Ebook Publisher Power Rankings: Random and Penguin on Top
It’s a great feat for a publisher to have even one book make a best-seller list. Below is a list of the publishers who have made the Digital Book World Ebook Best-Seller List since its launch in mid-Aug. — and how many times they’ve each made the list.
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.
Random House and Penguin top our publisher power rankings. If the two publishers’ books were counted together — logical considering their recent merger — they would have more titles on the list than the rest of the publishers combined; and all the No. 1s.
We decided to lump all the self-published titles together into one “publisher” (quotes used here because a handful of separate self-publishing authors do not work together the way Random House’s employees work together — not as a commentary on self-publishing). The self-published “publisher” had more titles on the list than a handful of major publishers. See below.
Related: Best of the Best-Selling Ebooks: Aug. – Oct.
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| Rank | Publisher | Appearances | No. 1 Titles |
| 1 | Random House | 85 | 5 |
| 2 | Penguin | 62 | 6 |
| 3 | Scholastic | 35 | 0 |
| 4 | Hachette | 29 | 0 |
| 5 | Simon & Schuster | 18 | 0 |
| 6 | Macmillan | 10 | 0 |
| 7 | Self-published | 9 | 0 |
| 8 | Hyperion | 8 | 0 |
| 9 | Amazon | 6 | 0 |
| 10 | HarperCollins | 5 | 0 |
| 11 | Soho Press | 4 | 0 |
| 12 | NeedtoRead Books | 3 | 0 |
| 13 | Sliding Hill Press | 1 | 0 |
A quick glance at Sliding Hill Press suggests to me that it only publishes legal thrillers by Charles Rosenberg—which would make it essentially a self-publisher, bringing the total number of self-published appearances to 10.