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gwern comments on How can I strategically write a complex bestseller? (4HS001) - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure I know where you're getting this from. Aren't there a lot fewer than a million books published each year?
A lot depends on what the definition of "best seller" is. Are we talking about NYT best seller? How many weeks on the list? There are 52 weeks in the year and 10 slots on the list for each of fiction and nonfiction.
There's at least one LW member whose first nonfiction book was an international bestseller, and I'd say it's pretty likely that his second (released this month) will do the same.
I think that what your Twilight/Fifty Shades examples are referring to would be more accurately described as "cultural phenomena", rather than mere bestsellers. Bestsellers happen every week.
Absolutely not. In the UNESCO figures, the USA hits >300k new books a year and a global total of >2.2m new books a year. Estimates sourced from Bowkers (in charge of ISBNs) using a less restrictive definition put it at 3 million, in the USA alone.
So, in any given market for books, there are a lot less than a million published each year. 300k/520 opportunities to be a bestseller = better than 1:1000 odds.
Note that an "international bestseller" doesn't mean a book is in the top worldwide, it means that it was a bestseller in more than one country. So nobody's trying to rank out of the 2.2m/year.
That doesn't follow. To make the obvious points, books published the previous years (~300m possibilities) are also competing for space on the bestsellers list by means fair and foul (see the Church of Scientology), and books can also spend many weeks on the bestseller list, using up even more slots (not sure where your 520 number is coming from).
10 slots on a list times 52 weeks in a year. While the other issues you mention are relevant, they are at least somewhat balanced by there being more than one best seller list in existence, many with a smaller pool of candidates than the NYT list.
Somewhat. Not much. There are books that spend months or years on the bestsellers (eg. Fifty Shades of Grey), and just one of these books alone will blow away an entire tenth of the entire pool for that bestseller list - and then there are the sequels or spinoffs or licensees of existing franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek or Dune or Twilight...
That's not a point in favor because it means that you will have a hard time getting into those pools. It's only useful if you know in advance that you can get into them.