The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to NYT, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon

Publishing operates under a shroud of secrecy, making even the most simple questions — like which books sold the most this week — impossible to answer definitively. Amazon, especially, guards its data, and because they control so much of the market, trying to come to a conclusion without those numbers is always going to be inaccurate.

That’s where this combined bestseller list comes in. Every week, I compile the bestsellers on four of the most popular lists: the New York Times, both Combined Print & E-Book Fiction and Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction lists; Amazon Charts, both Fiction and Nonfiction; USA Today; and Publishers Weekly. They all use their own criteria and data, but I note the titles on multiple lists in the hopes that it will give us a broad overview of the bestselling books of the moment.

This week includes a lot more overlap than usual, and there aren’t a lot of surprises here. In fact, so many of these titles have been on this list for many weeks (Verity is on week 70 of being on the NYT Bestseller List) that I’ve bolded new additions so you can find them easier. Even the new titles are almost all extremely established authors, though, like David Baldacci, Nelson DeMille, and Jodi Picoult.

Unsurprisingly, then, this bestseller is also overwhelmingly (entirely?) white, which shows that while more diverse books may be published now than in years past, that doesn’t mean they’re getting the same marketing push as well-known white authors.

Books on All Four Bestseller Lists:

Long Shadows by David Baldacci (NYT #1, USA Today #2, Publishers Weekly #4, Amazon #5)

The Maze by Nelson DeMille (NYT #2, USA Today #3, Publishers Weekly #10, Amazon #7)

Verity by Colleen Hoover (NYT #3, USA Today #5, Publishers Weekly #3, Amazon #2)

It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover (NYT #4, USA Today #4, Publishers Weekly #2, Amazon #4)

Fairy Tale by Stephen King (NYT #5, USA Today #8, Publishers Weekly #8, Amazon #3)

Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman (NYT #1, USA Today #9, Publishers Weekly #6, Amazon #2)

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.