[IgorPartola]

Aww, just like every person I call at an 800 number is a Customer Executive, every product I buy is Award Winning, every slice of pizza I eat is World Famous, every company I work with is an Industry Leader, etc. This is also how I am the founder, president, CEO, and owner of my company, which is basically just me and my laptop doing contract work every once in a while.

Look, this is a stupid bug in their algorithm, and will probably be fixed at some point. Or perhaps the label falls off during hour number 2 when nobody is buying it. There are other ways to hack the Amazon publishing system, like Tim Ferris did when he sent free copies of his book out to people so that they would leave reviews when it went on sale. Does it really matter?

[nkozyra]

> Look, this is a stupid bug in their algorithm, and will probably be fixed at some point.

How is it a bug in their algorithm? If anything it's a bug in their process. OP found a niche category with so little competition that it was simple to legitimately become the best-selling author by virtue of having the best-selling book (over some time period) in that category?

I agree with him that the title is meaningless, but it's not necessarily inaccurate. What Amazon needs to do - that is, if they care about the 'validity' of the best-seller title - is better vet submissions and purchases. One person purchasing multiple copies should probably only count as one purchase for the sake of this distinction, although that might hurt small retailers that buy from Amazon directly.

I see this as not much different than claiming you're a World Record Holder because you stacked the most pennies on your big toe (it was 21, for the record).

[IgorPartola]

Best Seller implies loads of people bought the book. Put a absolute floor of a few hundred copies sold, in addition to comparing the relative sales.

You don't want people to start questioning your brand (Amazon Best Seller in this case). We all know that World Record Holder doesn't mean much on its own. You have to specify whether it was most pennies stacked on a toe, biggest soap bubble, etc. What TFA points out is pretty much that the title Amazon Best Seller is useless without specifying a category, or possibly not at all.

[ktRolster]

The author is a little deceptive, it wasn't a "Best Seller", it was a best seller in its category. Each category has its own best seller, and apparently the category he chose (Transpersonal Psychology Movements) doesn't have a lot of sales.

The deception is him telling people he's a "Best Seller" when really he's "Best Seller in Category." And frankly, Amazon's styling encourages the deception.

[huxley]

Hardly, he isn't being deceptive at all, it's that Amazon's categories are so easy to game.

Categories are normal in modern bestseller lists. Take a look at NY Times' Bestseller Page:

http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html

There is the Fiction and Non-Fiction list, but besides that are dozens and dozens of categories. And each of the authors in each category is a NY Times Bestselling Author.

Now, the NY Times at least has some gatekeeping done by human beings, Amazon has been easy to game for about as long as they've had bestseller lists. It's the same for all their "best selling" categories, some are just easier than others.

[EGreg]

Um, all Amazon has to do is match the time frame of the NYT, such as a week instead of an hour.

[ktRolster]

The NY Times is being deceptive, too.

[ryanholiday]

That's exactly the point no?

[caseysoftware]

It makes a ton of sense.

By owning one small, niche category with good timing and an easy push, if it drives enough sales, you can basically trade up in your other categories. If you get the right combination and self-sustaining beyond your local allies, you could get traction across the board and build a legitimate best seller in an ever widening space which just furthers the cycle. It's the same as Hacker News.

And it reminds me of another book I read last year.. ;)

[ktRolster]

In my experience, getting the "Best Seller" label isn't self-sustaining. It doesn't seem to generate a huge number of sales on its own (but it does let you call yourself a best-seller, which is kind of cool)

[floppydisk]

Playing devil's advocate, could this also be a means by which Amazon increases their influence in the book selling world by decreasing the value of the title of "best selling" author? In the traditional sense, we think of best selling authors as achieving certain sales numbers in a given time period (NYT Best Seller's List for instance) where access to the club is limited by the amount of space on the list. In terms of a writing career, it used to be an illustrious achievement to make one of the major newspapers' best seller lists and became an advertising perk for later writing and speaking endeavors.

Now, with the advent of Amazon, anyone can be a best seller based on very fine grained categories (as shown here) but claim the same accolades based on the title of Best Selling Author. A lot of people accept the title at face value. Over time, this shifts the power from the traditional lists to Amazon since Amazon has most of the power in determining who gets a "best seller" label and at what granularity.

I think this is what the author is really concerned about. In the article he mentions his job consists of working with authors to promote their books and their metric of success is aiming for the NYT best seller's list. If that list loses its value and the cache of being a NYT Best Selling Author decreases, then the author's value add to an individual author is diminished thereby threatening his underlying business model as it stands now.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Depending on the category, roughly 3,000 to 9,000 sales in a week will get you near the top of one of the NYT lists.

