Want to be a bestselling author? For $10,000 to $15,000, New York-based PR firm Ruder Finn will get you on the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list, just by dropping an email blast. The Wall Street Journal's "numbers guy" columnist, Carl Bialik, has the details on how to buy your way onto the bestseller list, in today's WSJ (there's also some info on Bialik's blog). If you have enough friends, you can do the same thing without dropping a bunch of dough on a PR agency. Getting just 1,000 people to order your book is enough to make it a bestseller, if only for a day.
It won't do much for overall sales, unfortunately. Much like traffic rankings from Amazon subsidiary Alexa, the Amazon.com bestseller list is good mainly for bragging rights, and today's top ranking can quickly turn into tomorrow's nosedive. The sample size is so small that even small changes -- such as a single day without a book sale -- can send your book from the 10,000th spot to the 50,000th, Bialik writes. That hasn't stopped people from obsessing over the numbers, though. If you want to get really wonky over numbers that mean nothing, there's Charteous -- the booklover's answer to Alexaholic Statsaholic.
