took a picture of his foot and created a “best selling” book out of it. He gives the details over at Observer.com. In the post Categories, keywords, Amazon, and you. How to get the most out of your choices. I discussed the way to optimize your choices on Amazon to get your book the best rankings. Brent obviously took this to an extreme and managed to get his foot a best selling listing. While this tactic did work, I have to disagree with Brent a little bit. He got three friends to buy and rate his book, and there is nothing stopping anyone else from doing this, but readers are smarter than that. I doubt that he could make any sales or legitimately rank. Yes there are bad people out there trying to scam the system, but Amazon keeps on knocking them down and readers are pickier that that. Would we be better off as a whole if people didn’t try and game the system? Yes. Should people ignore the “best selling” marker? No, it is just one more piece of information, among a bunch of other pieces of information that readers use to choose titles. Read the article and let us know what you think.
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Behind the Scam: What Does It Take to Be a ‘Best-Selling Author’? $3 and 5 Minutes.
I would like to tell you about the biggest lie in book publishing. It appears in the biographies and social media profiles of almost every working “author” today. It’s the word “best seller.”
This isn’t about how The New York Times list is biased (though it is). This isn’t about how authors buy their way onto various national best-seller lists by buying their own books in bulk (though they do). No, this is about the far more insidious title of “Amazon Bestseller”—and how it’s complete and utter nonsense.
Here’s what happened in the book industry over the last few years: As Amazon has become the big dog in the book world, the “Amazon Bestseller” status has come to be synonymous with being an actual bestseller. This is not true, and I can prove it.
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Last week, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded to Amazon, and in a matter of hours, had achieved “No. 1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything.
How many copies did I need to sell be able to call up my mother and celebrate my newfound authorial achievements? Three. Yes, a total of three copies to become a best-selling author. And I bought two of those copies myself!
The reason people aspire to call themselves “bestselling author” is because it dramatically increases your credibility and “personal brand.” It can establish you as a thought leader. You’re able to show that you not only wrote a book, but that the market has judged it to be better than other books out there. It’s a status symbol, one of that cashes in on the prestige of one of man’s oldest past-times. At last, I had acquired this coveted title for myself.
Read the full post on Observer.com
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