Check out the official project website here.
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 cowrote an essay detailing some initial findings (Read it here!). Major project outputs include:
- Kudrick, Jed, Sean DiLeonardi. “How Translations Sell: Three U.S. Eras of International Bestsellers.” Public Books (September, 16 2025).
- DiLeonardi, Cohen, Sinykin. "Brand Management: International Bestsellers and the Death of the Author, Again," Studies in the Novel 56.4 (Winter 2024).
- DiLeonardi, Sean, Becca Cohen, and Dan Sinykin. 2025. “International Bestsellers: The Dataset.” Edited by Alexander Manshel, J.D. Porter, and Melanie Walsh. Post45 Data Collective, July. https://doi.org/10.18737/386521.
Pitt-Greensburg Faculty Sponsors
- Sean DiLeonardi (PI)
External Project Members
- Dan Sinykin, Emory University
- Becca Cohen, University of Illinois