Gaming the System

Manipulating Bestsellers and Booksellers in Real Time

I buy a lot of gifts from Amazon but this is the first time Amazon ever gave a gift to me. Sometimes a Shelf Life writes itself and that’s a gift. A gift in the form of a Shelf Life topic when I didn’t have anything specific on the docket for today. Is this what we get from Amazon in lieu of taxes? A Shelf Life topic? Okay, I’ll take it. I’d still rather they, you know, paid taxes. But I’m not giving the topic back.

Recently I wrote about bestseller lists and what it means for a book to qualify as a bestseller. In that article I touched on the way that Amazon’s bestseller lists are calculated differently from the other major lists (PW, NYT, WaPo/ABA, and USA Today). Amazon’s “bestsellers” are calculated in real time, so whatever is actually selling the most copies at any given time goes to the top. While the other outlets calculate once per week, Amazon is constantly calculating and recalculating. 

Listen, a funny thing happened on the way to the ’Zon. Actually it wasn’t funny, but it was interesting. I try to always be interesting even if I can’t be funny. This isn’t very funny. 

Do you remember what you were doing eleven years ago in Spring 2010? I was director of electronic publishing for a distribution network representing a bunch of indie publishers. Military-style jackets were popular so I was probably feeling sad that I had to put mine away for the summer. It was olive drab. It had many pockets.

One of the things I regularly do, whether I am shopping for a book to read or not, is browse what’s selling well in the genres I’m interested in. Earlier this week I popped into the Amazon bestselling books section and then headed over to the science fiction and fantasy list.

Because Amazon calculates what’s actually selling and doesn’t exclude old perennial bestsellers or self-published titles, I know it won’t match what I’ve seen on the other bestseller lists. So I was not surprised to see, for instance, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone or Leviathan Wakes even though they’re old. I know how to skim past the old stuff that’s always selling well and just look at the new items.

I don’t expect to be surprised, because I’m usually in the know about what’s forthcoming in these genres that is likely to be a hit. But right near the top, I saw a title that stopped my scrolling cold. Here’s why:

1. I didn’t recognize the title.

2. I didn’t recognize the author’s name.

3. First in a series.

4. Beautiful cover.

I’ll go ahead and walk you through why that stopped me in my tracks.

How does a series debut (ie, not cashing in on the success of a previous title in the same series) by an author whose name I have never heard, launch a title with no industry fanfare, and hit the top ten on a bestseller list? Sometimes self-published titles do this when the price is set to free and the author promotes the title hard, but this was—sorry—not the kind of cover you see on many self-published books. Even when an indie author has the funds to pay for a professional design of this caliber, they don’t come up with something this nice and on-trend without an editorial and marketing department to weigh in and guide the design process.

I’m intrigued. So I click through to the book details and I pick up three additional pieces of information:

1. The publishing imprint is Montlake.

2. The book is in preorder status right now.

3. The book is an “Amazon First Reads Pick” for the month of June.

Curiouser and curiouser. I’ve never heard of Amazon First Reads so I took a closer look.

As you can see here, Amazon First Reads is a program that lets Amazon users get early access to books that haven’t officially been released yet. This month Prime members can even choose two of the First Read Picks to get for free in the Kindle format.

Okay, this provides a bit of clarity. The book is free, and it’s an Amazon First Reads “pick,” so they’ve chosen to promote this title. I clicked through to see the other selections. There are nine “picks” total available for this month’s selections, which Amazon specifies are “editors’ picks.” All quite similar to the first book—different genres but each with a beautiful cover and an author and publishers I’ve never heard of before—Thomas & Mercer, Lake Union. 

There are thousands of publishers in the United States so naturally I don’t know all of them but it just seemed strange that I haven’t heard of any of the publishers of any of these—

Oh they’re all imprints of Amazon Publishing now it all makes sense.

To be clear, what’s happening here is:

1. Amazon has created a program to promote a handful of books each month as “Editors’ Picks.”

2. Membership in the program is free.

3. These monthly Editors’ Picks are available to members ahead in some kind of “early release” status and they get to pick one for free.

4. The Editors’ Picks are selected from forthcoming titles to be published by Amazon.

Maybe this feels kind of slimy to you; or maybe it feels a lot slimy; or maybe you don’t feel like it’s slimy and it’s just good business—they’re just using the platform they own to promote the content they own, right?

