Whether you realize it or not, there’s quite a controversy brewing around the various bestseller lists that matter, and it has everything to do with politics and nothing at all to do with politics.

The controversy centers on Ted Cruz, the Republican Junior Senator from Texas and presidential candidate. Like a lot of politician’s polishing their credentials and trying to broaden their appeal (or at least burnish their brand in case they don’t triumph over the 477 other people officially running for president in 2016), Cruz wrote a book, A Time for Truth in which he discusses some of his policies, beliefs, and other reasons he thinks you should vote for him.


Despite strong sales (reports say the book moved nearly 12,000 copies, good enough for third place in terms of sales of hardcover nonfiction), The New York Times has disqualified Cruz’s book and refused to list it on their bestseller list, which remains the iconic list for many people regardless of politics.

The Secret Formula

The stated reason for Cruz’s exclusion is simple: The New York Times says they have clear evidence that most of those sales were bought in bulk by third party companies hired to boost sales of Cruz’s book. This is against their rules.

There’s a long tradition of hiring companies to buy your books in order to make a turkey look like a bestseller, in both political circles and elsewhere (Scientology’s Dianetics has long been said to have had its millions and millions of sales boosted by such tactics, and just a few years ago Sarah Palin used $64,000 of her political action committee (PAC)’s money to buy up copies of her own book, boosting its sales numbers). And many of the books that were accused of using such tactics were placidly included on the NYT Bestseller lists.

Driving some of the outrage this time is simple politics, of course: Conservatives see The New York Times as a bastion of crazy liberals, the literal example of the “lefty media” manipulating the news to make things look the way Democrats want. But beyond that is the issue of the New York Times’ formula for deciding what books are bestsellers and what aren’t. Unlike Publisher’s Weekly, for example, The NYT bestseller lists always takes more than sale into account—but no one knows exactly what the formula is. The NYT guards it as a company secret, so it’s difficult to know whether sales of Cruz’s books differed significantly from sales of similar books by other political figures.

The Difference

The difference here may be the tactics used by Cruz or his publisher, HarperCollins, which may have involved not simply getting a store chain like WalMart to buy huge numbers of copies they will later return, but literally hiring companies to in turn hire individuals to go out and buy the book, making the sales look more organic, as if Cruz had a groundswell of popular support. If that’s the case, it is kind of a dirty trick, and Cruz probably doesn’t deserve to be known as a New York Times Bestseller.

On the other hand, Amazon.com, the largest bookseller on the planet, has stated it sees no evidence of bulk or sketchy sales for A Time for Truth (at the moment of this writing #27 on Amazon’s bestseller lists). It should be noted, however, that Amazon’s bestseller rankings are possibly even more mysterious than the New York Times’, as anyone with a self-published title can attest.

So what’s the bottom line? Nothing about bestseller status should convince you to buy or not buy a book. If you’re planning to vote in the primaries and/or the general election next year, reading a book by a major candidate isn’t a bad idea, whether it’s selling well or not. On the other hand, a candidate shouldn’t be able to buy bestseller status; a lot of other writers have worked very hard to get there purely on talent and ideas.