Placement of the author's name was not the best...

It's two-fold:

• Bookstores will place NYT best sellers up front on display racks and some even have a special section for the most recent ones, so it seems like there's nothing but them.

• They release a new list every week, and there are lots of categories, each with the several top best sellers in each category, so each week could have dozens of new bestsellers.

From the Wikipedia page on the NYT Bestsellers:

"The lists are divided among fiction and non-fiction, print and e-book, paperback and hardcover; each list contains 15 to 20 titles. The lists have been subdivided several times"

I recommend reading this article from Vox if you are interested in knowing more about some of the intricacies of the lists.

probably because we see the most popular ones the most

Because you never hear about the crappy authors, only the good ones.

Previous posters hit a lot of the points. But additionally, a lot of “bestselling authors” release books an at incredible pace. James Patterson and Danielle Steel, for example, put out multiple books per year. (Mind you, they’re not actually writing all of these themselves. But they still use the name.) So multiple times a year, you’re going to see “new book by bestselling “author x” get promoted.

This might be oversimplified, but it's basically a weekly list of which books sold heavily during that week. So lots of weeks, lots of authors.

If you're interested, this might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller_list

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I read once that certain publishers would buy their own books to get the "best-seller" title tag on the books, which will then lead to even more people buying the books.

Whoever does deserves to die.

Lisa Jackson apparently

Wow, are you judging the author, who is one out of millions of people who are #1 New York Times Bestselling Authors?

"Death of the Author" taken to the extreme.

Oh man how many combinations of verb + to die can we get?

So I looked it up, and apparently those are the main characters. So the part that looks like it's supposed to be the author(s) is the main characters, while the part that looks like it's supposed to be a character is the author.

Right?

Not if they’re selling it based more on the author than the title. People don’t go looking for “Deserves to Die”, they go looking for “The new Lisa Jackson book”. You see it often with books like this, the title isn’t so important to people who are really into the author.

You see it with big names too. For example, old Stephen King when he was first starting out had his name laid out in the “usual” way. Look at his newer books, and it’s much more prominent.

ETA: I just realized you were probably referencing the character names on the very bottom, not book layout trends in general. Derp.

Not always, no

Was it oral before, or??

First and probably or most probably the last print.

That's what I thought too, so I double checked. Nope. "Deserves to Die", written by Lisa Jackson.

No the author is lisa jackson. The names on the bottom are characters I believe. The book belongs to my mom which I found in a pile of lisa jackson books cause my mom said she loves the author (which is lisa jackson)