Conservative book publisher Regnery, which has published major conservative authors such as Mark Levin and Ann Coulter, has made a startling announcement: They no longer want anything to do with the New York Times’s best-sellers list. According to the Associated Press, “Regnery is annoyed that its book [Dinesh D’Souza’s] ‘The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left’ was only No. 7 on the Times’ latest best-sellers list even though another organization that tracks sales ranked it No. 1.” Once upon a time, marketing a book or author as a “New York Times best-seller” was essential for book marketing. In the past, Regnery books have dominated the Times’s list, and if they suspect the Times is engaged in chicanery here, well, they’re hardly the first to accuse the Times of monkeying with the list.
In 1983, Exorcist author William Peter Blatty sued the Times for $9 million, claiming that the Times hadn’t listed the book for more than single week because of “intentional negligence and injurious falsehood,” even though it had sold 84,000 copies. The Times’s legal defense was an, ahem, novel one: The list was an editorial product, not a strict accounting of which books sold the most copies. The courts sided with the Times, though Blatty appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case. Though the Times triumphed, soon after the Blatty case, it began hedging its bets and appended fine print to the list explaining that the sales figures were statistically adjusted.
At the same time the list relies on editorial input, there have been a number of documented instances of marketing firms successfully putting a book on the list through strategic purchases. If you’ve published a book and got a spare couple hundred thousand dollars lying around, there’s a good chance you, too, can be a New York Times best-selling author.
Because of this, the Times has become vigilant about authors trying to game the list—although, the Times has also used this as a rationale for possibly downplaying the success of conservative writers. In 2015, Ted Cruz’s book A Time For Truth was knocked off the list because it alleged an “overwhelming preponderance of evidence was that sales [of Cruz’s book] were limited to strategic bulk purchases.” Cruz’s presidential campaign issued a blistering response, accusing the Times of “blatant falsehood” and “partisan bias.” They further demanded theTimes publicly release their evidence that Cruz was trying to buy his way on to the list, and if they could not produce evidence, apologize to Cruz. The Times had no response.
Regnery is now betting that influence of the Times’s best-sellers list is already waning in the era of Amazon, and the odds may favor them. In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that like the rest of the Times, the best-sellers list isn’t a strict accounting of what happened—it’s very reflective of the paper’s politics.
