Monday, September 19, 2011

Getting books to #1 on Amazon

This book (Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman) is currently #1 on Amazon. Amazon maintains a page of books that are movers and shakers and this book has moved up the most of any book I have ever seen. It went from a sales rank of 335,530 to 1. Amazon list this as an improvement of 33,553,000% increase.

A few things to note. The book is published by Wiley and at least once a year a motivational or get rich quick book published by Wiley jumps to #1 on Amazon. Here are two other titles that have done this in previous years:

Multi-Family Millions: How Anyone Can Reposition Apartments for Big Profits


Bailout Riches!: How Everyday Investors Can Make a Fortune Buying Bad Loans for Pennies on the Dollar

What surprises me is that they clearly have a system to kick books to #1 on Amazon. If they offered to sell this method it would be more useful than some of the fly by night get rich quick schemes being peddled by these books.

Like the other Wiley books the Wicked Success book has some similar characteristics. If you run searches online looking for media attention that might be driving the sales of these books you find none. One thing I have noticed with all these books is that they are able to go to #1 on the day they are released or the day before they are released. One of the other books mentioned above had gone to #1 and all you could do was pre-order it. I think the trick they do is order a thousand copies before the book is officially on sale on Amazon. This pushes the book up to #1 then they cancel all the orders. Amazon reflects orders into the sales rank within an hour or so of a sale so you would get the benefit of the sale for sales rank even if you cancelled the order. I am a little surprised that Amazon has not found a way to keep people from gaming the system like this.

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