[rosser]

A friend used to work for an organization whose function was to buy books from NYT-reporting sellers for purposes of inflating the sales numbers of a given title, to manipulate it onto the bestseller list. They were usually paid by the publishers, but sometimes directly by the authors themselves.

This has been going on for a very long time.

EDIT: Phrasing.

[rsj_hn]

WOW, can I ask what the most common genre was?

[rosser]

I didn't ask, but in the conversations we had on the topic, I never got the sense that was a thing that mattered to them.