Yes, your feelings about the USA Today Besteller List are about ego.

USA Today has announced that, due to a lack of editorial staff, the paper’s famed bestseller list is going on “hiatus.”

Within hours of the news breaking, social media sites were already flooded with comments from disillusioned authors lamenting that if the paper doesn’t reinstate the list, they’ll never be able to obtain their coveted “letters,” a step long believed to be crucial for an author to qualify as a success. USA Today and The New York Times lists are considered something of a double-crown event, a sales-and-hype based EGOT for authors. Past list-makers were encouraged by many to search the archives and get a screenshot of their books’ rankings on the extended list, or else “there would be no way to prove” that they’d made it.

One popular writer reached out on Facebook in a viral post in the romance community. She implored everyone to feel their feelings about this devastating blow to the industry and the careers of individual authors. She advised those who’d set a “goal” of getting those letters to not let accusations of ego bother them, that their feelings that something had been “taken away” from them were valid. Like countless other posts, it sought to bolster those writers whose broken hearts ached at the lost opportunity to achieve that status. It, like countless other posts, focused solely on the hardship this causes genre fiction writers, without a mention of the massive layoff that caused the shortage at the paper to begin with.

The real victims, it seems, are authors who have hit the list and might, should the archives be taken down, have no proof that they’re bestsellers. The real victims are the authors who never made the list but considered it a career goal.

And yet, somehow, we’re meant to accept these reactions as being totally divorced from ego.

One argument is that having those letters above your name helps you market your books. As a USA Today Bestselling Author, I assure you, those letters mean nothing when it comes to moving your book from the Barnes & Noble shelf and into the hands of readers. I can back this up as a reader: very few people buy books based on whether or not the author has the words USA Today Bestselling Author above their names on the cover. And frankly, the readers who use bestseller lists decide what to read? They’re in a boring minority who are more interested in being a part of a trend than in actually enjoying books. They’re not a sustainable audience.

A person could argue that having your book hit the USA Today Bestseller List demonstrates monetary return to publishers and agents. The reality is, while independent presses and self-published authors hit the list more often now than in the past, your odds of seeing your name on that list are a hell of a lot better if you’re with a major publisher and already have an agent. And when it comes to publishers, there’s a dark side to making the list: you can’t just make it once. Your publisher will expect that follow-up books perform as well—or better—and having multiple books fail to chart after one or two make the cut can often hurt your career, not bolster it.

Many writers have pointed out that, unlike The New York Times, USA Today counts actual sales and reveals its methodology. The system can’t be gamed the way NYT was so blatantly gamed by Lani Sarem and every bulk-buying conservative with an asterisk beside their titles. This is simply not true. Have you ever browsed Amazon and seen those huge “boxed sets” of e-books that sell for ninety-nine cents and feature twenty-five or more novellas from authors you’ve never heard of? Those authors are likely USA Today Bestsellers, owing to a popular scam that sees authors “buy-in,” sometimes for thousands of dollars, to get their books into those anthologies. At one point, the “editors” putting these schemes together would guarantee that the money ponied up for inclusion would lead to earning a spot on the USA Today list. How could they possibly promise that? How could they know?

Because those thousands of dollars were being used to buy the books, artificially boosting their sales while keeping the price point obscenely low for bargain buyers.

Which do you think is more harmful to authors: bulk-buying twenty-five novellas for ninety-nine cents while other authors and industry professionals have to constantly justify pricing full-length novels at $3.99 or the potentially permanent loss of the allegedly unscammable list that made the scam possible—and the letters meaningless as a metric of true industry power?

Again, we’re supposed to believe that dreams of the fame and riches supposedly brought by bestseller status have nothing to do with vanity or ego. The article linked above briefly mentions an author who posted an eye-roll-worthy sob fest of a Facebook post when her book actually did make the USA Today list at number one. Rather than celebrating that success, she chose to metaphorically shake and cry and throw up over the slight dealt to her by the New York Times, which did not include her on their list. She insisted that not making the NYT cut insulted her publishing team and her fans, who all deserved to see her book lauded. Before you get the wrong idea about this author, making that list wasn’t important to her. No vanity was involved in her laughably privileged screed. It was simply about all the little people who had been denied a chance to bask in her glory with her. The USA Today list wasn’t enough, even though it reported actual sales. Suppose we’re operating under the delusion that author ego isn’t what bestseller lists are for. Why wouldn’t an incredibly lucky author like that one be satisfied by seeing her book on just one list?

