How did “Handbook for Mortals” get on the NYT bestseller list? | Hacker News Reader

How did “Handbook for Mortals” get on the NYT bestseller list?

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208 pointscratermoon79 comments

Because the NYT bestseller list is essentially not an accurate report, but "fake news." In 1983 William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, filed a lawsuit against the NYT for failing to include his book Legion on the list, despite provable sales. The Times won the lawsuit by claiming that their list does not in fact reflect bestsellers, but their own editorial opinion as to what constitutes a bestseller. In other words, they massage and ignore real data: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Yup. If they want to clean up their public image, this is another place they can start. I have seen a recent shift at NYT, but it is still very lacking in my perception. They seem to be popular, or at least heavily marketed here in HN.

Please consider reading the article. It was placed on the list as a consequence of a scheme to manipulate the sales data—exactly opposite what you suggest.

The NYT bestseller list has been a horrible indicator of what's selling for a while. You can often see well-known authors make the list weeks before their books are out due to massive orders by big box stores.

A much better source are Indie Bound's Indie Bestseller lists: https://www.indiebound.org/indie-bestsellers. While still able to be gamed, these lists are compiled based off of sales by independent booksellers. I've often found the books here to be better quality than the NYT bestsellers.

Nice Bestseller list. Does anyone here has other good (and independent) list?

I love how at least half of the Childrens Illustrated Best sellers are all old books.

Handbook for Mortals is currently #4 on Indie Bound's Children's Interest Bestsellers list :/

This sort metrics-buying isn't unique to books:

The RIAA changed its rules so Jay-Z's 'Magna Carta Holy Grail' would go platinum instantly after Samsung bought one million copies to give away to its users: http://pitchfork.com/news/51392-riaa-changes-gold-and-platin...

A similar partnership with Sprint meant '4:44' also went platinum almost immediately, even though it was only distributed on TIDAL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/garysuarez/2017/07/05/jay-z-444...

This "buyer" is not going to buy any of the books.

The trick only works because the book is considered published yet it is out of stock so has to be back ordered.

And these back orders still count for the NYT bestseller list.

My guess is they somehow triggered some sort of last second revision for their own book at the publisher thus pausing the printing.

So the book is technically published and available in various catalogs yet you can't actually buy it. You can only back-order it.

I assume if you could actually order the book the "buyer" would have to shell out some cash.

An additional trick is that the "buyer" is being careful not to trigger bulk buying clause for each store.

It is basically the click farm equivalent online.

When the Ch\wrch of Sc\w+nt\wl\wgy did this they actually had their cultists pay for the books. Most of them were then sold to second-hand book stores.

Because money actually came through to them, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton were happy to order enough to keep up with the fake demand.

> the Ch\wrch of Sc\w+nt\wl\wgy

What's going on here?

Likely an attempt to obscure the phrase from search.

Because 0xChurch0f5c13n70l06y isn't valid hex.

Folks here in LA will give you "shut up right now" looks if you speak ill of the CoS in a public place.

Hardly. The CoS is like LA's version of the Amish. There aren't many of them and, much like wild animals, they're more scared of you than you are of them. The most exciting thing they ever do is pay for some floats in a Christmas parade once a year. I think they had a Garfield float last year.

It's regex-encoded (for a lack of better term). \w means any letter (or number, or underscore), the + after the \w means one or more repetitions of it.

I believe it's supposed to decode as "Church of Scientology"

You can get into trouble if you speak ill of the Ch*rch in public. This hinders discoverability.

Trouble with who? The Church? I'm familiar with their weirdo bullying tactics but you can't really take them seriously - they have no power.

Their lawyers have power. They've killed people too, though that was years ago.

Imagine a DDOS attack on your life. Don't underestimate the cumulative effect of fanatics with little individual 'power', intent on punishing you...

There was a time in the 90s when Scientology was the main target of internet censorship, and they (mis)used copyright law to hinder criticism and to hide what they did.

South Park broadcast all the details of Xenu in 2005, which made it much easier for other former Scientologists (e.g. Kate Bornstein) to talk about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_and_the_Internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapped_in_the_Closet_(South_P...

They filed enough law suits against people in the IRS to have their millions in back taxes waived and granted non-profit church status.

They bullied the IRS.

It seems that violent aggressive growth tactics are common in start-up religions.

Fuck the Church of Scientology. I know they're nasty motherfuckers, but if nothing else they don't have the resources to personally mess with every person anywhere on the internet who speaks ill of them, not since Chanology multiplied that number by orders of magnitude. Don't let them scare you into censoring yourself, even in such a minor way.

Hey Church of Scientology, somebody here is claiming you are fraudsters gaming the bestseller lists. I'll add my own opinion that you're an abusive cult dead set on parting fools and their money, that your "church" was invented by a guy alternating between nights on uppers and downers, and your myth of aliens on DC-10s doing something around a vulcano (can't remember the details) is pure fantasy.

If you want to sue me, you should be able to find my details if you click on my username. Have at it!

The Church of scientology is a shitty cult that rips off it's members.

Come at me scientologists.

