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You Too Can Be An Amazon Bestseller

Posted by Zonk on from the internet-commerce dept.

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.'"

6 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Not really new? by Kaenneth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Not really new? by smellsofbikes · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I used to work in a used bookstore and people -- I'm not making any blanket statements about what sort of people -- would come in with 40 brand-new copies of "Dianetics" and just give them to us since we wouldn't buy them (since, y'know, we already had eleventy three zillion.) That happened at least once a week for a while.

      In other news, my girlfriend got a job interview the other day. Phone interview, went in for an actual interview, all gussied up in her business suit, for a consultant job looking for people who had communications and management background. The interviewer handed her a paper to read and sign at the beginning of the interview, and one of the items on it was "I will read, learn, and obey the rules of L. Ron Hubbard." I'm not sure whether they were recruiting for the church or recruiting communications majors with psychology backgrounds to become recruiters for the church, but either way that's not how you want an interview to go. (She walked out.)

      --
      Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
  2. Who Cares? by Seumas · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:hmm by Red+Flayer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sure there is. Per-book print costs for paperbacks are well under $1 each for large print runs, typically you can have 10,000 copies printed for just over 1.00 each now -- it's the marketing, shelf placement, shipping, etc that drive costs up. On Amazon, you get to remove shipping costs (not included in the $1.99 price).

    Also, look at the pricing structure over time. If you sell a few thousand books at 7.99, you may have just covered printing and marketing costs for tens of thousands of books. Lots of creative accounting in publishing -- say you expense all of the marketing costs during the first year of publication. All the sudden, you don't have to factor them into the margins on your reduced-price sales, if you reduce the price during the next calendar year.

    --
    "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  4. Re:Does ranking mean that much on Amazon? by Rei · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Posted too soon. The part in parentheses was supposed to read:

      "that is, to purchase a number of copies to kick off sales, since people are less likely to buy a book that only one or two people have purchased"

    --
    "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
  5. system definitely busted by f1055man · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.