The book Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman
According to Worldcat roughly five libraries show they are getting the book. There are no reviews online for the book not even on Amazon. Would your library buy a book based on Amazon sales rank alone? If a book hits #1 on Amazon do you buy it even if there are no reviews anywhere? Or does it take a patron requesting the book to get the library to purchase?
Books and seminars
The person that wrote the book conducts seminars. It is possible they bought a thousand copies of their book to give out at seminars. This would be win/win for them. The purchases push the book to #1 on Amazon and then they can turn around and point to the #1 status on Amazon as some kind of credential that their book is worth something.
Rankings
The Amazon rankings are completely bogus. Why would someone take the word of an unnamed person whose judgement and level of expertise cannot be determined?
Rankings
In the case of the book mentioned above I think the ranking is very suspect but for other books the ranking at least provides the information that the book is selling numerous copies.
Let’s look at a specific example. The book “The Hunger Games” is ranked #8 on Amazon and beside the ranking it says that the book has been in the top 100 the last 369 days.
The book has to be somewhat good, at least to a certain audience. If the book was dreadful it might make the top 10 for a week or so but then the word would get out that the book was horrible and it would stop selling.
Worth a look
I keep an eye on the Amazon top 10, just to see what’s on there, but I would never buy a book that had no reviews. (Unless I could get my hands on it in person and decide for myself if it would be a good addition to the collection.)
how will library lending affect these rankings?
I want to see if Amazon will include library loans and rentals in their sales rankings (starting next week?).
If you saw the recommendation that said, “#1 in libraries” on Amazon, would you be more likely to rent/buy?
tom
I Will Wait and See…
It was also #1 on Barnes & Noble’s Top 100 yesterday so someone was bulk buying. Either that or hundreds of thousands of people spontaneously bought a book that I had never heard of until now.
I work in a large public library and we haven’t had one request for this book.
Just because it sizzles…
…doesn’t mean it’s a steak.
Agreed
Book has been 5 days in the top 100 and there is still not a single real review online or on Amazon. This completely screams that someone did a bulk purchase to drive the book to the top on Amazon.
Even bigger sign
Paperbackswap is a book swapping site. If a book is not available people can put it on their wishlist. When a book gets in the top 100 on Amazon several people at a minimum will put the book on thier wishlist. Currently no one has this book on their wishlist. This is very odd for a book. One thing that would explain this was the author buying their own book on Amazon.
http://www.paperbackswap.com/Wicked-Success-Inside-Vickie-L-Milazzo/book/1118100522/
If it shows up on NYT Bestseller List
Well if this shows up on the NYT Bestsellers site, we’ll know for sure whether it was a bulk purchase. NYT puts a little dagger next to titles of books that have bulk buys.
But I’m 99.9999999999% sure this is the author or her publishing company bulk buying this book to give out at her seminars/speeches/etc.