[peterlk]

Here's how "Best Sellers" become a thing:

Publishers count the number of books they sell.

This seems pretty simple, right? It is, but as a consequence, easily gamed. Publishers don't sell to you and me, they sell to book stores. So, you create some marketing to get people to preorder your book from a lots of different book stores. Book sellers inform the number of copies based, in part, on preorder numbers. There are ways that you can get book stores to order many more books than there is demand for by fraudulently (not sure if it's legally fraudulent, but maybe?) pre-ordering books, and stocking shelves with books that no one ever picks up. But boom, there you go - best seller.

If you want to cut out the middle man, and you're rich enough, you can just _be_ the middle man. Buy all the books from the publisher, and resell them. The publisher still gets their money, so they don't care. Again, now you have a best-seller.

And then, of course, there are legitimate sales that the best seller lists market themselves as measuring.

Book sellers don't want to be stuck with unsold inventory, so there's something of an arms race between book sellers and publishers/authors.

After seeing this game first-hand, I no longer believe anything on a best-seller list. As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not. The system can still be gamed, especially if it's run by algorithms.

So, basically, I'd argue that it doesn't matter whether WaPo is "right" or not because the input data is likely of poor quality anyways.

[CobrastanJorji]

You left out my favorite trick: politics! For example, say that you're running for President, and you want your campaign book to be a "top 10 list" best seller. Well, just have your campaign pre-order 4,000 or so copies of the book. That plus 1000 or so real sales will be enough to get you into the top 10 list, and at only about $55,000, it's practically a steal. Even better, the proceeds come right back to you because you're sure as heck not gonna give your campaign a discount.

[m463]

Scientology did one better - they bought their own books at retail, then fed them back into the distribution chain. It was common for "new" books to arrive with price tags still on them.

[wp381640]

I have a story about a well-known "best selling" author

Some years ago received a random package in the mail - turns out it was 40+ copies of this authors new book. Had no idea what to do with them so they just sat around, I never even read it

A few days later I notice some blogs running giveaways for the same book - figure they got deliveries of it as well. Go to a conference and in conversation find that a bunch of people also got the same package

I didn't put together until years later that this is all part of self-sales to boost best seller rankings.

Apparently if you know which book stores are surveyed by the NYTimes you can call them up and order a handful of copies of your own book and boost your own sales

It's no coincidence that this author heavily pitches themselves as a multiple-NYTimes best seller. It likely pays off because I have a good idea of what their appearance fee is and it's mid-5 figures+

[TheOtherHobbes]

The same thing used to happen in the UK music charts. Sales were tracked in a small number of stores and then interpolated.

So of course record companies and sometimes artists would make sure there were big orders at those stores. And a lot of very bad records became unexpected chart toppers.

[chiefalchemist]

This reminds me of the early 90's when Billboard's music sales charts switched from subjective reported to SoundScan (actual scanned sales).

That truth was the breakout tipping point for country music. It also makes you wonder how legit/truthful any charting previous to SoundScan actually was.

[jammygit]

> As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not.

Amazon might make things a lot worse. The “recommended by amazon” windows 10 keys are mostly fake ripoffs at this point with pages of complaints in the reviews

Edit: added quote

[falcor84]

I'm not familiar with this, what's the sellers business model then? Consumers easily get full refunds on fakes, no?

[greedo]

Book sellers are rarely stuck with unsold inventory. They almost always have the ability to send unsold inventory (though not magazines) back to the publisher for full credit.

[pessimizer]

To remainder paperbacks, instead of sending the entire book back for credit they'd rip off the covers, send those instead, and dumpster the book. I don't know if they do this anymore. When I grew up in the 80s, I read an enormous number of coverless books:)

[themattress]

This was SOP for me when I worked as the receiver in a supermarket from ~2007-2011.

It’s a shame, I must have thrown thousands and thousands of books away, instead of donating them to a library or something.

But then again, I guess the library would only accept so many copies of the same nascar-themed trashy romance novel.

[greedo]

That's still SOP.

[bduerst]

So then if you have sufficient capital, you park it into your own book for a few weeks and then return it all later once the best-selling status is achieved?

I can't imagine publishers would let this happen more than once or twice before revoking this ability for the seller. Inventory handling is expensive.

[greedo]

Publishers need booksellers more than the reverse.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I know of one publisher who massively overprinted a title. Most of the run didn't even make it to the stores.

Because of a worker error, the copies were left under a leak in the warehouse roof.

I understand there was an insurance claim. It was all very unfortunate.

[lonelappde]

Amazon's bestseller ranking is famously gameable by having a flash mob order the item all on the same day

[ramblerman]

It seems like amazon has access to more real metrics like total kindle time per book.

But perhaps it doesn’t serve them to diverge from the bestseller model.