UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging

Chapter 40. Best Sellers

THERE IS NO better way for an author to get clout than to have a best-selling book.^[110] The term "best seller" makes you sound like kind of a big deal. It helps get you speaking engagements, consulting contracts, not to mention sell more copies of the book. It's the publishing industry's version of social proof. When someone reads or hears that a book is a best seller, then that person believes that thousands of people have tested it out and validated that it's good. But in many cases that never happened.

I'm not going to get into the old way of getting around the best-selling system, which was made popular both in the publishing of books and music with mass quantities of the product bought by the publishing house or label themselves to hit the bestseller list, just to be returned after the period had ended.

What I want to cover is the new way to screw the system— let's call it fake best seller 2.0. Amazon has a huge amount of clout in the world today and their best-seller list updates hourly if not more frequently. One unruly author figured out that if he sold a small amount of books in a short amount of time the book could temporarily hit a best-seller list on Amazon, and then the author could claim that the book is a best seller.

So then the avalanche started. Authors created best-seller programs where they focused on selling as many books as possible in as small a window as possible, rather than spending months focusing their promotion to hit the New York ...