What Does It Take to Be a ‘Best-Selling Author’? $3 and 5 Minutes

454 点作者 hullo大约 9 年前

30 条评论

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?

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Outdoorsman大约 9 年前

The author is right...it doesn't take a high level of talent, or any at all in his example, to become a "best seller"...I pay no attention to "best seller" labels...I realized quite some time back that my reading time is far more limited than I would like for it to be...I intend to spend the time I do have reading the best I can get my hands on...When looking for a good read I most certainly do not start at Amazon...Rather, I look through lists of the major literary prize winners and select something from them...Pulitzer Prize Winners, National Book Award winners, Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction winners, Man Booker Prize winners...just to name a few...I've yet to be disappointed, even when the topics are somewhat outside my everyday interests and hobbies...A list of the major awards:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_awards#American_literature" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_awards#Americ...</a>There's something there for every taste...and you'll benefit from knowing that someone took a great deal of time and care with their efforts...someone writing seriously...

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joelgrus大约 9 年前

Confession: I am guilty of this. Well, sort of. I actually did write a book, and it did sell more than 3 copies, and now I put "best selling author" on my resume, on account of my book being #1 in its category (sometimes) and #1 on oreilly.com (sometimes).So far no one has gotten bent out of shape about it (or maybe no one has looked at my resume), I assume because they're smart enough to know that a "best selling" data science book is not on the NYT list outselling Stephen King and 50 Shades of Gray and Hunger Games, it's bestselling among "Books / Computers / Data & Data Analytics" or whatever.Having put my bias on the table, I have a hard time getting worked up about what this guy did, for the following reason:"Whoa, you're a bestselling author? What did you write?" "It's not a book, it's a picture of my foot." "Oh. That's kind of strange. How many copies did it sell?" "Three." "..."I mean, it's not like there's some kind of special club where "best selling author" allows you to cut in line or anything. Is there? If there is, please let me know.

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reitanqild大约 9 年前

Wonderful author credits at the end:> Brent Underwood is the No. 1 best-selling author of Putting My Foot Down and a ...

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im_down_w_otp大约 9 年前

This. Is. Hysterical.I literally cried from laughing several times as I was reading.Can you start a companion series titled, "On the Other Hand: An Exploration of Misplaced Gloves"?

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6stringmerc大约 9 年前

Okay I completely understand the concept of the post and get the sadness and humor all at the same time. In an era where attentiveness and long-form reading seems to be in distinct decline, distinctions within the marketplace losing meaning hurts. I'm sure customers will eventually adapt though...but this quote:>I wrote this post because I’m tired of vanity titles and success without quality....just makes me laugh, because we're talking about an industry that most recently is probably the most guilty of "success without quality" by way of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise and all the buckets and buckets of money it made. Self-help being a juggernaut of sales year after year. Obvious derivative slop like Pride and Prejudice & Zombies and the wish-fulfillment nostalgia collage of Ready Player One aren't bringing a new enlightenment to society, practically speaking.>I hope my story illustrates that the best marketing tactic you can use for a book is to write a great book that actually sells over the long term.Actually, it kind of illustrates the opposite, in that "a book uploaded every five minutes" isn't a signal-to-noise ratio that really makes much of any sense. The only reason to write a quality book is vanity at this point.The day that an entity - a startup, a publisher, a legacy firm - can figure out how to intelligently and profitably cull 'good quality' new artists from the loads and loads of self-publishing writers, musicians, or cinema/visual creators out there on their own and bring viewers is the day artists and audiences probably start meeting the monetization in the middle.

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computator大约 9 年前

> These days, over one million books are published each year, with at least half of these self-published.The biggest thing I got out of that article is that the Internet has truly killed the prospect of making a living as an author if you're competing with half a million other self-published books every year.I'd say that no one should go into any of the following professions with any expectation of making any money at all:1) Writing of any kind (fiction, non-fiction, technical articles, journalism -- forget about it!)2) Digital art of any kind (see DeviantArt for millions of super-talented creations that haven't earned a cent)3) Photography of any kind (see Shutterfly for millions of photos better than anything you ever took and yet no one will ever pay for)4) Composing music or lyricsIt kind of surprises me that software, a creative and digital medium like the above, is not futile and that you can still make a good living at it.

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mattkevan大约 9 年前

The signal-to-noise ratio for Kindle books is out of hand.Self publishing can be fantastic as it lowers the bar to entry, enabling authors to be heard who wouldn't normally get past the traditional gatekeepers. Andy Weir's 'The Martian' is a great example of this.Conversely, finding anything decent on the Kindle store by browsing - especially Kindle Unlimited - is difficult due to the avalanche of crap which clogs up every category.And I guess it's not really in Amazon's interest to improve this - money is money after all, and they want people to buy these 'books' otherwise 'authors' may stop publishing to the platform.However, even if the books are unreadable, there's a lot of entertainment to be had from the covers: <a href="http://kindlecoverdisasters.tumblr.com" rel="nofollow">http://kindlecoverdisasters.tumblr.com</a>

edent大约 9 年前

Not really a new phenomenon. I sold 4 comics and was second only to Neil Gaiman's Sandman. <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/08/how-to-crack-amazons-kindle-best-seller-list-sell-4-books/" rel="nofollow">https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/08/how-to-crack-amazons-kindle...</a>It's an even less useful a heuristic than "As Seem On TV!"

