Updates to this story
A US writer claims that Amazon's Kindle best seller list is easily manipulated by those wishing to push their books.
Thomas Hertog said he came up with a cunning plan when he was trying to flog his financial advice book called Wealth Hazards.
Over five months all he had to do was buy and download his book to his Kindle 173 times. He has also written 42 customer reviews that he voted on one hundred and eight times to raise the ranking on Amazon's bestseller list and recommendation lists.
"At various times, Wealth Hazards was ranked number bestseller in personal finance higher than Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, Andrew Tobias or Donald Trump," he told TechEye.
Hertog was so amazed at how easy it was to get to the top of the Kindle best seller list that he dashed out another book The Day the Kindle Died about his technique.
The book reveals how Amazon publishes inaccurate sales rankings and bestseller lists, allows fake customer reviews to be posted and utilises all of this misleading information to make recommendations to customers. The proof is Hertog himself.
"Amazon pays me royalties each month and apparently has never bothered to read The Day the Kindle Died because as of today it is ranked a Top 20 consumer guide on Amazon. Wealth Hazards still ranks in the Top 10 for personal finance after five months of daily purchases and inflated reviews," he said.
This is not the first time that we have suspected something like this. A while ago, journalist Dan Bloom smelt a rat when a controversial self-published eBook titled "A Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure" was released, triggering a ground swell of protest on social media networks from Twitter to Facebook. The vanity press title suddenly found itself being ''propelled'' to the top 100 rankings among paid Kindle titles on Amazon.
Bloom suspected those ranking stats did not mean people were buying the book, or even ordering it, but merely that thousands of curious internet surfers from London to Louisana were clicking on the book's Amazon link just to see what the fuss was all about. And to catch a glimpse of the cover. Much ado about nada.
Whether or not Amazon can be gamed in this way, Hertog managed to boost his results - twice.
Do people really buy a book because it's a best seller or because they have a particular interest in a given title/subject.
I for one totally disregard "Best Seller" lists unless there happens to be a title of interested there in that case best seller has no bearing on if I buy it or not.
Again I say who cares about a best seller list I think there all bogus no matter how they get on the list.
Philip Ray Greaves II was arrested
on obscenity charges by Florida
because he signed and
sold and mailed his book,
"The Pedophile's Guide
to Love and Pleasure:
a Child-lover's Code of Conduct,"
(presumably intended
for the priesthood)
for $50 directly to
undercover sheriff deputies
who had written the author
a letter requesting a copy;
he told officers it was
his last copy.
Florida's obscenity law -
a third-degree felony - prohibits the "distribution of obscene material depicting minors engaged in conduct harmful to minors."
I would have guessed
the crime should be
the asking price.
Ironically, the deputies
should have been the offenders
had they downloaded the book
via an ereader such as Kindle.
I think it is important to point out that the described practice may be illegal as I referred to in my blog http://blog.amplifiedanalytics.com/2010/12/idiot-marketers-or-idiot-consumers/.
So like the story above says, the next time you read in a press release or newspaper that a certain
book "has been propelled to the top 100 rankings among paid Kindle
titles on Amazon.com," think again. What does that really mean?. And
the next time you
hear that a certain book "has been propelled to the top 100 rankings
among regular print book titles on Amazon.com," think again, too. Do the stats
figures mean actual sales, pre-orders or what?
Nobody outside Amazon headquarters seems to know. All Amazon will say
on the record
is that the famous/infamous book ranking "stats" are from actual sales
and they are updated every hour.
So one must assume that this is the case, at least, until someone who
understands the code
comes forward and dishes. For now, it's a true puzzle.
When news broke worldwide
recently about
a controversial self-published eBook titled "A Peodophile's Guide to
Love and Pleasure", triggering a ground swell of protest on social
media networks from Twitter to Facebook,
the vanity press title suddenly found itself being ''propelled'' to
the top 100 rankings among paid
Kindle titles on Amazon, according to news reports. But did those
short-lived ranking stats mean actual sales
had taken place, or that pre-orders had been temporarily filed, or what?
People want to know. Me, too. So far, we're all in the dark.
Ask any publisher or book editor in New York or London.
Amazon's book stats are not easy to decode, their true meaning
almost zen-like in their inscrutability.
Maybe I can find someone who used to work at Amazon, or who coded for
Amazon, who might be willing to talk. My email door is open. Jeff, you
can email me, too. Dish. My door is always open
In the case of the peodofile guide, some news reports
were saying that "less than 24 hours before the book was taken down by
Amazon, the virtually unknown digital book ranked well north of
157,000" on the online book ordering site. Suddenly,
the news reports reported, the guide was up in the top100.
Top 100 of what? Top 100 of sales, all paid for and delivered to happy
customers, or
top 100 of pre-ordering interest with such pre-orders routinely never
actually purchased?
Did the controversy actually spur sales of the guide, which was being
sold sold only on the Kindle platform? Perhaps. Amazon stats don't lie.
It's strange, because the author of the book in Colorado, told an
Associated Press reporter
in Denver that he had only sold one copy of the book.
David Carnoy, who routinely
follows the e-book
industry as an editor at Cnet.com and is the author of a novel titled
''Knife Music", believes the Amazon stats are about
sales. He recently told CNBC
reporter Bertha Coombs: "That's the disturbing part about [the
peodefile guide media controversy],
that it led to actual sales."
