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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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...")

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.

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.

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