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John DiBello on Amazon Best-Of Lists
posted November 14, 2005
 

John DiBello
W. W. Norton
Internet Account Manager

A couple comments on today's post about Amazon's "best of the year" lists. I'm Internet Account Manager for W. W. Norton, so I sell to and analyze Amazon for Norton and our distributed publishers (including Fantagraphics). I've been looking over these "best of" lists since they were announced late last week, and your post isn't clear if you've realized a couple things (please excuse me if you have):

While the "Editors' Picks Lists" are chosen by the Amazon editors (caveat emptor: I work with the Amazon editors in my day-to-day job), the "Customer Favorites Lists" are purely based on 2005 sales--no voting or balloting was held for Customers' Favorites. The absence of manga and superhero titles on this list confirms a long-held suspicion of mine that typical customer responsible for the sales of these books are much more likely to buy them from a bricks-and-mortar store, whether it's a B&N or a local comic book store. (You do seem to hint at this but again, I wasn't certain if it was clear what the difference between the Editors' Picks and Customers' Favorites lists were in your description.

Second, to confuse matters more, the Editors' Picks and Customers' Favorites lists do not contain the exact same categories, and at Amazon, books can be listed (and awarded) in more than one category. THE COMPLETE CALVIN AND HOBBES is listed in both the Editors' Picks Graphic Novels *and* Humor (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/593137/) categories, while THE COMPLETE PEANUTS is listed in the Humor category only. There IS no humor section in the Customers' Favorites lists, so there's a stronger showing by traditionally higher-selling strip collections on the Customers' Favorites list. Thus comparing the lists is a little like matching up apples and slightly different apples.

Nothing groundbreaking there, but I thought the clarifications might be interesting to you. I've been living and breathing these lists very thoroughly over the past few days, and was interested to see your post suggest someone other than just me is interested in dissecting them.