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Few Sales Tricks Can Launch a Book To Top of Online Lists The Wall Street Journal
THE NUMBERS GUY
By CARL BIALIK
For $10,000 to $15,000, you, too, can be a best-selling author. New
York public-relations firm Ruder Finn says it can propel unknown
titles to the top of rankings on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble with
a mass email called the Best-Seller Blast. Popular authors such
as Mark Victor Hansen of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series
recommend your book in messages to fans, and offer a deal: Buy the
book today and you'll get downloadable "bonuses" supposedly valued
at thousands of dollars -- such as recordings of motivational speeches
and contact information for important people. Orchestrating even
1,000 book purchases in a single day can drive a title from obscurity
to the top of the charts.
Rick Frishman, who oversees the campaigns
for Ruder Finn's Planned Television Arts, also is a client. His
2004 book "Networking Magic" went from a sales rank of 896,000 on
barnesandnoble.com the morning it was published to No. 1 at 4 p.m.
He has a poster in his office showing the sales chart he briefly
topped. "I'm a nobody, but I was somebody for a day," he says.
A decade after they were introduced, online
book-sales rankings remain an object of obsession for authors. Because
they're unrestrained by shelf space, the Web stores give millions
of books a ranking. These are updated hourly and displayed on the
book's sales page and on best-seller lists. This "democratic" potential
is celebrated by compulsive watchers of the numbers. Cindy Ratzlaff,
vice president of brand marketing for Rodale Books, has noticed
that Amazon seems to refresh its numbers 35 minutes after every
hour and she makes it a point to check the page soon after, every
hour during the workday. "It's really pathetic and extremely addictive
-- and we all do it," she says.
But if this is the democracy of bookselling,
vote buying is an option. Ruder Finn's best-seller program is one
of several online aimed at new authors; entrepreneurial sorts do
it themselves. Suzanne Falter-Barns sent me the eight-page journal
of her own personal Amazon Day, as she calls the time an email campaign
sent her book to No. 8 on the list. ("Life is good, I think, as
I watch the sun rise over Lake Champlain," she wrote of learning
she was an online best-seller.)
Amazon says little about how it calculates
its rankings, though scholars and publishers have attempted to reverse-engineer
the system to determine how a sales ranking translates into actual
sales. One major quirk: Used and new book sales are counted equally.
So an author anxious about his sales ranking could put a few dozen
of his books for sale for a penny apiece and ask a friend to buy
them all.
This all adds up to numbers that are ubiquitous,
closely watched -- and of dubious value. The targeted marketing
campaigns contribute volatility to sales-ranking numbers that are
inherently unstable. Outside the top 1% or so of books, few sell
multiple copies a day, so little separates books with rankings tens
of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, apart. Morris Rosenthal,
an author and publisher based in Springfield, Mass., who has studied
the Amazon charts, says a day without a sale can send a book ranked
10,000 to as low as 50,000.
On Charteo.us, a free Web site that tracks
the ebb and flow of Amazon rankings daily, dozens of the 1,500 books
currently tracked rise or fall by 75% or more each day. Online sales
can be throttled quickly by national media mentions. Author appearances
on "Oprah," "Larry King Live" and "60 Minutes" accounted for some
of the most dramatic increases measured by Charteo.us in the past
couple of months, according to the publishers.
"We think of Amazon as the instant-gratification
indicator for us," says Ms. Ratzlaff. Publishers also say they look
to Amazon rankings as an indicator of future sales potential for
authors -- along with rankings from Nielsen BookScan, the New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal and others that cut across retailers.
Publishers can chart books' rankings on sites such as Charteo.us
and TitleZ. The Planning Shop, a publisher that developed TitleZ
to track its own books, plans to start charging for the service
later this year.
Hence, sales pitches such as those from
Mr. Frishman to new authors eager to become best-sellers, if only
for an hour and only on a single site. "Everyone wants to call themselves
a best-seller if they can," he says, even if it means doing so by
luring would-be buyers with bonuses.
"It's a made-up number," Mr. Frishman concedes
of the bonus value. There's little incentive for Amazon and Barnes
& Noble to discourage these campaigns, because they drive sales.
(Representatives for both sites declined to comment on how they
calculate their numbers, and how others try to juice them.)
Critics of such programs say they muck
up Amazon's recommendation system -- because some people buy the
promoted books just for the bonuses, not for reasons of taste --
and encourage new authors to obsess over volatile numbers and pay
for marketing tools to boost them.
"These campaigns aren't really effective;
they don't lead to sustained word of mouth or sales," says Steve
Weber, a writer and seller of used books on Amazon. "But new authors
have no way of knowing what a scam this is."