A friend of a friend had a book on the New York Times best-seller list. I questioned for how much longer the best-seller list would impress anyone — a year, five years?
With newspapers slowly going down the drain, how much longer will we care what they have to say about books we read on our Kindles? With the increased “niche-ing” of society — and people moving into small and highly selective groupings of people who like highly selective niched works of art — will this list remain relevant?
I read poetry and the poetry niche even has its niches: Language poetry, lyrical poetry, spoken word poetry and so on.
When’s the last time you asked someone what they were reading and you found you were not reading the same thing?
The importance of the best-seller list exists, in part, due to people like you and me. We give it importance so it becomes important in the same way a dollar is worth a dollar because you and I believe that.
This importance comes from positioning. In the same way the Iowa Writer’s Workshop will always be the “number one” place to study creative writing or Harvard will always be the number one school, the New York Times best-seller list will always be number one — at least as long as we believe in it.
I had been thinking about this idea and was reminded of it when I read Seth Godin’s blog last evening. He got to write about a similar subject before I did.
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Amen.