There was an article I wanted to write last year, but I could not access the relevant clear sources. This year I wanted to mention it again, so I started researching. Unfortunately, the situation is similar, but I wanted to address it, albeit superficially, because I succumbed to my curiosity. I researched the bestsellers in our country.
My aim was to see what kind of sales figures they achieved on an annual basis and to analyse what kind of books were selling more. The problem is that some of the sites do not give the relevant figures (and if they do, we do not know how accurate they are) and we do not know how the bestseller category is treated (such as 'starting year' and 'annual' or 'all-time' basis). In other words, there is no data from which we can draw firm conclusions, or there are very few sites that provide such data.
I have compiled the ones that gave me a chance of finding the data I wanted. To do this I used kitapyurdu.com, kitapsec.com and bkmkitap.com.
For the first 25 books in the bestseller category, I noted the book title, the author's name, the genre of the book, the number of copies sold, the number of pages, the original language of the author (and possibly the book), the sale price on 12 November, the year of publication, the bookstore and the availability of stock. When I checked again since then, I found that some prices and the order of books on the two sites had changed, but not significantly.
In making these notes, I have favoured sites that sell books of all genres, rather than sites that focus on selling a particular genre. This would not have helped with any interpretation that might have been made.
I have also not included books sold in sets (if any were in the top 25).
In terms of genre, which is somewhat difficult to decide, I preferred to check some books by looking at their tags on goodreads.com. Since I only noted a single genre, I tried to choose the most general category possible.
For example, a book with the tags 'spirituality', 'psychology' and 'self-help' was placed in the self-help category, because the first two tags here offer a narrative in a language that everyone can understand, rather than an academic meaning that is at the core of the book, and help the narrative of self-help. It becomes a book that is suitable for everyday reading and does not require a certain level of knowledge. Just like the difference between the academically complex category of 'science' and the popular category of 'popular science'.
After all, the information I give and the interpretations I make are meant to give an idea, albeit a simple one, and none of them is definitive. I will try to treat my sentences in terms of 'probability' and encourage you to read them that way.
First, let's examine it on a site by site basis.
Photo by Araix Rand on Unsplash
The predominance of children's books on the Kitapyurdu (annual bestseller) website is immediately noticeable. 9 out of 25 books are in the children's category. There are just as many fiction books. However, fiction is divided into fantasy and historical fiction. Furthermore, a third of the list of 20 different authors are Turkish.
If we analyse the number of sales, we see that it is more than 1 million. If we divide it into an average of twenty-five books, that means almost 45 thousand units.
If we were to read each book, we would turn almost 5000 pages. On average, we would finish twenty-five books, each containing almost 200 pages.
If we had done our shopping that day (I took the discounted versions for all three sites), we would have spent a total of 2268 TL. That is an average of 90 TL per book.
We would have read books from 17 different publishers and translations of books written in 7 different languages, 13 in Turkish and 6 in English.
Kitapseç (bestsellers) website is dominated by fiction books. Classic novels by well-known authors are in the majority. In the list of 17 different authors, Sabahattin Ali and Stefan Zweig are the bestselling authors with four books each. There are also 6 science fiction/dystopian books. Most of the three websites.
In terms of sales, we are half the size of the previous site. However, I would like to point out that we are looking at the 'bestseller' category for this site. There is no indication of how long this is based on. According to the wording at the bottom of the page, these are the bestsellers for 2020. Although I cannot be sure, this may be true if we consider that all but one of the books sold are classics.
If we were to spend time with all the books, we would read 4700 pages, or an average of 190 pages. We would spend just over 2000 TL on books, which is an average of 82 TL.
We would read books from 9 different publishers and we would see that three of the publishers would be more dominant. Books written in 6 different languages would greet us and 7 of them would be Turkish, 7 English and 5 German based works.
On the Bkmkitap (bestseller) website, fiction books of various themes are very popular. The most interesting is fantasy fiction. However, I attribute this to a possible advertising campaign, because 4 out of 6 of these books are written by Turkish authors and their sales figures are extremely below average. When I noticed this while making my notes, I thought that such a comment would not be absurd. There are 24 different authors on the list, and they are surprisingly diverse. Jack London is the only one with two books. The number of authors who are no longer alive is 15.
This is the list with the highest sales, with a total of 1.12 million copies sold. This is despite the low number of books with low sales that I mentioned earlier. On average, this would mean a potential of just over 45 thousand per book.
However, these fantasy novels do have an impact. Because of the long narrative of the genre, the total number of pages has also increased considerably. If we were to read all the books, we would be faced with almost 7500 pages. Despite the same number of books, we are talking about reading 1.5 times more than others. In other words, an average of 300 pages per book.
You can also understand that we see the same effect in terms of price. 2700 TL in total and an average of 110 TL per book.
While 14 different publishing houses welcomed us, the most dominant one was İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, which hosted 10 books. In the list of books in 6 different languages, English seems to be in the lead this time with 11 books. Of the rest, 7 are in Turkish.
Photo by Andrey Strizhkov on Unsplash
As I said, the time period of the data can be a bit misleading. I cannot tell exactly what year or period the sales are for because one site says "annual", another says "bestsellers" and yet it gives information from an old date instead of the current date. I don't think the sites are obliged to do this, but they could have provided a more organised output to draw certain conclusions and see what the public needs, likes and wonders about. That's why I could only make notes of what was available.
As books become more expensive, there is no longer a certain understanding of pricing. However, we can see that readers who do not hesitate to spend their time and money on reading do not hesitate to spend around 85-90 TL per book. This can be directly proportional to the number of pages, the type of book, its popularity in the country if it is a translated book, the number of editions of the book and the reputation of the publisher.
If we exclude from this average fantasy fiction books with low sales but high page counts, readers prefer books with 200-250 pages. Of course, children's books tend to have between 32 and 64 pages, which may lower the average. But even on the second site, where only classics were available, the average number of pages was 190 and the lowest was 68.
It seems that the quality of the publisher and translation is not a priority for buyers. Of course, those with a well-known name make more sales. However, translations of bestselling foreign books can be provided by more niche publishers.
On the other hand, since any publisher can print old works that are out of copyright, this can also provide diversity. There are publishers who sell classics or old works of a certain genre in a series. These publishers may do this either to monopolise the market, to ensure that new translations from the past are published, to keep collectors happy, or, in the most moderate sense, to make them accessible to everyone.
The most important thing, in my opinion, is to make available to readers those works that have not yet been translated into our language and those that have not been reprinted since their publication decades ago.
We do not buy a lot of our local works. I don't want to say that we don't value them because, as I said, that would be an obvious conclusion and these lists don't provide it. However, what is sold (for the three sites) and the sales figures are obvious.
If my eyes do not deceive me, the only work in all three lists (at least in the top 25) is '1984', and I suppose that will come as no surprise to anyone. It is, after all, a novel that everyone claims to have read or to know, and that is used in sentences to describe political situations gone wrong.
It should be remembered, however, that the number of sales is not the same as the number of readers. Nevertheless, if I were asked what is the most widely read work of fiction in the country, I would not hesitate to say this book. Of course, I would say this on the assumption that they have read it. There is also a difference between buying a book and reading it. I am not even going into the question of reading and understanding.
Finally, I will share with you the file I have prepared so that you can make your own personal interpretation and analysis. You can access it via the link.
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