A writer I very much respect is quoted in the same article as saying the USA Today list gives us a good idea of what’s actually being consumed by readers across the United States. I disagree. While the NYT and USA Today lists have diversified in the past decade, they’re only as diverse as publishing. That is to say, not much. The higher ratio of white authors to every other race of author tells us that this list is about who gets deals, who gets marketing support, and who can afford advertising (or a $5,000 buy-in to a boxed set). Not who is being widely read but who is being widely positioned to sell. There will never be a metric that can accurately tell the industry what readers want. If there was, the industry would ignore it, anyway.

Yet, the social media ego fluffing continues. One author consoled her colleagues with words validating their “grief,” a vocabulary choice that struck me as particularly extreme and vaguely insulting. Another reassured them that the goal of making that list wasn’t about vanity or validation. No one, at least that I’ve seen, has told the truth: if your goal is making a list that measures how popular your work is, your goal is undeniably, irrefutably, rooted in ego.

Note: I haven’t said that ego is a bad thing. This is a hard business. You watch ungrateful, undeserving, mediocre authors rocket to undreamed-of success once a week with books packed with problematic and downright harmful content. You see truly awful people protected from criticisms they should receive and good people torn apart for not being white enough, straight enough, syrupy-sweet fake enough to deserve the same protection when they deliver those valid criticisms. Authors who strive for originality and can’t get a contract look on as lukewarm copycats, and outright plagiarists, receive their gold medals for being unethical enough to make a publisher heaps of cash. No matter how many readers you have, or how many industry professionals you have in your corner, you have to be your own cheerleader. You have to believe in yourself.

For many years, I didn’t mention my USA Today bestseller status on my book covers for various reasons. One, they were attached to a name I no longer used. Two, I felt that I somehow failed to “earn” those letters since I didn’t hit any list ever again. But when I finally decided that yeah, I was going to reclaim that title, it was a decision made entirely out of ego. I didn’t have any illusions that I would suddenly sell better, my skin would be clearer, and people would like me. I reclaimed it because it was something that made me feel good. It made me feel like a winner. It stroked my ego.

Vanity and ego aren’t horrible, unforgivable traits, nor are they facets of the universal human experience that we can simply choose to ignore. It’s the inability to accept that all of us, in all sorts of different ways, desire outside validation that makes a person insufferable. Denial of the existence of one’s ego leads to an inability to feel fulfillment, no matter how much objective greatness a person achieves. We’re seeing that truth play out in real-time on a certain bird app; even billions of dollars and a cult-like following of fawning capitalist teat-suckers praising and defending a person’s every decision or half-formed thought can’t make a person happy if they won’t simply admit that they’re valuing popularity above all else. Want those letters. But be honest about why you want them. You have an ego, no matter what all of those “grief” support posts going around are saying.

It is disheartening to know that without the USA Today list, many authors who fall outside of the straight, white, cis mold won’t get the thrill of the validation that comes with being a bestseller. Because, as I’ve said, everyone enjoys that ego boost. We’re seeing yet another door close on that experience for marginalized authors. It’s also frustrating to see such high numbers of employees let go from a newspaper at a time when journalism should be valued above profit. But those aren’t the angles being broadcast by the loudest, most viral voices. Instead, the focus has largely been on dispelling any notion that even a shred of ego is involved in any of the disappointment in the writing community.

Is it truly asking too much for some intellectual honesty when it comes to this development?

To the authors who are disappointed because hitting the list was your goal: you do have an ego. And that’s okay. It’s human. You’re not above your humanity. You are not the one person who has ever lived who doesn’t crave outside validation. It’s okay to admit that you want something because it will make you feel successful and important. It’s okay to want it openly without trying to dance in semantic circles about why, actually, you’re not motivated by ego on this. You deserve to live a human experience with human emotions. You are not beholden to perform a sanitized version of humanity in which you are perfect and selfless and never want popularity or praise, or to belong to an exclusive group.

But you also should consider not setting goals like “get my book made into a movie” or “be on the bestseller list.” Those aren’t things you achieve or earn. They’re things that happen to you. What you achieved was writing a book. What you earned was the sense of accomplishment that comes with typing “the end.” Those things should be your goals. They’re the only things that you have power over. Those are the only things that you can truly earn through hard work and determination. And if you value those things more than making a list, I promise, you’ll be mentally healthier than if you wait around for other people to tell you it’s okay to put letters above your name before you feel like you’ve accomplished something. A USA Today Bestselling Author above your name and eight bucks will buy you a cappuccino. It will not make or break you.

You deserve to be proud of yourself without proving your worth to others by showing up on a chart. But none of us can do that if we collectively maintain a dishonest narrative about the industry, its biases, and our motivations.