels with very large publication numbers, as well as gaining international success.