If Only I Had Known!

I may have mentioned once or twice previously that I have been writing fiction, off and on, since at least 1980 – and possibly before, depending on your point of view – with a grand total of zero professional sales to date. This isn’t actually all that unusual for amateur writers, as it happens. Even as the quality of instruction in writing has plummeted in recent decades, the value placed on writing has also declined, to the point where everyone who has never tried it seems to believe that writing a books is as simple as arranging 100,000 or so words into something vaguely coherent. At the same time, the decline of magazines, newspapers and books in favor of free content on the Internet has reduced the number of opportunities available to writers, until only the extremely fortunate or unreasonably well-connected (and those ghost writing for celebrities of various kinds) have any realistic hope of becoming published. But apparently, once you do actually achieve publication becoming a best-selling author may be as easy as writing a check…

You can check out the Wall Street Journal article online here if you want to, but the basic idea is that a number of services have appeared over the last decade or so that will artificially increase your initial sales for your new book by placing thousands of pre-orders in advance of your release date. Then when your book finally hits the stores it outsells all other new releases for that week, gets on various bestseller lists, and makes you a “Bestselling Author” – resulting in instant street cred, prestige, a much higher hourly or day rate for your consulting services, or whatever other befits you might be able to gain from being the author of a bestselling book in your field (whatever that might be). And the best part is that this method will work even if what you have written is complete twaddle, without any redeeming features…

Of course, the following week, when the artificially inflated sales dry up the book will drop to the level of sales it would have achieved on its own – possibly with a small increase for having been on any major Best Sellers list for a week, or at least until actual reviews of the book start to appear. In some cases, if the books has some utility or interest it may achieve modest sales following the jump-start, but these are unlikely to justify the enormous cost of using the tactic in the first place (up to $200,000 in some cases), and the Journal notes some examples where the books promoted in this fashion are actually experiencing negative sales (more people return copies each week than purchase new ones) once their debut week is over and they have to survive on their own merits…

Now, obviously this won’t affect writers of fiction as much as it will those authors trying to publish professional books, how-to and self-help books, business strategy books and so on, if only because the rewards available to a successful author of fiction are much smaller. Somebody whose novel appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List for a single week is unlikely to draw a lot of six-figure consulting or speaking engagements, and their ability to leverage such a “success” into a new opportunity will be much smaller – especially because a novel can’t have any utility; it’s either a good read or it isn’t. Most publishers are going to require more than just one good week of sales before they will order more copies printed, and if they ever find out about how you’ve gamed the system your chances are effectively shot. But I still can’t help wishing I had known about this strategy years ago…

I’d probably still be a scruffy blogger nobody ever reads. But I’d be a scruffy Bestselling Author who writes a blog that nobody reads…