The Washington Post's bestseller lists have been wrong
Here's how "Best Sellers" become a thing:<p>Publishers count the number of books they sell.<p>This seems pretty simple, right? It is, but as a consequence, easily gamed. Publishers don't sell to you and me, they sell to book stores. So, you create some marketing to get people to preorder your book from a lots of different book stores. Book sellers inform the number of copies based, in part, on preorder numbers. There are ways that you can get book stores to order many more books than there is demand for by fraudulently (not sure if it's legally fraudulent, but maybe?) pre-ordering books, and stocking shelves with books that no one ever picks up. But boom, there you go - best seller.<p>If you want to cut out the middle man, and you're rich enough, you can just _be_ the middle man. Buy all the books from the publisher, and resell them. The publisher still gets their money, so they don't care. Again, now you have a best-seller.<p>And then, of course, there are legitimate sales that the best seller lists market themselves as measuring.<p>Book sellers don't want to be stuck with unsold inventory, so there's something of an arms race between book sellers and publishers/authors.<p>After seeing this game first-hand, I no longer believe anything on a best-seller list. As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not. The system can still be gamed, especially if it's run by algorithms.<p>So, basically, I'd argue that it doesn't matter whether WaPo is "right" or not because the input data is likely of poor quality anyways.