The ‘Amazon bestseller’ scam is getting pretty overworked

by Ken Winston Caine

Andrea Lee writes on her blog about why she will never do one of those one-day, make-my-new-eBook-an-Amazon-bestseller campaigns.

I’ll add the reason I won’t do one.

Claiming to have a best-selling book because you were able to game Amazon’s system for a few minutes on one day so that it appeared that you had one of the best-selling books in the universe is misleading. It misrepresents the idea of “bestseller” that most people hold.

That said, people MUST be getting jaded as they see more and more marketers play the “Amazon bestseller” game.

How you, too, can have an Amazon bestseller

The way it works: The author rallies every marketer she can find with a huge list and gets them to sign on as joint-venture partners (for a big cut of the profits) and to push the author’s book to their list on one specific day. They cook up lots of inflated-value, one-day-only “bonuses” for purchasers who play the one-day game with them.

You’ve seen those offers: $8,247.50 worth of extras tossed in, today only, if you will use THIS LINK during THESE HOURS to buy THIS $29 book.

What an investment!

Buy the $29 book and sell off the bonuses at half-price on eBay and turn a quick $4,100.

Right.

If done well, with a strong offer to enough compatible big lists, your e-book will hit Amazon’s top 10 for a few minutes that day — or maybe even a few hours.

But that’s not because people really, really are gobbling up your book.

It’s because you’ve learned how to “game” the Amazon system to make it appear as though people are really, really gobbling up your book.

People who know about this always discount the claim that someone has an Amazon best-selling book. Because it doesn’t mean much.

A REAL bestseller

Top the New York Times Bestseller list (or another traditional bestseller) and you’ve really accomplished something.

It means that people have gone to bookstores all across the country and bought your book in the last week.

If that could be manipulated, I’m sure authors would manipulate it. But ethical, legitimate publications like the New York Times closely guard and protect their method of gathering sales data so that it can’t be manipulated.

How to tell a REAL bestseller from a fake wannabe

I was told a few years back that the NYT on a regular basis secretly rotates which bookstores it is collecting data from in order to protect the integrity of the bestseller list.

If a book is a “bestseller,” it will still be on the list next week. And the week after. Its position may change a wee bit. But it won’t just appear out of nowhere one week and then drop off the edge of the earth.

Test any “Amazon bestseller” you’ve received an email about. See what its current ranking is. See what its ranking is next week.

What having an “Amazon bestseller” really says about you — and not about your book — is that you successfully managed to pull together joint ventures with some big marketers and put together a strong, one-day marketing package. That’s a cool accomplishment. But it doesn’t mean you have a “bestseller” by any conventional measurement.

It bugs me a bit that coaches — including some really respected coaches — who talk so much, so often about “being in integrity,” use this “Amazon bestseller” launch and proudly cite their “Amazon bestseller” e-books.