This week, Publishers Weekly rounds up the bestselling paperbacks of 2008. Topping the list at a whopping 5,298,355 copies sold in 2008 is Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, followed closely by William P. Young’s The Shack at 4,432,439, and Three Cups of Tea at 1,346,204. Barack Obama’s books round off the 1 million plus list. The list is further broken down into trade paperback and mass market paperback, divided into categories of numbers sold: 1million+, 750,000+, 500,000+, 250,000+, and 100,00+.

The Year of Fog appears considerably lower on the list than A New Earth, at 217,069 trade paperbacks sold in 2008, which is approximately 210,000 more copies than my first two books combined (including both hardcover and paperback). What makes one book fall through the cracks, another leap onto the bestseller lists? Certainly, part of a book’s success has to do with the story, the writing, all that important and artistic stuff we set out to do when we write a book, but an enormous amount of it has to do with publicity, placement, distribution, and, here’s a big one, word of mouth.It’s about a few passionate booksellers who light a fire under the book, and, in my case, it’s about Target, which featured The Year of Fog in its Bookmarked program.

Almost all of the books on PW’s list have recognizable titles. It may not surprise you to know that the PW list departs widely from The New York Times bestseller list. Publishers Weekly measures specific numbers of books sold nationwide, while the NYT list surveys a much smaller number of stores. While many of the books from the PW list were New York Times bestsellers, some books that sold in the range of 150,000 spent many more weeks on the NYT list than other books that sold over 250,000 copies. So what is the alchemy behind the numbers of the New York Times bestseller list?

The Year of Fog hit the NYT list a few weeks before it hit the Target shelves, but during its heyday at Target, when it was at its zenith in terms of sales, it dropped to the “also selling” part of the NYT list. One of my absolute favorite books of last year, Out Stealing Horses, which was a New York Times Notable Book, sold 195,000 copies in trade paperback. Yet, way back in November, it was in its 17th week on the New York Times bestseller list–further evidence that the NYT list has less to do with actual numbers sold nationwide than it does with a specialized subset of bookstores and the listmakers’ own expectations about what will sell (in fact, the form that the NYT sends out to booksellers to fill out includes several books for which the NYT has high expectations).

Frances Dinkelspiel had a great post earlier this week about the mysteries of the bestseller lists, which focuses on Northern California. She also links to the wikipedia page for the New York Times besteller list.