Best of the Best-Selling Ebooks: Aug. – Oct.
Making it on to the Digital Book World Ebook Best-Seller List is hard. It requires a week of sustained sales across five leading booksellers. No daily deals or flashes in the pan here.
Because of Hurricane Sandy, we were unable to gather the data we normally gather for our weekly best-seller lists and so instead have decided to take a look back at the last 11 weeks of best-seller data to bring you our overall best-selling ebooks as well as the publishers which have made the biggest impact over the period.
Below are the top-selling ebooks over our first 11 weeks. To derive this list, we took our previous 11 lists and assigned each title in each list a score, 1 through 25, in reverse order. So, a No. 1 best-seller for a particular week received 25 points and the No. 2 best-seller that week got 24 points and so on, down to the No. 25 best-seller, which received 1 point. Then we added up the scores and ranked the ebooks by highest score.
The top of the list should be no surprise. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Random House) is our overall No. 1, on the back of 3 No. 1 appearances and 11 solid weeks on the list. You have to go out of the top 5 to find a book that hasn’t been on the list every week. Later on is where there are some surprises. For instance, why is Sylvia Day’s Reflected in You: A Crossfire Novel (Penguin) ranked No. 10 despite having spent the last four weeks at No. 1 and having 9 total list appearances? Well, because aside from those No. 1s, all of the other appearances were near the bottom of the list.
Some more facts about the list:
– 76 titles have made our top 25 in the past 11 weeks — out of 275 possible spots (if there were no repeat titles on the list over the course of 11 weeks)
– The titles have come from 13 publishers — if you lump together all self-published titles
– Despite 9 self-published titles hitting the list over the course of 11 weeks, only one, M. Leighton’s Down to You, made the list below
– After adding up all the scores as described above, our overall No. 1, Gone Girl, had 263 points; the No. 25 book had 42 points; and the No. 26 book, Brad Thor’s Black List: A Thriller (Simon & Schuster) missed the cut by only 4 points (about the value of one No. 22 ranking or of moving up four spots in any given week)
Related: Publisher Power Rankings
Sponsored by:
| Rank | Title | Author | Publisher | Appearances | Weeks at No. 1 |
| 1 | Gone Girl: A Novel | Gillian Flynn | Random House | 11 | 3 |
| 2 | Fifty Shades Freed: Book Three of the Fifty Shades Trilogy | E.L. James | Random House | 11 | 0 |
| 3 | Fifty Shades Darker: Book Two of the Fifty Shades Trilogy | E.L. James | Random House | 11 | 2 |
| 4 | Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy | E.L. James | Random House | 11 | 0 |
| 5 | Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games) | Suzanne Collins | Scholastic | 11 | 0 |
| 6 | Bared to You: A Crossfire Novel | Sylvia Day | Penguin | 11 | 0 |
| 7 | Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games) | Suzanne Collins | Scholastic | 11 | 0 |
| 8 | The Hunger Games (Hunger Games Series #1) | Suzanne Collins | Scholastic | 10 | 0 |
| 9 | No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden | Mark Owen; Kevin Maurer | Penguin | 8 | 2 |
| 10 | Reflected in You: A Crossfire Novel | Sylvia Day | Penguin | 9 | 4 |
| 11 | The Casual Vacancy | J.K. Rowling | Hachette | 5 | 0 |
| 12 | A Wanted Man: A Jack Reacher Novel | Lee Child | Random House | 6 | 0 |
| 13 | The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, Book Three) | Rick Riordan | Hyperion | 4 | 0 |
| 14 | Fifty Shades Trilogy Bundle: Fifty Shades of Grey; Fifty Shades Darker; Fifty Shades Freed | E.L. James | Random House | 8 | 0 |
| 15 | Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot | Bill O’Reilly; Martin Dugard | Macmillan | 4 | 0 |
| 16 | The Light Between Oceans: A Novel | ML Stedman | Simon & Schuster | 7 | 0 |
| 17 | Where We Belong | Emily Giffin | Macmillan | 5 | 0 |
| 18 | Zoo | James Patterson; Michael Ledwidge | Hachette | 5 | 0 |
| 19 | The Inn at Rose Harbor: A Novel | Debbie Macomber | Random House | 6 | 0 |
| 20 | The Boy in the Suitcase | Lene Kaaberbol; Agnete Friis | Soho Press | 4 | 0 |
| 21 | Down to You | M. Leighton | Self-published | 3 | 0 |
| 22 | NYPD Red | James Patterson; Marshall Karp | Hachette | 3 | 0 |
| 23 | Winter of the World: Book Two of the Century Trilogy | Ken Follett | Penguin | 5 | 0 |
| 24 | Deep Down: A Jack Reacher Story | Lee Child | Random House | 5 | 0 |
| 25 | The Bone Bed (Kay Scarpetta Series #20) | Patricia Cornwell | Penguin | 2 | 0 |
