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.'"

maybe

Well does being able to write "Amazon.com Bestselling Author" on your book actually sell books?

Not really new?

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?

No. You see, here's the problem: You don't know the history of Scientology!

Re:Not really new?

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.)

Pitiful.

>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...

Re:Pitiful.

I like to tell my passengers that I am just one turn of the wheel from getting in the news.

TFA summed up

* 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...

Does ranking mean that much on Amazon?

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.

What definitely gets more customers looking is the "Other customers that purchased also purchased ..." feature. I know many times something of interest has popped up using this feature, especially with books, movies, and music.

Spending $10k to bump up a ranking that not too many care about seems to be a misdirected waste of resources.

Re:Does ranking mean that much on Amazon?

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. What definitely gets more customers looking is the "Other customers that purchased also purchased ..." feature.

I agree, that definitely drives people to see the book. What sells the book, in my opinion (assuming it has a decent sized market and a lot don't), is the customer reviews. I read the customer reviews and if the book is crap, it comes out in the reviews.

Re:Does ranking mean that much on Amazon?

You do know that people game those reviews, right? Agents encourage authors and their families to frontload sales for various online retail sites (that ) and to post good reviews.

Of course, they can't un-post a negative review -- which is why negative reviews are more useful information to have. :)

Re:Does ranking mean that much on Amazon?

What definitely gets more customers looking is the "Other customers that purchased also purchased ..." feature.

True, which is why if you're going to try to game the system, you might be better off spending that money buying multiple copies of your book along with a few selected, sustained best sellers. Then when someone looks at the best seller, they your book listed as something that other customers also published.

Or if you'd like to participate in a more honest way, I recommend these tools on Amazon, which I've used to promote my Moodle [amazon.com] and Training books [amazon.com]:

Create a So you'd like to... [amazon.com] guide with your book on the guide. Make the guide relevant, not just an excuse for self promotion, and people will actually use your guide. The more people who click into items from your guide, the more Amazon will display it.

Create a Listmania [amazon.com] list with your book on it. Again, make it relevant and you'll get better results from that list.

Make search suggestions that are relevant and accurate for your book. "You can specify the search for which you think the item should appear, along with your explanation of why it is relevant. Once approved, we'll show your suggestion in Amazon search to everyone."

Participate in Amazon's Search Inside! [amazon.com] program.

Add descriptive content [amazon.com] to your book's Amazon listing.

Ditto for adding a cover image [amazon.com].

And one that I've been too busy (lazy?) to use, participate in Amazon's blog program, AmazonConnect [amazon.com].

These are all much longer-lasting ways of improving the sale of your book on Amazon. And they're much cheaper than paying someone thousands to game the system for you. But if people really thing it's worth all that money for one hour of dubious fame, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would offer a service to do it for them.

hmm

If your book was a cheap paper back, say $1.99, I bet you could get the #1 spot for a lot less.

Re:hmm

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.

Ancestor on Amazon

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 [amazon.com] number one on Amazon for at least a few minutes. Here's a link [podshow.com] to his plea. Pretty interesting, but too bad it's probably my least favorite out of all the books he has written.

Wow, if authors knew this sooner....

... They wouldn't have to work so hard to get onto Oprah.

Who Cares?

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.

Unfortunately, we're likely to see more...

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.

Re:Unfortunately, we're likely to see more...

Thanks for posting that -- and kudos to you for putting forth all of the work necessary to get published! As someone working towards being published, let me attest to the fact that it is a lot of work towards improving your craft. Have I removed unnecessary 'that's and other dead words from my dialogue? Have I struck the right balance between descriptive prose and pushing the plot ahead? Is the POV jumping around? Am I keeping track of persistent issues, such as injuries and the locations of objects? Have the characters' motives for their actions been made clear enough? Do plot and action elements catch the reader up soon enough? The list goes on and on. Looking back at my earlier drafts, I've come to realize why it's recommended that you go through a dozen proofreading/revision runs before you start to submit.

Writing is a business in which supply vastly outweighs demand. It's intensely competitive -- especially in genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, horror), which I write. A query letter to an agent typically has less than a one in a thousand chance of landing representation. For the big agents, the number may be in the tens of thousands. There's a lot of junk out there, it's true -- but there's also an awful lot of talent that you're up against, and only a limited demand. It's not for money -- authors get 15% of sales (less if you buy from places that purchase in bulk, such as big chains). People just want to write. And with all of these people being rejected, there is a staggeringly huge market for scammers.

All writers should know about this site: Preditors and Editors [anotherealm.com]. Writers should live by this rule: You don't pay anything to agents or publishers; they pay you. Not reading fees, not representation fees, not editing fees, nothing. An agent may *deduct* their expenses from your 15% that the publisher pays, but this comes *after the sale*. You never give them money. Ever. Look for AAR representation in agents. If an agent isn't a member, figure out why before you submit. There are good reasons -- new agents starting out, agents who've been in the business for a long time and have a good reputation already, who subscribe to the AAR guidelines without paying for memembership, etc. But be extra cautious. Never submit to an agent without finding what they've sold recently. Double check.

Scam agents aren't the only ones conning people; I've seen all sorts of grabs for writer cash. The "Sobel Prize" writing contest is a good example. There's bulk querying services that e-query your query letter for a fee (and ticks off a thousand agents at once). There's the POD People (Print On Demand**) -- companies that convince people to pay to self publish with them to bypass that evil publishing industry. They sway authors into believing that they'll get the books on the shelves and market authors to readership. Almost nobody stocks them, and almost nobody they publish ever gets heard of by the general public. The facts are that the publishing industry is very picky. There's far less demand than supply, so they have the right to be picky. Sure, they're not perfect. Almost every good author has a laundry list of rejections. But the cream does, overall, tend to rise to the top. If a hundred agents rejected you, you may want to pause for a minute and think about why. It's not them: it's you.

In a way, the industry is biased *toward* new authors. Let's say a big house signs you, and you sell 25k copies. You better sell 50k copies with your next book, 100k with the one after that, and so on. Otherwise, they're not going to keep wanting your books; they want to clear space in their list for the next up and coming author who will sell a million books.

Anyways, one final recommendation for unpublished authors: Miss Snark [blogspot.com]. If you have any nitwitted ideas about the publishing industry, she'll knock some sense into you.

** - Not all print on demand is bad. It

Blah...

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).

Re:Blah...

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.

The long tail of books

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.

Oblig. Quote

Step 1: Pay $10,000 to top Amazon best seller chart

Step 2: ????

Step 3: Profit !! (For Amazon & Marketing Company. Not the author)

system definitely busted

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.

That's simple

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.

Re:how about just using Amazon themselves?

haha I got moderated offtopic yet my post had everything to do with the article? silly goose..