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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.'"
>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
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
No. You see, here's the problem: You don't know the history of Scientology!
and you don't know the history of Scientology on Slashdot jokes. The first rule of Scientology on Slashdot jokes is, we don't joke about Scientology on Slashdot.