I worked for a media company a few years back and we would hack the NYT by selling "limited edition" autographed copies of books.<p>We paid authors $5/signature and sold the book for $10 over MSRP. The author pre-signed thousands of books that we bought from major retailers at a discount (orders in the 10s of thousands). Then we organized speaking events and book tours the week the book released. On the book tour, when the stores ran out of stock they would buy our autographed copies because the publisher couldn't ship them fast enough. Any books that we didn't sell back to the retailers, we would sell on our online store at markup.<p>The key to hacking the system was negotiating with the retailer to report (on Nielsen BookScan) X number of books on release day, X number the day after, and so on...