Official project website forthcoming
The International Bestsellers project is a collaborative endeavor to create, share, and analyze scholarly datasets about international bestsellers in fiction. More than ever, novels that become bestsellers often circulate the globe, spurred by multinational publishers, translation networks, literary agencies, social media, and other key factors in twenty-first-century publishing. Even basic access to information about this literary phenomenon is restricted, limiting how scholars of contemporary literature and publishing understand them and their significance to reading habits around the world. The IB project collects bestseller lists, supplements them with additional data, and aggregates them for the purposes of scholarly research.
The project has produced two original datasets and several conference presentations, public writings, and peer-reviewed publications. Pitt-Greensburg student Jed Kudrick (Creative & Professional Writing) worked on the project, first as a Research Assistant and then as a Green Scholar throughout 2024-25. He conducted research to complete one dataset, prepared it for analysis, and composed an essay detailing some initial findings, which is forthcoming. Some of the project outputs are made available below:
- DiLeonardi, Cohen, Sinykin. "Brand Management: International Bestsellers and the Death of the Author, Again," Studies in the Novel 56.4 (Winter 2024).
- "International Bestsellers: The Dataset," Post45 Data Collective (forthcoming).
Pitt-Greensburg Faculty Sponsors
- Sean DiLeonardi (PI)
External Project Members
- Dan Sinykin, Emory University
- Becca Cohen, University of Illinois