Troubled is a National Bestseller—But Weirdly, Not a New York Times Bestseller

My debut book is on two national bestseller lists but there is one conspicuous exception

A few days ago, my editor informed me that Troubled hit the USA Today bestseller list, which designates the book as a National Bestseller. It also hit the Publishers Weekly list, another major national list.

It received placement in Apple’s Biography & Memoir Bestsellers section.

It was also the top-selling title on Bookshop (an online book marketplace that fulfills orders for independent booksellers, conceived as a response to Amazon).

Many thanks to you and the rest of my readers for your support over these last few years as I built this newsletter and struggled to write my book.

Interestingly, Troubled did not make the New York Times list. Speaking with other authors and people in the publishing industry, apparently it is exceedingly rare for a book to instantly and simultaneously hit both the USA Today list and the Publishers Weekly list but not the NYT list. I read about how these lists are organized. The USA Today list and the Publishers Weekly list seem to be based primarily (though not entirely) on raw sales. In contrast, the NYT list cares about where the books are being purchased (e.g., fancy independent bookstores in NY and SF). Of course, they care about sales (to a point), but the tastemakers who curate the list also concentrate on image and “fit.” Similar to “holistic admissions.” To draw a rough analogy: the USA Today bestseller list is akin to MIT or Caltech; the NYT list is more like Harvard or Yale. My publisher was surprised enough that they are inquiring as to how the oversight occurred, though they tell me they expect to receive the standard boilerplate response about how the list relies on factors other than raw sales performance alone. They also tell me that book launch was successful and “beautiful.” I agree. Again, it’s thanks to you and my readers and supporters. Maybe it was good enough that I’ll write another one some day. I actually didn’t enjoy writing Troubled that much, if I’m being honest. I’m glad I did it. I’m proud of it. But the process itself sucked. Enough time has passed, though, that I’ve nearly forgotten the daily struggles it entailed, and am coming back around to finding the idea of another book appealing. I’m in the midst of a successful launch, too, which no doubt colors my judgment. And memoir-writing exercised different mental muscles than I’m used to. Any future book I’d write would be in the vein of popular social science, cultural commentary, and so on. Which doesn’t demand the kind of personal archaeology, storytelling, and structure of memoir. Thank God.

It is interesting how these different lists work. Despite all claiming to represent the bestsellers of the week, they regularly disagree on what those books are. Each list uses their own criteria and sources. They weigh sales from various sources differently. And there is little doubt that some subjective curation occurs as well. In their book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors define noise as judgments that are unpredictable, or scattered. There are two different types of noise. “Level noise” is the variability in judgments produced by different people. For instance, you and I might look at the exact same information and form completely different conclusions. That is perhaps what happened with my book hitting some lists but not another; arbitrators responsible for the respective lists saw the sales numbers and made different decisions. I also wonder to what extent “occasion noise”—or variability in judgments produced by the same person—might be relevant. Your conclusions about the exact same information might vary today versus tomorrow based on how you’re feeling, your mood, the weather, time of day, and so on. Fashionable social trends (e.g., polyamory), political climate, and other factors might also play a role when curators decide which books should hit the list.

It’s also important to note that these national bestseller lists only reflect velocity of sales, not the overall success of a book. A title could be a “tortoise seller” and move a few hundred copies a week for a decade, gradually amounting to hundreds of thousands of copies, yet never make any of the lists. Or a title could be a “hare seller” and move 10 thousand copies its debut week, literally never sell another copy ever again, and qualify as a bestseller. Maybe this is for the best. If lists literally just compiled the bestselling books of all time, it would never really change. You’d just see the Bible, Harry Potter, and the Britney Spears/Prince Harry/A-list celeb memoir every week. Basing the lists on sales velocity in a given week, along with some editorial curation, introduces some variety.

In some ways, bestseller status is growing less relevant in this age of ebooks, apps, and digital downloads. Still, the educated public, the bourgeoisie, the chattering class, they care about these lists. These individuals read books and play a disproportionate role in influencing the trajectory of public opinion, our political apparatus, family policy, our educational systems, and our basic civic functioning. Most Americans (the majority of whom, remember, do not have college degrees) putter along without thinking much about books. Elites, though, do think about them. And elite opinion matters. A prominent study from 2014 found that strong support for a policy among the middle class has virtually no effect on a policy being adopted. In contrast, strong support among Americans in the top income decile—those who earn at least $192K a year—doubles the probability that a policy will be adopted.

People who earn that kind of money are disproportionately likely to read a lot and care about bestseller status when making decisions on which book to pick up when confronted with endless choice. At least for now. Perhaps with generational shifts, the discourse around books will be influenced more by which titles go viral online or what literary Tik Tok influencers care about rather than which books appear on the bestseller lists.

It is amusing that these lists, and particularly the most prominent and well-known list, employ legerdemain to get a preferred outcome. As a friend of mine in Hollywood likes to say, if you're from a certain background, or you’re not down with the identity politics campaign, you get graded on a curve. Oddly enough, it’s possible that the lack of partisan rhetoric in my book actually backfired. The book can’t be immediately categorized, and thus, many people would prefer to simply ignore it or overlook it. It’s non-partisan.

The number of times the words “liberal” or “conservative” appear in my book: zero. The number of times those words appear in reviews and discussions of my book: At least twenty.

