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.'"

Comments

Not really new?

[Kaenneth]

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.

Re:Not really new?

[smellsofbikes]

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.)