Amazon sales - cheating the system, Machine of Death

[Scott_Arm]

Just a quick post about the reliability of using Amazon sales rankings as a gauge of how well a product is doing in the market.

An acquaintance of mine was involved in the creation of this book, which shot to #1 on the amazon.ca sales rankings for books, the day that the Keith Richards autobiography came out, as well as the new John Grisham book and the absolute juggernaut, Glenn Beck's new book.

How did they do it? With a small sales spike. They asked everyone that was planning to purchase to buy it on the same day. I haven't heard how many copies they sold, but I imagine the number was not all that big. They also pissed off Glenn Beck and he whined about it on his radio show.

http://machineofdeath.net/a/159

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/28/3050793.htm?section=entertainment

As another connection to gaming, Yahtzee has a story in this one.

 

[Gerry]

Anything that pisses of Glenn Beck is a good thing.

 

[RobertR1]

Poor zed

 

[AlphaWolf]

Apparently someone named Glenn Beck had a book come out on Tuesday too? I don’t know who Mr. Beck is, but a quick Google seems to indicate that he’s some sort of Ron Popeil-like infomercial huckster or something:

Now that's an apt description.

 

[V3]

I'm suprised Amazon doesn't accept payment for this yet. They could make a lot of money from all the bidding.

 

[zed]

How did they do it? With a small sales spike. They asked everyone that was planning to purchase to buy it on the same day. I haven't heard how many copies they sold, but I imagine the number was not all that big.

this has been going since the start of sales charts, with record sales etc to try and drum up interest in a product

Just a quick post about the reliability of using Amazon sales rankings as a gauge of how well a product is doing in the market.

how so not?, during that day I expect it prolly did sell more than the other mentioned books

looking now its #71
keith richards book is #3
glen becks is #5
grisham is #7

in a months/years time I expect all 3 books are gonna be significantly higher than machine of death.
I bet you if you see the final sales numbers the actual results will be quite close to its amazon performance overall