> The trick only works because the book is considered published yet it is out of stock so has to be back ordered. And these back orders still count for the NYT bestseller list.

The NYT says that "Sales are defined as completed transactions by individuals"[1]. Either you're mistaken about the trick that was used or the NYT is lying about their methodology.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/methodology/

It would appear they are lying, as they won a court case by arguing they were not. So either way someone is blowing hot air, and either way that someone is the NYT

Indie publisher here. There have been strange things going on in the last year with best-seller lists, not only in the NYT but also USA Today and Amazon, often relating to ebook "box sets" that have coordinated marketing and borrow campaigns set up around them. See the following resources/discussions:

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2017/04/the-bestseller-list-b...

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,250491.125.html

I am not sure if the TFA example is connected to box set scams, though.

From 2013:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...

ResultSource, a San Diego-based marketing consultancy, specializes in getting books onto bestseller lists, according to The Wall Street Journal. For clients willing to pay enough, it will even guarantee a No. 1 spot. It does this by taking bulk sales and breaking them up into more organic-looking individual purchases, defeating safeguards that are supposed to make it impossible to "buy" bestseller status.

One of the methods they use is getting people who show up to talks to get a copy of the book, I guess because you can stuff the price of the book into the price of the ticket. (I have a book at home I got from attending a Pop-Up Magazine show, for which tickets were a bit pricier than I would have liked. I haven't opened it yet.)

I believe NYT has a bookstore list for reporting orders. This is how the best selling books make it on this list. The buyer (someone tied to the book) probably knew the store was on the NYT list and made a massive order. The NYT will need to tweak things going forward. Any store telling people they are on the NYT Best Seller reporting list should be removed from the list.

it's blackhat SEO, but offline (where it still works)

From the OP: "Buying your way onto the bestseller list is not technically illegal, nor is it that hard if you know how."

It's a pretty awesome ploy, with one caveat: to make real money, somewhere, someone should produce something of value. Even if they offline kickstart this book into "#1 bestseller", at least the movie should be good enough for YA.

There are at least two companies that will guarantee (guarantee, mind you) a slot on the NYT list in exchange for a fee.

The story specifically mentions that there were suspicious calls asking if a store was a NYT reporting store, followed by bulk orders with no delivery date.

I was scratching my head because I didn't recall reading this. After dinner, I grabbed a glass of wine and I went back and read beyond the first 5 paragraphs plus the embedded tweets.You gotta do what you good do but don't get caught.

During the article, I wondered what the writer's end goal was. Then I saw that she wants to portray the lead in a movie version, and I can only assume this will be some Neil Breen-level, awesomely-bad garbage.

It's called a Mary Sue character. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue

Neil Breen, explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KolenE1GCyg (NSFW audio, probably NSFW video)

God bless both of you for introducing me to Neil Breen

Incredible.

Based on the reviews I've seen, the book is exactly as bad as you'd expect it to be. A purple prose filled cliche storm with every aspect of a bad novel you'd expect it to have:

https://twitter.com/runwithskizzers/status/90081065965428326...

Yeah, that compares it to the infamous Harry Potter fan fic My Immortal.

I always assumed that the NYT Bestseller List was a marketing vehicle that you could buy into. Not that it didn't track legitimate "bestsellers." I just figured you could pay to play too. If people really care about knowing that for sure then I guess it's nice to see some actual proof of it.

Methodology: https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/methodology/

Thanks! I probably should have looked for this myself...

It wouldn't be much use if it was widely-known to be easily gamed. Even as a revenue vehicle, the NYT would do better (at least in the past decade) to make these books pay for ads the old-fashioned way.

The consensus I've seen from people in the publishing industry is that lots of books buy their way onto the NYT bestseller list, but this one is just being much less subtle about it.

I like this one better than people shelling out $200k to make the list because they exploited a bug in the system -- this didn't cost anything outside the manpower to place these orders which will never go through or be charged.

Thank you. The article is treating the NYT bestseller list as sacrosanct. Someone figured a (relatively) cheap way to hack it. Good for them.

As someone who just published a children's book if I thought this would work I would try it.

It's a scam regardless of how cheap it was. It sounds like you're trying justify the fact you'd be willing to do the same scam.

Years ago I became aware of how many wealthy people and "best-selling authors" bought their way onto the NY Times list and how even people with publishing deals are often "encouraged" to use their advances to use companies like ResultsSource.

Since the entire thing seems to be a scam to me I like this one because of it's elegance. Why bother even selling the books or paying Results Source when you can just put it in a few hundred orders for 30 books across various independent stores.

A bit more irritating to fellow publishers (sour grapes) because this publisher didn’t have to fork out actual cash for their own books. Feel sorry for the stores taking the orders with no hope of actual sales.

> Feel sorry for the stores taking the orders with no hope of actual sales.

Since it's not clear if the book has actually even been published, I'm not sure those orders would ever be fulfilled.

Yeah, but some poor sap at the book store has to deal with this crap. Paper cuts add up.

It Seems like some sort of Neilson Ratings System would be more representative than basing it purely on sales.

Or lower the bulk threshold to one. Meaning a single sale of a title “counts” while >1 sales in a transaction counts as 1.

