The decision about which sources to include seems from your account to have been based on preferring those that agree with each other If six newspapers give figures and four are similar with the other two as outliers that does not mean the four that coincide are more reliable it may well mean that they all quote from the same initial source or from one another Therefore the winnowing process that you describe as having taken place over the past few years is still OR  My suggestion for rewriting this article would be to begin with a prominent detailed caveat stating that estimates are often speculative biased or highly variant and that where trusted sales figures do exist mainly at national level they are often proprietary andor confidential The bestseller article has relevant material though its not well cited There is a difference between copyrighted works and outofcopyright works which merits separate columns or tables the former figures are generally more reliable  It might be wise to have separate columns for national and global totals since some national totals are more reliable than others  Finally and most importantly once you have decided on a threshold for reliability of sources then I suggest all figures for a given book that meet that threshold should be quoted together with the date Obviously an older figure will not count sales subsequent to its date but may still be  informative especially if it is bigger than a laterdated estimate  A notes column could note instances where sales estimate X has been explicitly endorsedcriticised by source Y Clearly for some books youll end up with a large number of different citations for different figures thats more appropriate than doing the selection of just one or two figures here on the Talk page it lets the readers decide rather than having editors make that decision for them To save some space I think the sales figure can take millions as read  I appreciate that a lot of work has gone into this page but I believe more of that work needs to be visible to the reader to prevent it being SYNOR