We Need a Real Book Hall of Fame
Kate McKean (who you should all be reading if you have any interest in the business of writing) has an interesting proposal to make the NY Times Bestseller list more useful to readers and fair to writers. It does not go far enough.
McKean’s proposal is simple: a Hall of Fame for Bestsellers:
I propose a NYT Bestsellers Hall of Fame. Once your book hits that list for 52 (nonconsecutive) weeks, it becomes a Hall of Fame Bestseller. If that’s too many words to fit on the cover, may be it can be an All-Time Bestseller, a Golden Bestseller, a Lifetime Bestseller. I’m sure the Times can come up with a moniker that makes everyone look good. Publishers would get to put something even more special on the cover, authors would get to do the same in their bios and such, and everyone looks good because it’s the ultimate humblebrag. Oh, my book was soooooo successful they had to retire it from the List! I was so happy to make room for other authors to share in the success I’ve enjoyed.” Everyone wins! More books hit the List, publishers get something super special to use to market said books, and the Times looks magnanimous and like they’re the List of the people. They can even print another, separate list (mayyyyyybe only fiction and nonficiton, combined genres and ages, for now. We don’t need to double the length of the section) so that publishers and authors can screenshot it and post it on Instagram
This completely misses the point of a Hall of Fame. A Hall of Fame is not meant to reward talent, skill, and exceptional careers. I mean, that is nice when that happens, but that is not the point. The point of a Hall of Fame is to give fans something to argue about. It is let fans rail against the injustice of their teams and favorite players being kept out (of course Corey Crawford is a Hall of Fame goalie! Okay, no he’s not, but you didn’t hear that from me.) and rail against the obvious stupidity of the voters who let any Tom, Jane, and Page in (what idiot thought Joe Nieuwendyk was a Hall of Famer? Seriously, no offense to Joe, but that’s a terrible decision.) Just think of the fun we will all have.
Yes, the NY Times needs to retire books from the list. How the heck is Harry Potter still on the list, for example. But they should not automatically be put on a hall of Fame list. No, we should have reporters vote, preferably only a few and preferably in a manner that reveals their ballots and thus their terrible, low-brow, elitist, pretentious, pandering to the masses, view from the ivory-tower taste. Announce the list of eligible titles each year, and only let in two or three then sit back and watch the fun. How can you argue that The Wonderful Things You Will Be is better than The Day the Crayons Quit, you troglodyte? I mean, have you even looked their respect BARR (Books Above Replacement Read)? Or their CSAE (Children’s Smiles Above Expected)? Only people who think counting stats like TL (Total Laughs) are meaningful could argue otherwise. Might as well have a Hall of Pretty Good Reads.
It has potential to drive conversation, is all I’m saying. A Hall of Fame based on purely reasonable, automatic statistics misses out on the single greatest reason to even have a Hall of Fame: the chance to fight with people online about meaningless crap. Add that component to the NY Hall of Bestsellers, and no one will ever stop talking about books again.