It’s the dream of many writers — to make it onto the New York Times bestsellers list. There’s prestige attached. And increased book sales.

But for the University of Toronto’s controversy-courting professor Jordan Peterson, it just might be the impossible dream.

Since it was published on Jan. 23, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has soared to the top of the charts. This week it tops the Star’s non-fiction list and other lists across Canada.

Readers in the United States seem to like him, too. It’s the No. 4 best-selling book in the U.S. overall, according to Publishers Weekly. It’s No. 1 on Amazon. It’s No. 2 on the Washington Post’s non-fiction list. It’s No. 4 on USA Today’s overall list.

But it didn’t seem to cast even a shadow on the New York Times’ prestigious list. Why would that be?

Let it be said up front that compiling a bestsellers list can be a tricky thing. Different publications use different categories and criteria. Does this book belong in self-help or general non-fiction?, we might ask ourselves, moving it off one list and onto another. This can explain, particularly in non-fiction, why there’s so much variety from one list to another, even though they’re ostensibly measuring the same thing.

In addition, not everyone in the U.S. gets their sales numbers from the same place. And some of them even define weeks differently, measuring from Sunday to Saturday, say, like the Times, or Monday to Sunday, like Publishers Weekly.

Keeping that in mind, we approached the Times to ask why Peterson’s book did not make the list when it was so prominent elsewhere.

We received an email from Books Editor Pamela Paul, who wrote: “Per the Bestsellers team, we do not include books published in Canada only. Hope that helps!”

That wasn’t an answer we expected.

The book was in fact sold in the U.S. — according to Publishers Weekly it moved almost 90,000 copies there in two weeks. It was also printed south of the border.

But the publisher is listed as Penguin Random House Canada — rather than its U.S.-based parent company or one of its stateside subsidiaries.

Could that be enough to disqualify Peterson from bragging rights?

Being Canadian didn’t seem to be an issue for another book that made the Times’ lists: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, from Vancouver-based publisher Greystone Books. So we went back to the Times for clarification.

This time, we heard back from Chris Harcum, who works with Paul.

“The Hidden Life of Trees was also published in the United States. We do not rank books that are not published in the United States,” Harcum reaffirmed in an email.

The Hidden Life of Trees, according to Jennifer Gauthier, the director of sales and marketing at Greystone, noted that the book was printed in Canada and, as to selling it in the U.S. market, they did “the same as when we ‘publish’ in Canada. We present it to our U.S. reps, they present it to buyers, it ships from our U.S. distributor, it is stocked in retail stores and we invest in marketing it.”

In addition, the book had the same ISBN identification number in both countries, and Greystone had rights to sell it both in Canada and the U.S.

Random House Canada says it handled Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life the same way.

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Company spokesperson Tracey Turriff noted that the book was printed in the United States, distributed from its facilities in Maryland, and had U.S. “salespeople, publicists and marketers.”

Without meaning to be difficult, I emailed Harcum again to ask what, exactly, being published in the United States means. He referred me back to Random House Canada to “explain the differences in their imprints and to ask why they decided not to publish this title in the U.S.”

This, it seems, is where the crux lies. Random House Canada is owned by U.S. parent Penguin Random House. None of the New York company’s American imprints picked up the book, we’re told, because they didn’t consider it a good fit.

Now, according to Random House Canada, it’s one of their best performing books ever.

To be fair, there were a couple of other prominent lists where Peterson’s book didn’t appear. It wasn’t on the L.A. Times bestseller lists for this week; nor was it on Indiebound, the lists of books sold at only independent booksellers.

Jim Milliot from Publishers Weekly notes, “Since we use point-of-sale data, as long as it is sold here, that is good enough for us. The New York Times’ reasoning doesn’t make much sense. The lists are about what is selling.”

Publishers Weekly receives its information from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks point-of-sale purchases from major retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Target and independent bookstores, among others.

While it might seem simple — a book sale is a book sale is a book sale — there is no hard and fast rule as to where each outlet gets their numbers. And they don’t all use BookScan.

USA Today and the New York Times compile their own lists from their own numbers. On its website, USA Today says that it “collects sales data from booksellers representing a variety of outlets,” which include contributors such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Costco, and other independent stores it names.

The Times doesn’t say specifically where the numbers come from: “Rankings reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles.” It cites “thousands of diverse selling locations” and mentions independent book stores, chains of varying sizes, ebook sellers, and more.

Which is all to say: there are no reliable answers. Most of us who compile bestsellers lists in Canada use a centralized service, BookNet, so our lists tend to be reasonably similar, barring any editor’s quirks in decision making. While it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of which booksellers report to whom and who is selling what, and how those sales are ranked, it’s probably a lot easier than trying to pin down what it means to publish in the United States.

So if you can’t make it on the New York Times bestsellers list? Well, you might not make it there, but that doesn’t mean you won’t make it anywhere.