Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Well does being able to write "Amazon.com Bestselling Author" on your book actually sell books?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
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.
>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.
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
Blah, the advances are part of the problem. Two in three books never earn back their advance. Whenever you see a book that's getting a six figure advance, realize that you're looking at ten authors who didn't get published because of it.
First off, how the advance system works. You sell a book, they give you an advance. This is money given to you upfront. Your agent (if you have one) skims their 15% cut off the top, and probably charges you various fees that take another few hundred from it. A big house's advance may well be over 10k. Medium size houses, a few k. Small houses, little to no advance. No matter what your book does from here on out, that money is yours; you never have to pay it back.
Now, your book goes on sale. Both the publisher and agent push you like crazy to do publicity. They'll help you out a bit, but unless you're a big name author, they won't put much resources into it. Every book that sells from a small bookstore nets you 15%, minus the 15% of that amount taken by your agent, if you have one. Big bookstores, which purchase in bulk, get discounts, and they take part of that discount from you. Someone buys a book at Borders, you may well net only 8% or so, minus the agent's cut. Now, neither you nor your agent see a dime of those royalties *until* your royalties start exceeding the amount of the advance. The publisher gets your royalties until that point.
When a publisher pays a big advance to someone, this limits the number of other authors they can afford to take on. That's money diverted from other advances, cover art, editing, and everything else that goes into bringing a book to market. It distorts the industry when they give away so much money, when more times than not they won't make it back.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.