Nathan BarryFounder and CEO, Kit · Founder and CEO at Kit

Why The New York Times Bestseller List Doesn't Matter

24 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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This content was created by Nathan Barry. This content was uploaded by Nathan Barry. This is a YouTube video titled "Why The New York Times Bestseller List Doesn't Matter" (created 2026-02-24T17:00:38+00:00). The excerpt is a spoken segment by a single participant (labelled SPEAKER A) offering a critique of bestseller lists—especially the New York Times list—arguing that measuring weekly sales is a misleading metric for long-term popularity. The speaker notes that many books briefly hit bestseller lists but then stop selling, and cites Josh Kaufman's The Personal MBA as an example of a book that sold over 2 million copies without ever appearing on major lists.

Chapters

There are a lot of books that hit the New York Times bestseller list and then never sell another 1,000 copies ever again. The New York Times list and all of these lists, they go from Sunday to Saturday. So it's how many sales you get in a week, which is kind of a weird thing to do. If you go back to why are there bestseller lists, it's, well, so that I as a reader will know what I should read because that's the most popular book. How many a book sells in a week doesn't really matter, I don't think. We have a mutual friend, Josh Kaufman. His book, The Personal MBA, has sold over 2 million copies since it came out. It has never once hit the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, any of the major lists.