Conducting a literary experiment
At around 9:15 a.m. on a recent Friday, after sipping my morning coffee and checking the day’s headlines, I learned some exciting news. I’d become a bestselling author. After U.S. book marketer Brent Underwood made headlines recently for becoming a bestseller on Amazon by uploading a picture of his foot, the Star decided to try to replicate his experiment. Asked about the results, Amazon spokeswoman Katie McFadzean said, “We don’t believe this should have happened and so we’re working on fixing it, and beyond that I don’t have anything else to share.”
It took about 20 minutes to make my fake book.
Inspired by Japanese organizing maven Marie Kondo, I called it Decluttering Your Desk: A Guide to Cleaning Up and Living Your Best Life, with product description, “Clean up your desk to start living now.”
I decided to go with the pen name “Miranda Scott,” based on my middle name and mom’s maiden name.
I had to upload a word document so I wrote exactly 74 words, more than half of them used up by repeating the words “this is a book file” over and over.
For my cover I took a picture of three books that sit beside my cubicle. There were no words on the cover, just the one photo.
I chose to upload my book to two Amazon categories that I hoped would be obscure enough to make me a bestseller: “Hypnosis” and “Crystals.”
After making my way through an online form and submitting my bank information (the hardest part by far), I was done.
It took a few hours for the book to be reviewed and approved by Amazon and published live on the site.
When it did, I asked seven fellow Star reporters to buy a copy for $1.31 (0.99 U.S.) and made sure to get one for myself.
I kept refreshing my email, expecting some sort of congratulatory message from Amazon.
When it didn’t arrive, I figured the categories were too mainstream and went home for the night. But the next morning when I searched for my masterpiece on Amazon.ca, there it was, an orange “bestseller” banner over my book. To be fair, when you hovered over it, it said “in Hypnosis.”
It was even a “Hot New Release” in the Crystals category.
Newsroom high-fives ensued. I briefly considered adding it to my email signature and calling my mom.
Thanks to some colleagues who actually bought and read my brief book I had three five-star reviews stamped with a “verified purchase” seal of approval.
“This book was short but sweet and definitely did a good job of hammering down the point that ‘this is a book file.’ I’m already keeping my fingers crossed for a followup from bestselling author Miranda Scott,” read one. “My world will never be the same. Thanks Miranda Scott,” read another .
For fun, I changed the categories to “Movements” and “Zoroastrianism,” republished, and asked three more friends to buy it.
The book didn’t make any more sense in these categories than the first ones, but I wanted to see if Amazon would let it overtake legitimate books in the psychology field and one of the world’s oldest religions.
I became a bestseller on Amazon.ca in the Movements category. My book was beating out celebrated Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung.
I also became a bestseller on parent site Amazon.com in Zoroastrianism. I’m not exactly sure how Amazon calculates “.ca” vs. “.com” status, but it seemed like the American title was another great achievement.
By the time I removed it from the site, after being on sale for five days, Decluttering Your Desk was sitting at No. 22,848 for paid books in the Amazon.ca Kindle Store, six in Movements, two in Zoroastrianism books and one in Zoroastrianism for the Kindle store — with a total of only a dozen copies sold.
Still, not bad for a book with fewer than 100 words.