Buying Your Way Onto the NY Times Bestsellers List 110
Freshly Exhumed writes "An endorsement from Oprah Winfrey; a film deal from Steven Spielberg; a debut at the top of The New York Times bestsellers list. These are the things every author craves most. While the first two require the favor of a benevolent deity, the third can be had by anyone with the ability to write a check — a pretty big one, to ResultSource, a San Diego-based marketing consultancy — in what Forbes says is essentially a laundering operation aimed at deceiving the book-buying public into believing a title is more in-demand than it is. Soren Kaplan, a business consultant and speaker, hired ResultSource to promote his book Leapfrogging. Responding to the WSJ article on his website, Kaplan breaks out the economics of making the list. 'It's no wonder few people in the industry want to talk about bestseller campaigns,' he writes. 'Put bluntly, they allow people with enough money, contacts, and know-how to buy their way onto bestseller lists.'"
Re:"Art" is a commodity (Score:4, Funny)
Most books and movies are the same. Look at half the scifi books on amazon. Humans fighting aliens for some reason
Yeah. Every book I've read is just a sequence of words, one after the other. All the same!
Re:Scientologists have been doing this for decades (Score:4, Funny)
How do you think all those gods-awful L. Ron Hubbard books got on the best seller lists? The cult members were ordered to buy as mony copies as possible of *every single book*, then they would return them to the book store a week later. And if the stores refused them, they'd "contribute" the stores to libraries.
This explains why the public library I visited when I was a kid had the entire Mission Earth series. It was quite possibly the most horrible thing I have ever read. I read the entire 10 book series in 2 days because it was so utterly insane, so incredibly bad that I couldn't stop reading. It was obvious that copious quantites of powerful mind altering substances were used in the creation of those novels.
I remember thinking to myself as I read :
This is a product of mind on drugs...
lots and lots of drugs...
very powerful drugs... "
If this is what LSD does it is very very very bad.
It was because of L Ron Hubbard and his Mission Earth series that I resolved never ever to use LSD or any other hallucinogen. Anything that could inspire the type of warped, demented and utterly insane thought that went into those books and the poor judgement that resulted in releasing those books for public consumption was clearly a bad thing to be avoided at any cost.
Re:And this is different (Score:5, Funny)
Do people actually run out to buy a book just because Oprah reviewed it? Really?
Yes, yes.
Oprah and I have almost NOTHING in common.
Well, your DNA is damned near identical. I mean, compared to a sea cucumber.