畅销书排行榜真正告诉我们的是一本书的受欢迎程度

畅销书排行榜真正告诉我们的是一本书的受欢迎程度

For anyone involved in writing or publishing books, the New York Times bestseller list is the holy grail.

对于任何从事写作或出版书籍的人来说，《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜是他们的圣杯。

"I still remember the very first time that I got on the list," says Dominique Raccah. She's the founder of Sourcebooks, a publishing house based just outside Chicago. "For an indie press in the middle of the Midwest, yeah, it was absolutely the most extraordinary moment in my life."

多米尼克·拉卡说:“我仍然记得我第一次登上这个名单的情景。她是芝加哥郊外的Sourcebooks出版社的创始人。“作为一名生活在中西部的独立媒体人，这绝对是我生命中最不寻常的时刻。”

The publishing industry has had a good year when it comes to books about recent politics: James Comey, Michael Wolff and Jim Mattis have all spent weeks on the treasured Times lists.

出版行业今年在政治类书籍方面表现不错:詹姆斯·科米、迈克尔·沃尔夫和吉姆·马蒂斯都曾连续几周出现在《纽约时报》的珍贵人物名单上。

Nobody quite knows what goes into making a New York Times bestseller. The paper doesn't reveal its methodology, other than to say in part that it's based on a "detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers." So I asked the people who are in the best position to make educated guesses about a book's sales, and who watch the lists closely: publishers.

没人知道怎样才能成为《纽约时报》的畅销书。这篇论文没有透露它的方法，只是部分地说它是基于“广泛的零售商对图书销售的详细分析”。因此，我询问了那些最有可能对一本书的销量做出有根据猜测的人，以及密切关注这份名单的人:出版商。

"You expect that if it's rung up at a cash register, it's reported to The New York Times and it's reported to the publisher, all of those things align equivalently," says Dominique Raccah. "That's not how we get the data."

多米尼克•拉卡表示:“你会以为，如果有人在收银台给你打电话，它会报告给《纽约时报》，然后再报告给出版商，所有这些事情都是同等重要的。”“这不是我们得到数据的方法。”

That's because nowhere in the world is there a straight up list of how many copies every book has sold. It just doesn't exist.

这是因为世界上没有可以直接列出每本书的销量地方。它根本不存在。

And yes, publishers ship books to Amazon, Target and Barnes & Noble, and get sales figures back. But some books go through middlemen, distributors who sell to many independent bookstores, and not all of them report their sales. Dennis Johnson, co-founder of Melville House, says he only really knows for sure what he sends out.

没错，出版商会把书寄给亚马逊、塔吉特和巴诺，然后拿回销售数据。但有些书要经过中间商，经销商把书卖给许多独立的书店，而不是所有的书店都报告销量。梅尔维尔之家的联合创始人丹尼斯·约翰逊说，他真的只知道自己送出了多少。

"I can look at each account in the country that has taken a book directly from our warehouse. And so I know how many books are out there, but that is not a sales reporting service, really. It's an ordering service."

“我可以查看该国直接从我们的仓库取书的每个账户。所以我知道有多少本书，但这不是销售报告服务，真的。这是一种订购服务。”

And then there are books that get sold to third parties — for example, "if you do a book on health care, and there is some kind of health care organization or hospital that wants to buy that book for its employees," Johnson adds, "that has a healthy business efficiency to it." That's because the publisher is selling directly to the hospital.

然后还有卖给第三方的书—例如，“如果你写了一本关于医疗保健的书，有某种医疗保健组织或医院想要为其员工购买这本书，”约翰逊补充道，“这会带来健康的商业效率。”那是因为出版商直接卖给医院。

This happens all the time — an organization thinks a book would be good for its employees to read, so it makes a bulk order from the publisher. Since the sale didn't go through a store, it wouldn't get reported to the bestseller lists. But here's where we need to make a distinction: If someone had instead bought the books from a bulk buying arm of a big bookstore, that would get reported. And if the book does make the bestseller list, that bulk order would be noted as part of its sales.

这种情况经常发生——一个组织认为一本书适合它的员工阅读，所以它会从出版商那里大量订购。由于销售不是通过商店进行的，所以它不会出现在畅销书排行榜上。但这里我们需要做出区分: 如果有人从一家大书店的批量采购部门购买了这些书，那就会被报道。如果这本书确实上了畅销书排行榜，那么批量订购将被记为销售的一部分。

But every publisher I talked to told me the same thing Dennis Johnson did: "It looks like he might have made that list anyway."

但与我交谈过的所有出版商都告诉我丹尼斯•约翰逊做过的一件事:“看起来他无论如何都可能会进入那个名单。”

This practice makes some publishers uncomfortable. "You care about the bestsellers list because you believe it to be an indication of what Americans are reading. The problem with this particular kind of system is that it's actually inflating numbers in such a way as to not be representative of what Americans are actually reading."

这种做法让某些出版商感到不舒服。“你关心畅销书排行榜，因为你认为它反映了美国人的阅读习惯。这种特殊体系的问题在于，它实际上是在以一种不能代表美国人实际阅读内容的方式夸大数字。”

Of course, once a book is sold, it's anyone's guess as to whether Americans are actually reading it ... or just letting it collect dust on the shelf.

当然，一旦一本书卖出去，所有人都在猜测美国人是否真的在读这本书……或者只是让它在架子上积灰尘。