Is the New York Times Bestseller List Part of the Conspiracy?

One of the key tenets of the Sad Puppy movement is that the Hugo Awards do not represent the mainstream of science fiction. Certain people out there are trying to undermine our argument by pointing out that many of the Hugo winners we consider substandard are in fact New York Times bestsellers, and therefore more representative of the mainstream than John C. Wright or Tom Kratman. Redshirts, for instance, debuted at #15, and both The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell were in the Top 10, compared to 23 and 27 for Larry Correia's best showings.

Is this proof that the Hugos are more mainstream than the Puppy movement claims? Of course not. Clearly our enemies within the Nielsen Hayden coterie have taken a lesson from Scientology. Back in the 1980s, Bridge Publications, Scientology's official publishing house, reportedly sent Church members to bookstores to purchase copies of Battlefield Earth and the Mission: Earth series, which they then gave over to Bridge so they could be shipped back to the same stores. Clearly the same thing must be happening here. It is inconceivable--utterly inconceivable--that enough people would buy a book like Redshirts to get it on a bestseller list. His work is too literary. Redshirts is practically Post Modern. Americans don't want that. We don't crave high quality prose. We don't like multidimensional characters. We want eye-popping action scenes with shallow characters, exactly like Larry, Tom and Brad give us. A bestseller list that doesn't reflect that has clearly been rigged by the elitist cabal that secretly controls publishing.

Mark my words, the actual number of people who've read John Scalzi are, at most, in the dozens, and his family accounts for most of them.