but I guess I understand why so many thing that seem to be such dreck can end up being ??New York Times?? bestsellers. From “Neil Gaiman’s weblog”:http://neilgaiman.com/journal/2003_09_14_archive.asp#106377353876310964:
bq. (The New York Times “tracks” the books it expects to see on the list. It sends out queries to reporting stores, asking how many they sold of the books in question. If you’re not on the list to be tracked, you won’t be on the final list.)
So whether you’re on the list isn’t necessarily a matter of you selling the most books, per se–which is, to my understanding, what it *does* mean to have an album on the Billboard lists or whatever–it’s a matter of whether someone decided to put you on the list, and then you ranked high enough to be mentioned.
Does this seem mendacious to anyone else? I mean, not that I give a flying fuck about whether something’s on the list, but they don’t exactly have a full-disclosure policy about what being on that list really means.
