Fake ’book’ becomes an Amazon bestseller,
How does one become a chart-topping author? These days, it’s as easy as uploading a picture of your foot
Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, insert your name here.
It turns out it doesn’t take much to become a bestselling author in the era of self-publishing.
In mid-February, Brent Underwood, a 28-year-old partner at a book marketing company in Austin, Texas, was frustrated. It seemed to him the term “bestselling author” had become “almost meaningless” and he decided to try a little experiment.
He uploaded a “book” to Amazon that was just a photo of his foot with the title “Putting my foot down.” He placed this masterpiece under the Amazon categories of “transpersonal movements” and “freemasonry & secret societies.”
He got two friends to buy the ebook and, for good measure, snagged a copy for himself.
Less than 24 hours later he was rewarded with Amazon bestseller status.
“I just wanted to prove that it doesn’t take a lot of time, it doesn’t take a lot of money,” Underwood told the Star. “Say you’re a New York Times bestselling author for 10 years straight. Is it fair that I can call myself the same thing as that person?”
Asked about Brentwood’s experiment, Amazon spokeswoman Katie McFadzean said, “This definitely isn’t something that should have happened and we’re working on fixing it.”
She would not comment on what “fixing it” means or Amazon’s criteria for a book to be published on the site. “There’s a lot that goes into our algorithms and so we are always working on making them better,” McFadzean added.
The website has hundreds of book categories from gastroenterology to the history of Fiji. The bestseller stats are updated hourly, meaning a book in a niche category with a spurt of sales in a short time frame can shoot to the top of that list.
Underwood’s own book was the No. 1 bestseller in the category of “transpersonal,” a sub-category of medical books, psychology and movements but, as a screen shot he took shows, the book was No. 29,751on a list of paid books in the Kindle Store at that same moment.
“At which point Amazon throws on a bestselling-author tag on the top of the book, and (people) screenshot that and they call themselves a bestselling author for the rest of their lives, which is kind of deceiving I think,” Underwood said.
He was also concerned about the proliferation of companies offering to help market people’s books and make them bestsellers which, as he proved, can be done free, without actually writing anything.
“You have these marketing companies setting up these bestseller packages and guaranteeing bestseller status, almost preying on authors’ desire to have some type of status and write a book,” Underwood said.
Jason Boyd, an assistant professor at Ryerson who teaches digital publishing, said Underwood has “pinpointed a weakness and a way to easily abuse the bestseller ranking,” which “Amazon really needs to kind of look at and fix.”
But Boyd is not sure how many people would be fooled by bestseller status in a niche category.
“When you look at all the other metrics that you would associate with a bestseller, of course they weren’t there,” he said, adding the traditional bestseller lists such as the New York Times’ still carry more “cultural authority.”
Boyd called the easier-to-obtain status part of “the diversification and expansion of the publishing world” that has happened with the explosion of Amazon, ebooks and selfpublishing in recent years
As for companies that offer to make people bestsellers for a price, “it’s terrible that marketing is open to these type of abuses; on the other hand, you could say this is just the kind of new entrepreneurship in the digital age.”
David Soberman, a professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said he finds the discussion sparked by Underwood something of a tempest in a teapot.
“You have to remember, all he did was he got himself listed as a bestseller in an obscure category,” he said of the experiment.
“But by virtue of the fact that the category is obscure there’s not very many people that are going to be buying books in that category anyway,” Soberman added.
“To somebody that’s actually quite familiar with the Internet, I think that they realize that these things don’t have as much meaning as you would think.”
Meanwhile, back in Texas, although his book was eventually taken down by Amazon.com, Underwood has added a line to his LinkedIn profile letting the world know he is officially a “#1 best selling author.”