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The Silliness Of Book Bestseller ListsThe Silliness Of Book Bestseller Lists
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I think a lot of top seller lists are rubbish. And Amazon's ranks are not beyond tweaking in the same way Alexa's stats are tweakable.
A few years ago, before I became an Amazon associate, someone sent me an email claiming they'd offer me $250 in free software if I bought their $25 book on Amazon. It was software that was worth $25 to me to play with, and the book was moderately interesting (it might have been something like one of Robert Allen's "how to make $24,000 in 24 hours On The Internet" kind of book). I might already have had a copy of the book. (BTW, that book is kind of a scam. Quick Review: You have to spend 30 days ahead of time asking a very responsive mailing list of at least 10,000 what they want you to sell them and for what price among a series of choices. Hopefully at the end you have 500 people pre-agreed to buy whatever $50 thing it is that you want to sell them on the day when you'll make $24K in a day.)
I went ahead and ordered the book. The book was already at #1 from this stunt. Apparently they got so many orders for the book that the order was never filled, and 30 days later it automatically cancelled itself.
The free software? Turned out to be very difficult to track down the people offering the free software. I finally go to a real phone number that had a voice mail system to block anyone from getting through. I finally figured out the right set of escapes to get past the voice mail and get a real person to answer the phone. After being hung up on three or four times in a period of a few minutes, they decided to honor their offer, and sent me the download links......
I suppose someone did this only for the ooh-aah of being a #1 book on Amazon, no one made any money from it. I guess it's a good claim to print on future book covers.
I imagine Amazon's listing for Bill's book is a bunch of similar nonsense, except you probably will get charged to receive a pound of landfill when you order his book. Bill Clinton 's book is being hyped in the same way artificial way to try and get it to #1. Many stores are offering discounts on future purchases if you buy the book, something they aren't doing for other new books. Or they already offering 30% discounts on the hardback, when none of the other books published in the last two months have such a discount. (Amazon's starting discount is 40%. In the olden days that much discount would have disqualified us for the 15% commission.)
Welcome to the leftist bias of the powers that be..... Although maybe we need to have sympathy on them. Perhaps someone forced them to buy truckloads of the landfill, and they are getting rid of it the only way they know how.....
Until the Clinton mania dies down I'm almost afraid to go into the city for fear I'll be confronted with "Hey buddy, can you spare space on your bookshelf for this? Some guy told me he'd give me a dollar for every copy I can get rid of...."
Dang, kind of sounds like what we do to our visitors all year long.....
- Garnet
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