Best of the Best Sellers

Words by Andrew Beasley | Analysis by Andrew Beasley and Dewey Molenda

There are thousands of publishers in the United States, and those publishers put out hundreds of thousands of books last year. And yet, when the dust of “authoritative ranking” settled in 2025, only 68 publishers and 232 titles filled the 780 slots available on the New York Times Best Sellers Lists for Hardcover Fiction. What I want to know is who performed the best across the entire year. Who was the best seller on the Best Sellers list? 

Caveats:

The first attempt at a ranking involved just looking at total appearances. In this world, making it to the list is achievement enough. Each appearance is given a score of 1 and totals are added up across the 52 weeks. This approach favors large publishers, broad catalogs, and titles that had high staying power on the list.

With this approach, there is Red Tower Books and then there is everyone else. They accounted for 12.6% of all available spots on the list. Led primarily by Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series, Red Tower appeared on the list 98 times in 2025. Yarros’s Iron Flame had three #1 weeks (1/26, 2/2, 10/19) and 24 total appearances; Fourth Wing appeared 23 times in 2025 with its highest positon at #2; and Onyx Storm spent 10 weeks in the #1 slot and appeared on the list 39 times! Outside of those three titles, Red Tower still appeared on the list another 13 times, with Devney Perry’s Shield of Sparrows as the only other #1. Red Tower had more appearances than the next two most-appearing publishers combined. 

Half of Doubleday’s appearances were held by one title: James. Doubleday’s other slots on the list were mostly split between Dan Brown and John Grisham, with a couple bottom slots scooped up by Dream State. 

Sorting the other direction, there were fourteen publishers with only one week’s appearance on the list, and of those the highest ranking title was Mulholland Books’ The Hallmarked Man by “Robert Galbraith.” (NB: Publishers with one appearance on the list is different from publishers with only one title on the list. 24 publishers had only one title, which includes these fourteen as well as ten others like Europa, FSG, and Ecco, which enjoyed multiple weeks on the list). To see where all 68 publishers fell, I’ve dropped tables into a Looker Studio here (spoilers for the breakdowns to come).

Another simplified approach is to count up all of the individual titles for each publisher that appeared across the 2025 lists. This heavily favors broad lists even more than Approach #1, which accounts for Grand Central’s rise and Red Tower’s decline to third. The mean number of titles per publisher was 3.4 last year with a median of 2. Of particular interest is that the second ranked publisher on the first approach dropped out of the top ten completely here since Doubleday’s success was built on just four titles. Again, the full ranking is in Looker Studio.

As I said earlier, simply making it onto the list is an achievement, but #1 NYT BESTSELLER has a real ring to it. Every spot is worth celebrating, but we can’t pretend that rankings don’t matter. For this approach, we are looking at the average placement for a publisher across all appearances. This approach favors publishers with few titles that happened to do really well and penalizes those with either one appearance but low ranking or many appearances with the majority on the lower side. This could negatively affect a publisher that has a book chart with longevity but low placement. 

As I mentioned in the first section, Mulholland’s Robert Galbraith spent one week at #2 and then dropped off the list entirely, meaning the publisher’s average rank for all appearances is the second spot. Del Rey is an interesting example of a publisher with a high number of titles and a high average ranking, managing to stay in the top 15 even with eight titles and 22 appearances.

The approaches above ignore important aspects of what we are considering successful presence on the lists. Appearance count ignores ranking, total titles ignores quantity of appearance and ranking, average ranking ignores quantity. 

In order to develop a more accurate power ranking, we began by assigning points to each week. We assigned an inverse value to chart position, with a #1 best seller receiving 15 points and a #15 best seller receiving one point. If there were multiple titles, a publisher received the total of all titles’ points for that week. Publishers not on the list for a week received zero points. This allows us to arrive at a top ten list of total points acquired across all 52 weeks. I know the chart below is overwhelming, but here is what those results looked like across the entire year, for every publisher.

This approach then gives us a top ten based on total points acquired, which favors quantity and longevity as well as position.

The approach above gets us closer to what we want, but it still treats each publisher as an island, rather than in competition with one another. To take the final step, we need a Cumulative Rank. In this instance, each week is a competition and the number of competitors involved is factored in. A publisher’s score for each week is essentially how many other publishers they beat out based on our scoring from Approach #4. If there were 10 unique publishers on the list, the best publisher that week gets 10 and the worst gets one, if there were four unique publishers, the best gets four and the worst gets one. I have included two charts here. The first is the top 15 publishers using this method, and below that is a chart mapping all 68 publishers.

Of particular interest is Del Rey’s late rise, barely breaking over Holt by only five points in the final week, as well as the publishers like Riverhead who saw early success but did not manage to make an appearance in the back half of the year.

Using this method, the top ten publishers with the most significant presence on the NYT Best Sellers (Fiction) List are:

That concludes our analysis of the 2025 lists for Fiction, but there are always further questions. For instance, one thing I didn’t explore is a “Time-On-Top” factor where there is weighting to boost titles that remain in the top positions week after week. I’d also like to look at Big 5 presence on the list and genre breakdowns but that will take some categorizing work! I’m planning to do more of these analyses, including taking a look at the Nonfiction list, so please let me know if there are questions you’d like explored! 

Congrats to our top three List Toppers for 2025: Red Tower 🥇, Doubleday🥈, and Little, Brown🥉

If you found this interesting and would like to chat about data, books, or anything else one on one, please feel free to send a message to [email protected]

*Titles are tied