Carnoy told me in a subsequent email: "You know why [I believe] it
was sales? Because the book cost
something like $4. So people were buying the thing. When you have a
few hundred thousand curious people looking at the book, it's not hard
to believe that a couple of hundred would buy it, is it? At that
price?"
Point well taken.
A midlist novelist in New York. whose books are sold on Amazon and who
therefore
prefers to remain anonymous for this story, told me in an email: "Like
most people, I always believed the Amazon book
rankings
were based on sales. I don't think Amazon ever publicly posted its
methodology, and I only
get an occasional royalty statement that doesn't reflect the daily gyrations
of the statistics. However, I have noticed that when a friend or
relative buys just
a few copies of one of my books, the ranking jumps enormously. Most authors
could be a gigantic tie for last place."
When I recently asked an American technology beat writer what he knew
about the Amazon stats, he replied:
"I actually don't know what the truth is about the sales stats.
People in the publishing business here in New York tend to say they
are meaningless, but I've never
seen proof."
He went on: "However, the one aspect of Amazon's book stats that could
be debunked with readily
available evidence is the way they claim e-book sales now exceed sales
of old-fashioned books. If you look at their press releases, they do
this in a way that suggests it's an industry-wide fact. But the claim
is very deceptive. It's based on the number of Kindle sales versus
hardcover sales, and only on Amazon. That leaves out paperbacks,
which are still the lion's share of book sales (on Amazon and in the
world at large). And, just as important, it leaves out hardcover
sales in the rest of the book industry, which, if tallied together
with the Amazon hardcover sales, reduces the Kindle number to a tiny
percentage of the total. It's a real scam, and the media tend to buy
into it, as part of the 'paperless society' trope -- now over half a
century old, but somehow still kicking."
And finally, when I spoke with a veteran publisher in Manhattan, who
has been in the business for more than 40 years, he told me: "As a
publisher, I know that the stats are not
'the real thing' and this awareness on my part is based on following
the rankings of our own books and seeing how the rankings coordinated
with the following weekly Amazon orders. Since Amazon orders on a
regular once a week basis, it's pretty easy to follow. Basically, the
stats thing is a ploy used by many publishers and self-published
authors to push their rankings up and try to get a better
distribution. Like most things in life it's all about perception, not
reality. Welcome to the world of publishing."
So now, Jeff Bezos, talk to me?
book "has been propelled to the top 100 rankings among paid Kindle
titles on Amazon.com," don't you believe it. And the next time you
hear that a certain book "has been propelled to the top 100 rankings
among regular print book titles on Amazon.com," don't you believe it,
either.
In both cases, you've been fed a can of worms -- marketing hype white
lies. Amazon stats do not mean anything, and even worse, they
could best be described as "lies, damn lies and PR hype." These
much-ballyhooed "stats" do not represent the number of books sold, as
you have been led to believe. No, they merely represent the number of
times surfers around the world have ''searched'' on Amazon for a
particular book after reading a ''currently trending'' news story
about the tome.
Case in point, to illustrate this deception. When news broke worldwide
last week about
a controversial self-published eBook titled "A Peodophile's Guide to
Love and Pleasure", triggering a ground swell of protest on social
media networks from Twitter to Facebook,
the vanity press title suddenly found itself being ''propelled'' to
the top 100 rankings among paid
Kindle titles on Amazon. But those ranking stats did not mean people
were buying the book, or even ordering it, but merely that thousands
of curious internet surfers from London to Louisana were clicking on
the book's Amazon link just to see what
the fuss was all about. And to catch a glimpse of the cover. Much ado
about nada.
Sales did not go up. Web searches for the book went up, that's all.
Amazon's savvy PR department -- and gullible news reporters who take
anything a press release feeds them -- wants you to believe that Jeff
Bezos' cleverly-disguised ''stats'' mean something. They don't. It's
the Great White Lie of the publishing busienss.
Ask any honest publisher or book editor in New York or London.
Amazon's book stats are not worth a hill of beans. They do not
represent books sold or books pre-ordered. They merely reflect
internet sufers' interests and curiosity.
In the case of the peodofile guide, some ill-informed news reports
were saying that "less than 24 hours before the book was taken down by
Amazon, the virtually unknown digital book ranked well north of
157,000" on the online book ordering site. Suddenly,
the news reports erroneously "reported", the guide was up in the top100. Not.
Top 100 of what? Top 100 of nothing. Top 100 of book stats that are
''gamed'' by clever statisticians. Meaningless drivel.
Did the controversy actually spur sales of the guide, which was being
sold sold only on the Kindle platform? No.
There is no evidence or proof of that at all. Internet interest in the
book and its cover art went up, curiosity, that's all. Who's going to
actually buy a book like that? Sales never went past a few dozen. The
author himself admits that.
But even a media savvy editor of a news site, David Conroy, who
follows the e-book
industry, got taken in by the Amazon stats game, telling a CNBC
reporter Bertha Coombs: "That's the disturbing part about [the media
controvesy],
that it led to actual sales."
The controversy over the book did not lead to any actual sales. Amazon
stats are not what you think they are, David. You've been fooled, too.
Caveat emptor!