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BaconJuice大约 9 年前

I wanted to buy this book..seems like it's down now :(

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mring33621大约 9 年前

For the inevitable movie version, I'd like to see Idris Elba or Jake Gyllenhaal cast as the foot.

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Eiriksmal大约 9 年前

An elegant demonstration of a technique that works for most products on Amazon. Isn't it incredible how virtually every product you look at on Amazon is a #1 best seller in its category? At the very least, it'll be in the top 15. They only sell the best-possible products on there, right? Oh, it's only because the categories are so endlessly varied--er, "precise," that each one conveniently only has 8-15 products in it.

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Xcelerate大约 9 年前

If he had played up his "book" as fine art, he could have made millions. Kind of like how this guy took photos of other people's photos and sold them for exorbitant amounts:<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-lewis-instagram-photos-100000-dollars-new-york-new-portraits-copyright-2015-5?r=UK&IR=T" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-lewis-instagram-photo...</a>

robbles大约 9 年前

It seems like Amazon could fix this in a straightforward way without losing the "hourly updated" part of their bestseller list - just compute a longer time period for each hour, like a rolling average. That way the current bestseller still updates every hour, but they'd need to have the most sales over the last week/month instead.

kelvin0大约 9 年前

I don't know which is worse: Amazon's shoddy rating system (for 'bestsellers') or someone using this 'rating' to pass themselves as a first rate author ...

jonaldomo大约 9 年前

Did amazon pull his book down for low content? Anyways, this is an actual business strategy as the categories is always changing. I was hired by a guy to script which categories have a higher chance than others to get the top spot. The number of views for a category bestseller is staggering.

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nathancahill大约 9 年前

TL;DR: Choose an arbitrary small Amazon category to publish your book in. You'll be #1!

guelo大约 9 年前

Amazon would be smart to create an official "Amazon Best Selling Author" certification and protecting it by going after anybody claiming a fake Amazon title. Unfortunately and strangely, Amazon doesn't seem to care about this kind of reputation management, for example their product reviews have become a spam quagmire, and Amazon actually encourages it with their Vine reviewer program.

hippich大约 9 年前

To everybody who saying something along lines "amazon should do X Y Z": amazon's business is clusterfuck, but profitable one. They have TONS of issues with ranking, process, UI, etc,etc,etc. Almost every single problem requires reaching through seller support to engineering team, or someone having closer DB access. Categorization, fields are all SUBcategory-depending. The way you get included into certain categories is also depends on product/subcategory. Stuff sometimes simply doesn't work. In 2015 alone they switched between three different promotion offerings.I am selling on amazon and deal with it often :) It looks like it is constant growing pains.

eru大约 9 年前

Good PR, Amazon! They just made me read a tutorial of how to upload a book to their side, and convinced me it's easy enough to give it a try if I ever wanted to publish a book.

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jackschultz大约 9 年前

I was going to say that this was a fun hack and neat to read about but the author seemed actually angry about this bug. It's a random thing that's kind of funny and probably will be fixed.Though I am curious about the economics behind it. People really spending money on what they see is a "Best Seller" when it shouldn't be? Seems like most people buy books based on recommendations, not just going to Amazon and clicking on the best seller tab.

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cbhl大约 9 年前

Is it actually still possible to buy the alleged book? I couldn't find it with a cursory search of Amazon.com.

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EwanG大约 9 年前

Has been going on for a while. As I wrote about a couple years ago with my own experience:<a href="http://a1.blogspot.com/2014/08/zoes-secret-is-3-at-amazon.html" rel="nofollow">http://a1.blogspot.com/2014/08/zoes-secret-is-3-at-amazon.ht...</a>

armenarmen大约 9 年前

reminds a bit of this: <a href="http://thehustle.co/underground-world-of-kindle-ebooks" rel="nofollow">http://thehustle.co/underground-world-of-kindle-ebooks</a>

searine大约 9 年前

A better question. What does it take to hit best seller status on a top level category?About 5000 books sold in a day or. Thats... a lot harder (or just more expensive) to fake.

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Aardwolf大约 9 年前

Per definition of the word "best", there can be only one, so I never took that term serious

EGreg大约 9 年前

So the easy fix is to make the bestseller list look at the last week, not hour. Wow.

hmans大约 9 年前

How did Amazon approve this?

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ommunist大约 9 年前

Please register my complaint to Amazon. I want to buy your bestselling title! They have no rights to deprive me as a reader. I love feet!

t0mk大约 9 年前

tldr anyone? I read 25%, it was bragging and fancy talk. How is the system actually tricked?

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