Taylor Swift Doesn't Care About the NYT Bestseller List (And Neither Should You)

As a New York Times bestselling author, I can 100% tell you that it does not guarantee fame and riches.

When I had a book hit the list, I was so broke I couldn’t afford cab fare to the party.

And I know authors who have sold several hundred copies of their book, having it hit no list whatsoever, who have been set for life as a result of that book.

So what does that have to do with Taylor Swift?

Well, her long-awaited book—The Eras Tour Book—was on sale exclusively at Target.

In some ways, you could say: who cares? It’s a photo book, hardly a tell-all about how her feelings for Travis are so much deeper than her ones for Harry and what she really thinks about Karlie Kloss.

On the other hand, celebrity memoirs see publishing houses through seasons and seasons of failures. While not all of them succeed (hello, JT and Billie), when they do, they realllllly do.

Most celebrities—and when I say most, I mean everyone but Taylor—do the standard thing: have their agent let a publishing house know they’re ready and accept, sometimes, up to $20 million. Taylor is not, as we all well know, most celebrities. She famously got her songs back from evil producers, re-recorded them to even greater success and released her concert documentary exclusively through AMC (who needs a movie studio?)

In some ways, this was annoying. My friend and I saw The Eras Tour twice in the theater and the second time, she paid for tickets online that somehow didn’t show up on her phone. When she complained, the ticket person at the theater said there was nothing she could do as it was all controlled directly through Taylor Swift’s production company and not AMC. We ended up just buying another pair of tickets.

In some ways—if you’re a Swiftie—it was cool. Popcorn, for that show only, was $19.89, and came in a special Taylor Swift popcorn holder.

When Swift decided to release her first book, she went to no agents or publishing houses. Who needs them when you don’t even need to talk to the New York Times Sunday Magazine for their cover feature?

She and her team instead made a deal directly with Target. That means that she is cutting out the Big Five publishers and making a deal with one company: Target. Which brings me to my point: Every time someone tells me they want to sell their book to a big publisher rather than pay to have it published, I try to explain that if you do manage to succeed at selling your book—which isn’t easy—you will pay. And pay. And pay. You’ll pay in terms of your time…waiting years for the book to come out. You’ll pay in terms of your soul—being forced to go along with titles and covers and words you don’t like. You’ll pay in terms of your energy, when you see that your publisher isn’t doing anything for you because you’re not, like, Taylor Swift (or someone else who doesn’t need the help). Now that Taylor gets this, maybe other people will, too?!

The Eras Tour book will be on sale exclusively at Target on Black Friday—and nowhere else. No Amazon. No Barnes & Noble. No indie stores. Yes, that sucks for the indie stores but is it Taylor Swift’s job to keep indie bookstores in business? Isn’t the girl shouldering enough responsibility?

The most interesting part of this to me is that because Swift is distributing solely through Target, her book cannot hit the New York Times bestseller list.

AKA the most coveted cap feather, AKA, the list I hear people want daily.

I seriously cannot count the number of people who tell me that’s what they want for their book. At least every day I encounter a new one and when I tell them how broke I was when I hit the list, how broke my friend who was on the list for a year remains, how little it means when who reads your book matters so much more than how many, their eyes glaze over. They have stopped listening. Perhaps they’re even planning to have a “New York Times bestseller” tattooed on them as an act of manifestation. (Someone told me about this and said it’s online somehere; I can’t find it. If you do, tell me!)

Here’s the thing about the list: it’s sort of like the way meditation teachers talk about achieving happiness. Meaning: you can’t fixate on it in order to achieve it. It’s based on book sales, yes, but also on the editorial taste of the NYT editors. If that seems wrong—that a bestseller list should be based on number of copies sold and not whether or not an editor likes your book—you can take it up with the courts, as Exorcist writer William Blatty did.

Once upon a time, the list could be gamed. You could pay a company around $200,000 to have people go to the bookstores that report to the NYT list and purchase the exact right amount to make you hit the list. Then a guy from American Pie helped royally screw that up and everyone caught on.

People tend to believe that hitting the NYT list means you’ve sold the most books. But it doesn’t; it means that you’ve sold more books than other authors in a given week (and that the editors deem your boook NYT-worthy). The Bible has never been on the NYT list. And yet it has a few more sales than, say, Handbook for Mortals.

Point is: you’re much better off forgetting about the New York Times list and focusing on something you can control: like writing the best possible book you can for your audience.

And, of course, grabbing a copy of The Eras Tour book at Target while they still last.