Buying 5 copies of one book doesn’t mean it’s being sold (or willingly read by) to 5 distinct people. So it’s popularity is really just “1” because only one person actually bought it.

That would be much harder to game since they would have to have a lot of single transactions to move the needle. Buying 29 at a time ought not count as 29 sales even though it technically IS 29 sales. But the intent of the Bestseller list is to determine popularity, not necessarily “units moved” otherwise, why disqualify bulk sales? Those ARE sales right? But the NY Times does have a bulk purchase flag which means the list isn’t about volume, but about perceived popularity.

Our pastor bought our whole (small) congregation a particular book to read a little while back, it seems equally to fail to report that as a sale of 1; just as much as registering the publisher buying their own book a hundred (thousand, ...) times.

... Cue a book buying app that reimburses the first n people to buy a book and scan the sales receipt in order to provide "genuine" sales for skewing popularity lists.

> Or lower the bulk threshold to one. Meaning a single sale of a title “counts” while >1 sales in a transaction counts as 1.

Not knowing their data, it could be that they settled on 30 because reducing the number below that didn't change the results, and was more effort (ie, expensive) to tabulate.

Spike Trottman's tweets around this present some interesting points: https://twitter.com/Iron_Spike/status/900797323403554817

Mot notably: this has been used as a tactic to get books and comics optioned for films (which will make more money than selling books ever does), and the author is a no-name actor who - surprise! - is angling to play the lead in the film of her #1 bestselling novel.

How are movie options priced? Anything close to a "real options" approach?

AFAIK being optioned gives you a chunk of cash - you're selling an exclusive, sometimes time-limited, right for the studio to make the movie. If the movie doesn't get made, you still get to keep the money.

Huh, didn't know a lot of books were written by actors wanting to play the lead part. I mean, I've heard of scams where people are trying to misrepresent their work as more popular than is for a movie adaptation, but the actor aspect is a surprising one here.

Apparently the NYT released a new list, sans "Handbook for Mortals": https://twitter.com/cupcakeandy/status/900830696226381826

Direct link: https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/young-adult-hardc...

https://www.amazon.com/charts

Amazon charts are much more useful.

I'm sure why this is news, the NYT Bestseller List has always be gamed. Usually the books are decent and true good books linger, but getting there has always been a $$ game

Probably because it's about a small unknown (non-existent?) publisher and a book that barely exists. Yes, big publishing houses definitely game the system so their marquee authors get on the list, but this is a sort of low-level hack.

A big publisher would likely be pushing its books onto the NYT list in order to sell books. I'm not entirely sure this book exists at all, outside of press releases.

Yeah, this practice goes back literally decades: L. Ron Hubbard was ordering Scientologists to buy his books and prop them up on the NYT Bestseller List in the 1950s. This guy sounds pretty out of the loop if he thinks this is a new phenomenon.

According to the article:

> Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales.

That sounds pretty cheap. For a book that costs $10-20 that would be $50-100K to buy your way in. I'm not sure what the margins for books are these days (particularly the split between publisher and retailer) but that doesn't seem that expensive.

You can do what they did for L. Ron Hubbard's doorstop-ology "Mission Earth", where they'd buy the books in stores, give them back to the publisher, and buy them from the stores again. Booksellers were noticing that the books which came from the publisher already had their store's stickers on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Earth_(novel)#Sales_co...

Re-selling the books will save you some money.

5000 sales at a reporting store. So that probably represents 50,000 actual books sold since not every store reports.

I think Nate Silver ought to do some work on this area; it would be interesting to read his analysis.

It represents 50,000 actual books sold if the demand is legitimate. If you make sure to only buy from reporting stores, it's only 5,000 actual books sold.

I wish I knew how to find the article, but a few months back I read something that backed the other commenters: a large number of the NYT Bestsellers buy their way on. As I recall, the publisher sends a bunch of books out to stores, buys them, and kind of "seeds the tip jar" to bestseller status, which then generates enough to pay for the initial buy-in.

I'm mangling what was a good explanation, but the answer to the question of the headline is, "yeah, probably, just like a lot of others".

(Small pedantic note: your opening sentence should read "I'm NOT sure why...")

See also "I, Libertine"[1], which started out as a joke (by Jean Shepherd of "A Christmas Story" fame) and made it on to the bestseller list before it had even been written.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Libertine

"Buying your way onto the bestseller list is not technically illegal, nor is it that hard if you know how. Many CONSERVATIVE publishers have found success through bulk-buying books then giving them away as, say, subscriber gifts if you sign up to Newsmax or the like. "

hmmm, conservative only? Biased much? Is the strategy of buying placement somehow undiscovered by publishers of liberal persuasion?

Yes, seriously. You're playing looser with definitions, but in the sense they used conservative, yes.

Wow, the goodreads rating got fixed fast: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35800325-handbook-for-mo...

I love the fact that the author rated her own book five stars. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2076269822?book_show_a...

btw, YA is Young Adult literature. I've never heard about this jargon.

Thanks, I was totally confused as it's mentioned several times yet never explained in the first paragraphs.

That just tells me the system is flawed. Sounds way too easy to game...

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