Dissecting the different types of books that appear on the New York Times bestseller list

Abstract

The New York Times bestseller list is considerably one of, if not the most distinguished bestseller list. Books that appear on this list have enjoyed significant success, and their subsequent presence on the list is usually followed by a boost in sales. Hence, this paper highlights insights on books that are considered successful and popular among readers (by appearing on the New York Times bestseller list) and observe common characteristics these books have. This paper will focus on demonstrating how underlying information can be unlocked via data exploration and descriptive statistics to understand the factors surrounding books that are considered successful. Data is obtained by scraping the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction titles and subsequent findings were visualised in various ways to showcase patterns that may not be discernible at first glance. This paper found that certain book genres are more popular than others among readers, and the author's prestige is also a contributing factor for a book entering the list. Additionally, when looking closely at the breakdown of author's gender by genre of books, it is found that there is a disparity between the number of books that enter the list authored by male and female authors. These findings highlight that there are external factors that contribute to the success of a book that might not be accounted for initially. These findings can be expanded by extending the data collection period for a more comprehensive outlook of the changing patterns over time. From there, further studies can be conducted, such as to understand the influence of gender on the success of an author or barriers of entries for authors to write on specific books.