It's basically the same deal as Amazon, but on a bigger scale. Unfortunately it's not that much harder to game if you have spare cash and/or plenty of friends and/or followers and/or a significant marketing budget.

Not many people understand that sales can peak and dwindle rapidly. Unless you're J.K Rowling or George R.R. Martin, many books typically get a week of marketing effort at most.

So it's not unusual to hit the lists for the first week with - say - 10,000 copies, but only sell another 5,000 - 10,000 copies in the next 12 months.

This may be enough of a reason for a publisher to drop an author. Even after a book gets the coveted NYT best-seller tag, total royalties may still not cover a modest initial advance.

Staying on the lists for a long time is a whole other game, and much more of an accolade than getting on the lists in the first place.

[ProAm]

> If anything it's a bug in their process

It's not a bug at all, it behooves both parties that this occurs. The seller will sell more books appearing to be reputable, and amazon makes more money because they are selling more product. It's really a buyer beware tale if anything, online retailers are becoming 'used car salesmen' of the 21st century.

[SquidLord]

> online retailers are becoming 'salesmen'

Let me fix that for you.

[cdelsolar]

> behooves

I see what you did there.

[ComteDeLaFere]

Amazon has this problem with their "Top 500 Reviewer" category as well. I recently stumbled upon one of these whose reviews were all 5 stars, and all began with the same sentence. A quick look through that list also shows a few Top 500 Reviewers with zero reviews.

"Amazon Bestseller" and "Top 500 Reviewer" are concepts that form a large part of Amazon's brand and value proposition. Regardless of whether this is a bug that can be quickly patched, they should pay more attention to things like this IMHO.

[usefulcat]

I consider "Top 500 Reviewer" to be sign of someone who has made a hobby (if not a career) of receiving free stuff in exchange for writing reviews of said stuff. Makes it much easier to identify which reviews to ignore due to the reviewer having a definite conflict of interest.

[ComteDeLaFere]

I actually agree, and when I'm considering an Amazon purchase I find myself browsing all of the reviews for a particular reviewer, just to see how thoughtful they are.

Even so, Amazon's flavor of content curation has been a major part of their success story, and they mark their top 500 reviewers with a special tag for a reason - customers derive value from it (it's a badge of trust, in a way).

[pdwetz]

A local wine shop near me had hand written notes on their wines. The owner noticed that when the note said "delicious!" it was more likely to be purchased. So now all of the wines are labeled as such. No word on overall sales since then.

[infogulch]

There are statistical methods to fix the algorithm. How Not To Sort By Average Rating[0] reviews a couple of the typical ranking 'algorithms' and presents a much better option. There was a thread[1] about this article last year.

[0]: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855784

[nkozyra]

How does that apply here? The best-seller tag is applied to books that have the most sales.

[nommm-nommm]

>Look, this is a stupid bug in their algorithm, and will probably be fixed at some point.

I don't think its actually a bug, it's just the way Amazon sales rank works.

http://onlinesalesstepbystep.com/rank-risk-reward/

"I can define Amazon sales rank in one sentence:

“The period of time since an item last sold.”

That’s it

What does that mean? It means that starting from one hour after an item sells, its rank will start to rise until it sells again. The longer the gap between sales, the higher its sales rank grows. When the product sells again, it will drop significantly and then begin to rise again an hour later."

https://sellerengine.com/top-5-things-you-need-to-know-about...

"2. Current Sales Rank CAN’T Tell You How Well an Item is Selling

Because of the huge swings that sales rank can undergo (see the previous graph), looking at a single data point can’t tell you how well an item is selling. A low sales rank (one that is close to 1), can trick you into thinking an item is a longtime popular seller, when actually, that item was just sold.

To make accurate guesses about how fast an item is selling, you need to look at multiple data points and see how an item’s sales rank trends over time."

All products on Amazon have a sales rank, not just books. I'm not really sure of the reason for publishing it but it isn't supposed to be scientific or anything (the exact algorithm is not disclosed). All categories have a sales rank and a best seller list, no matter how obscure and the sales rank has worked this way forever. Why? I don't know.

[xivzgrev]

Anytime I see "world famous", I like to imagine the shop's owner mother is from some other country overseas - bam, world famous baby.

[gohrt]

> There are other ways to hack the Amazon publishing system, like Tim Ferris did when he sent free copies of his book out to people so that they would leave reviews when it went on sale.

That's not a hack, that's a value-add. https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help