Here's what I mean. If, say, Bill O’Reilly writes a book that does numbers, tastemakers can slap the NYT bestseller label on it because there’s no possibility of it changing anyone’s mind. Everyone knows what the guy who used to work at Fox News is going to say. People across the political spectrum know the author and have their preconceived notions. In contrast, my book might actually change people’s minds. This very ambiguity might disturb tastemakers. There’s no coordinated effort, to be clear. These places are just staffed with the kinds of people, at the individual level, who are disproportionately likely to disapprove of my book or express skepticism at its message. There are people within these institutions who are open to my book, and curious, and willing to extend a platform. Elite media isn’t entirely monolithic. The situation is similar to elite universities. Overall, the elite universities are staffed with a lot of ideological true believers and their supporters. But there are still great scholars within them doing important work who prioritize the pursuit of truth over dogma. Anyway, for me these events have led to a situation in which my book is being overlooked by the NYT list, but another elite media outlet has recently approached me to contribute an essay. Not unlike cases I’m familiar with where highly qualified researchers have been disinvited from one elite university while another one quietly offers them a fellowship.

This is a useful lesson in understanding that while the institutions generally march in ideological lockstep, it’s not as if each individual within them is fully synchronized. Still, this is a weird situation with Troubled. In a recent article in Esquire, the author relays a quote from a book publicist who has worked at two different Big Five publishing houses:

“It's frustrating when you get the actual numbers of what every book on the list sold and a book with lower numbers is higher on the list. You know it’s because of connections or The New York Times preferring one read over another.” When the author of the article asked a Times spokesperson about this, the response was “As always, raw sales are only one factor in determining if or where a book might rank on our lists.” Elite universities used to say this about standardized test scores—they’re only one factor when making decisions about admissions. And then they later abandoned tests altogether. People used to think that elite universities were elite because their students had high academic ability. Then they stopped requiring tests that measured academic ability. People used to think bestseller lists reported books that sold the best. Let’s hope, then, that there won’t be any calls to abandon the consideration of raw sales.

Despite the hectic past several days, some of which I spent battling illness, I’m feeling energized and pleased with how things have gone with the book. So far in total I’ve done more than 50 media appearances across podcast, radio, television, and print. More to go. During book launch week, I think I had what Amy describes here:

I was ready to power through the illness for book promo. Then I literally lost my voice and had to cancel meetings for an entire day. On subsequent days I’d record 3 or 4 podcasts in a day and then spend the rest of evening mainlining Robitussin and shivering under a blanket. I recall reading a quote in a Ryan Holiday book “If you do everything, you’ll win.” I was glad to be young and healthy enough to—despite my temporary infirmity—do everything I could to promote this book. James Clear says a book launch should “feel like an event.” To have a successful launch, Clear describes what he calls a “concentrated strike,” or the idea that for two weeks or so it should feel like an author is “everywhere.” You open social media, or your favorite podcast, or speak to your friend, and it seems like “everyone” is speaking about the book, which makes you want to learn about it. Then you open Amazon and see that lots of people have reviewed it, which gets you to finally order it. There is an element of showmanship and theater here which I learned not from academics, but from internet writers. As a debut author (or new person in any creative domain with lots of competition), you need to have high agency and hustle. Maybe I’ll write more about this at some point, but for now I’ll leave you with another Ryan Holiday excerpt from his book Perennial Seller:

You can order your copy of Troubled now:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

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Book reviews

Here are a few new reviews and discussions of my book:

• What ‘Luxury Beliefs’ Reveal About the Ruling Class by Conor Friedersdorf (ungated here)

  • Excerpt: “Henderson’s struggles as a child are rendered so evocatively, with such well-chosen details, that I teared up reading them…Henderson can be sharp-eyed about the blind spots of the social setting he ultimately joined. The ideas in his book offer a novel perspective, even when he is applying the concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ too promiscuously. His arguments ought to be debated at the places that he critiques, such as Yale.”

• The New York Post: The 15 best books we read in February 2024, ranked and reviewed

  • Excerpt: “Rob Henderson tells the searing story of his childhood in foster care, untangling his emotions and experiences — and how they fit into a larger conversation about opportunity, affluence and education…this insightful, scorching debut is a real page-turner. It will make you interrogate your own beliefs about who gets first (and second and third) chances, and who faces a much steeper hill to success— often time through no fault of their own.”

• Our ‘Troubled’ Underclass by Charles Murray (ungated here)

  • “Henderson’s newly published book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class…is an indispensable document for understanding America’s large and multiracial underclass…We who use those statistics haven’t been able to convey the pain and loss that lie behind the numbers. Rob Henderson paid an inexpressible price to be able to do it, but he has made the suffering of millions of children palpable.”

• Rob Henderson’s ‘Troubled’ Past by

  Rod Dreher

  • “Politics never comes up in Henderson’s book…but the book is more valuable than a stack of sociopolitical books proposing programs to ‘fix’ the poverty class. Why? Because Henderson tells the truth about how badly broken America is, and, by implication, how hard it’s going to be to repair. Rich liberals (and some rich conservatives too) display their tolerance by endorsing politics and lifestyles that, when adopted by the poor, lead to widespread destruction and immiseration.”

• The Child is the Father of the Man by

  Stetson

• Rob Henderson's Good Fortune by Scott Gibb

• The unity of the political animal 🧑‍🚀 by Lawrence Yeo

• Books you should read: Troubled by Rob Henderson by

  Anuradha Pandey

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Podcasts

Below are some new podcast appearances you can listen to where I speak about my book and other topics.

• The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

  The Weekly Dish
  : Rob Henderson On Overcoming Trauma

• The Nature & Nurture Podcast with Adam Omary: Dr. Rob Henderson - Childhood Instability, Poverty, Education, & Resilience (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast)

• Newt’s World with Newt Gingrich: Rob Henderson on Troubled (Spotify, Apple Podcast)

• Lean Out with

  Tara Henley
  : Why Dismissing the Importance of Family is the Ultimate Luxury Belief

This will be the last post specifically about my book for a while, though I’ll continue to share reviews, discussions, and media appearances. Thanks for your patience. Thanks for your support.