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You Too Can Be An Amazon Bestseller
Steve1960 writes "For $10,000 to $15,000, you, too, can be a best-selling author — on Amazon.com. Here's a cautionary tale on how easy it is to game Amazon's sales ranking numbers, and why authors who pay for this might be wasting their money. 'The targeted marketing campaigns contribute volatility to sales-ranking numbers that are inherently unstable. Outside the top 1% or so of books, few sell multiple copies a day, so little separates books with rankings tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, apart. Morris Rosenthal, an author and publisher based in Springfield, Mass., who has studied the Amazon charts, says a day without a sale can send a book ranked 10,000 to as low as 50,000.'"
I'm looking for more ways to earn money from the internet, ever since Google banned my Adsense account.
Well does being able to write "Amazon.com Bestselling Author" on your book actually sell books?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
A bullshit book for a a bullshit list. Have you looked at that list? It's ridiculous. Maybe three of those books deserve to be on there ... but a book on CD!?
If it's full of bullshit, that's what it's worth to me.
I've heard that Scientologist used to buy L Ron's books, and ship them back to the seller as new, just to try and make them 'best sellers', Book store employees would open 'new' packages of books from the 'printer', and find they already had the store own labels on them...
But that could have just been a malicious story. Point is, buying your own books to boost apperant popularity is nothing new.
Tell me how to get on Oprah's Book List!
>Rick Frishman, who oversees the campaigns for Ruder Finn's Planned Television Arts, also is a client. His 2004 book "Networking Magic" went from a sales rank of 896,000 on barnesandnoble.com the morning it was published to No. 1 at 4 p.m. He has a poster in his office showing the sales chart he briefly topped. "I'm a nobody, but I was somebody for a day," he says.
Hey, a cheap rifle with a scope, a perch in a high building - you can be somebody for a lot longer...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
* Disgusting marketting company proposes astroturfing campaigns to shitty authors for way too much money
* Shitty authors get top Amazon ranks for a little while
* Ranks drop back down because, well, the authors are shitty and in the end, what they write doesn't sell and no amount of astroturfing can change that
* Shitty authors disappointed
Well, duh...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If I were an author (or a musician, or someone selling anything else on Amazon), I wouldn't care too much about the Amazon rankings. I have been shopping at Amazon since it opened, and have never bothered looking at any of the "Top Ranked" for suggestions.
..." feature. I know many times something of interest has popped up using this feature, especially with books, movies, and music.
What definitely gets more customers looking is the "Other customers that purchased also purchased
Spending $10k to bump up a ranking that not too many care about seems to be a misdirected waste of resources.
Tell me how to get on Oprah's Book List!
You have to, ah, 'service' Oprah. Candidates are advised to bring a snorkel. Trust me, you really don't want to know what it's for.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If your book was a cheap paper back, say $1.99, I bet you could get the #1 spot for a lot less.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Something similar is happening in the podcast world, Scott Sigler, an author who releases all his books for free via podcast, is releasing his second novel to hardcopy in about a week. He's going through a big promotion to try to get Ancestor number one on Amazon for at least a few minutes. Here's a link to his plea. Pretty interesting, but too bad it's probably my least favorite out of all the books he has written.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
... They wouldn't have to work so hard to get onto Oprah.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Who cares what the amazon sales rank is? That is supposed to be a rank of the number of books that are selling. Not the other way around. Nobody actually buys a book because it's in the top ten Amazon books.
I've been writing professionally now for about nine years (wow - it really has been that long), and I hate to say it, but there are no shortage of scammers who want to take advantage of fresh young writers. And, since a lot of people want to be writers, there are no shortage of marks for these scammers.
As the f'ing article says, the fact of the matter is artificial sales are not sales, and simply won't help. The best way for an author to maximize the sales of his/her book is to write a really good book, and then once it's in print, write another one. That's how you build an audience, and that helps a lot towards propelling your sales up. And, for most of us authors, it's not a short process. You have to love this craft to try to make a living at it, and that's probably as it should be.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Way to go latching onto FP, Trout.
Your comment is completely irrelevant to this story and shows you didn't put the slightest bit of effort into knowing what's going on before you commented. This has nothing to do with Amazon Marketplace, it is about authors whose books are sold by Amazon.
It would be nicer if publishers were paying bigger advances for books. If the marketing department wants to spend $15K on Amazon, by all means let them do it. Just don't take it out of my royalities (if I had any).
It's the long tail! Seriously, what else would you expect from a marketplace of millions of books, most of which aren't textbooks or NYT bestsellers.
Step 1: Pay $10,000 to top Amazon best seller chart
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Profit !! (For Amazon & Marketing Company. Not the author)
My grandfather has written and "published" two books. The first was published in 1996 and is something of a travel memoir. It has a rank around 200,000. The second was published in 2003 and is an autobiography focusing on half a century spent coaching. It has a rank about 1.5million. While neither are big sellers (understatement) I know the second has sold more than the first. After a good 50 years of coaching there's plenty of former players out there that are interested. It has 8 copies available used. The first, older book, has 3 copies available, one with an inscription, so I know exactly who's copy it is (RIP, so no hard feelings). So a rank of 1.5million means no copies sold and at 200k no copies sold.
Another method is posting fake reviews. Amazingly, it works. Tucker Max, for example, made it to the tail of the NY Times best seller list by posting hundreds of fake reviews on amazon.com and spamming throughout the blogosphere (I can't believe I just typed that word).
You musta really been sweating through that lil' stinker...............Oh AC, no problem
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
Sadly, you sound like one of the workman/artisan writers who are more enrapt with the process of writing rather than writing itself: of planning, checklist-ticking, market-testing, publishing, attaining the sense of having the work under your belt, etc.
Have you read a lot of books about writing and publishing? Attended seminars or workshops too, perhaps? Strip away all this exploitative, formulaic, min-maxing marketing hogwash and try to find some actual passion for the art. Stop quoting statistics or bullet points from instructional literature. No author ever heard of these things prior to the 20th Century, yet classical fiction is magnificent and widely held in better esteem than contemporary fiction.
You write lucidly enough and seem to have a reasonable grasp of English grammar, syntax, tense, and so on. You don't need anything more to write well but a vigilant and curious mind.
It just makes me sad to see posts from people like you who seem so earnest about learning the "process" of writing and publishing. How postmodern. Step away from the novel assembly line.
Good luck.
haha I got moderated offtopic yet my post had everything to do with the article? silly goose..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*