USA Today Layoffs

A huge shock came across the book world this week when the USA Today Bestseller List is put on hiatus after the publishing company laid off their editor Mary Cadden, who has produced the list since 2007. This article I read yesterday goes more in depth to what’s going on.  From what I read in the article this layoff hurts authors as well as the editor and everyone else being laid off. Below is information I copy and pasted from the source.

USA Today drew upon hardcover, paperback and e-book sales from a wide range of outlets, including independent stores and online retailers, to put together 150 bestselling books from a given week. USA Today’s list has been highly valued by authors, agents and publishers, who also look to lists from The New York Times and Amazon.com, among others.

Sarah MacLean, a bestselling romance novelist who had noticed that USA Today did not update its list last week, said she and many of her peers valued the USA Today rankings because of their length, diversity and transparency.

“You get a broader view of the publishing industry and what people are reading,” said MacLean, whose books — most recently, “Heartbreaker” in early September — have frequently appeared on the USA Today list. “For a genre like mine, which is often forgotten, the USA Today list was invaluable.”

The New York Times breaks down its charts into various categories of 10 or more bestsellers, from children’s picture books to hardcover nonfiction. USA Today, on the other hand, combined everything into one list of 150.

“The Postmistress of Paris” author Meg Waite Clayton, whose novels have appeared on both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller list, said of the news,

It’s a shame to lose the USA Today list. It was unique in that it both combined formats for each book — print and ebook together — and included all types of books together: fiction and non-fiction of all kinds, and children’s and YA along with adult. So as a reader, you’re looking at everything there. I think often we have ideas about what we like and don’t like to read, but the USA Today lists exposed us to tiles we might not otherwise have considered.