[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.