Are you done laughing yet? I'm not sure I am. I've already seen the publication of my 10th book. Um, I haven't appeared on this list. In fact, I know more than one writer who has sold over 50 books and hasn't made this list.

In genre fiction, New York Times bestsellers are tough to come by. First, genre fiction, by its nature, appeals to a certain segment of the population, not necessarily all of it. But you knew that.

Another big reason is the way NYT bestsellers are made. Yes, made. The NYT list doesn't reflect actual sales to the public, but publisher sales to retail outlets and distributors. What does this mean? If a publisher is really behind you, they can make you an NYT bestseller with a big push and a big print run. There's no guarantee that people will buy those books, however, so publisher don't often ramp up for this kind of action unless they're pretty sure of the paybacks. (Remember the bean counters from lesson 1? They are en force here, too.) In this event, it's been suggested that the minimum print run needed to make an appearance on NYT is about 250,000 copies. Your average debut author's print run with an NYC publishing house will run somewhere in the 20K-30K range for mass market paperbacks, give or take a few. As you can see, you'd have to have a lot of growth in order to meet that minimum NYT number.

NYT is different from other lists like Waldens Book Stores and USA Today which reflect actual sales to the public, although to certain stores in both cases. In the case of a USA Today bestseller, I've heard that you really need about a 70K print run to hope to make is. 100K makes it much more likely. Why? If your print run is that big, your books are peppered in nearly every store, everywhere, available for folks to buy. The same can't be said for that debut author.

Does that mean that anyone who's published 10 books or more and hasn't become a staple of the NYT list ought to hand in their computer and take up something new?

Nope. You never know when you're going to write that book that's going to put you over the top. We all like to think that one special book is going to catapult us to the top. The reality for most writers is that they ascend the ladder of publishing slowly, over multiple books. Few writers in history have had success anything like J.K. Rowling's, for example. Maybe folks like Dan Brown and John Grisham can relate. The rest of us...will need to understand that a fan base is built slowly, line by line, book after book.

Despite all the talk about lists, what interests publishers most when you're new isn't lists. They know they probably haven't given you the print run for that. They call about sell-through, meaning what percentage of the copies they did print actually sold (after returns are calculated)? An average sell-through is 55-65%. Above 70% is damn good. Above 80% and you're smoking! These are numbers that impress publishers because they say you have fans who will buy books, and that's what they want to hear. So if you start with a smaller print run, it's easy to despair, but don't. That may enable you to achieve a great sell-through. After all, I'd rather be the 25K print run author who sells 20K of those books, rather than the 40K print run author who sells the same number of copies...