These are my issues with the situation:

1. You have to dig down several layers to uncover that the Editors’ Picks are published by Amazon. Nowhere is it made transparent that these books have been selected from among Amazon’s titles and all other publications are excluded.

2. Other publishers can’t really participate, because once a book is released to the public it’s . . . you know . . .  published. That’s literally what the term published means. For the First Reads program, Amazon has created an early access model for their own content.

3. By promoting these books and allowing Prime users to pick one or two at a prerelease price of $0.00, Amazon pushes them onto the bestseller chart. Each of the nine titles was near the top of their respective bestseller category list when I looked. Books that are promoted by the author or publisher usually see a bump while they’re being promoted; and books with prices lowered to free temporarily for a promotion usually see a bump; so it follows that books being promoted by Amazon all month, and priced free all month, will scoot right to the top.

So if you were wondering how a new title, in a new series, from a fairly unknown author is outselling perennials like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and forthcoming hot titles like the next installment of the NYT #1 bestselling Mercy Thompson series—well that’s how.

A funny thing about bestseller lists is that we know they’re self-perpetuating. Once a book makes its way to the bestseller list, it is likely to be propelled to higher and higher sales as many people choose their reading material from the bestseller list. So by pushing each of these titles onto the Amazon bestseller lists, they’re encouraging them to continue selling even after the promotion is over. Sorry, that was interesting but not funny.

Wait, it gets weirder.

The Amazon First Reads program is not new. As I’m scrolling around trying to investigate this bizarre phenomenon I see—

Would you like to see some of our previous picks? Why yes, I would! The link took me to six hundred and thirty-nine more editors’ picks. Bless their hearts, almost every one published by Amazon.

I’m genuinely not sure how this program has been going for years, first under the name Kindle First Reads and now as Amazon First Reads, and I’ve never heard about it until now. I’m an avid Amazon customer and shopper. I’m on this site all the time. They’ve never promoted this program to me or showed me any of these books before. I’m also a publisher and industry professional and I knew Amazon had a publishing operation. I vaguely suspected something like this existed to promote their products unfairly on their platform but I didn’t expect it to be so blatant.

It’s not easy to work with Amazon as a publisher—especially if you’re not one of the big five publishers, but it’s tough even if you are. Amazon doesn’t negotiate terms. Once a year you have a conference call with your account manager and in that call they tell you what your terms are for the next fiscal year. A little over eleven years ago, in April 2010, John Sargent at Macmillan pushed back on the terms and Amazon removed all the “Buy” buttons from all their products on the Amazon site.

I cannot say for the record if I was wearing a chic military-style olive drab jacket with many pockets on that particular day but I do remember the day very well.

Amazon didn’t remove the products, which would have signaled to customers that these books weren’t available at Amazon and might be available somewhere else—for instance, Macmillan’s website or Barnes & Noble. They removed the “Buy” buttons, so the product showed up—as in, this is a product Amazon carries—as unavailable to buy. This is product death for books.

Let me back up a little bit. There are a lot of models for selling products but in the book business the two main ones are the wholesale model and the agency model. 

Under the wholesale model, the publisher sets a wholesale price for the book and sells it at that price to a retailer, who then sets a retail price and sells the book. The retail price of a book is often the same as the cover price—that’s the price that might be printed somewhere on the back cover or inside jacket flap—but the retailer is not bound to sell the book at that price if they don’t want to. They could put the book on sale for a lower price, for instance. It’s up to them what price they sell the book for, and the difference between the wholesale price and the retail price determines their profit. Historically, this is how books have been sold at retail.

Under the agency model, the publisher and the retailer agree to a revenue sharing split ahead of time—for instance, MacPublishers gets 60 percent of the sale and Blamavon gets 40 percent—and then the retail price for the product is determined by the publisher. In this model, the manufacturer sets the final retail price, and the revenue generated by each sale is split among the publisher and the retailer along the previously agreed split. This is how electronic content is usually sold.

Whew, I have not had to think about this stuff in a long time. I’ve been making medical journals these last six years. A different world, fraught with its own challenges, but without much interaction with Amazon.

Up until around 2005, Amazon was selling mostly physical books that got shipped to customers in the mail, using a wholesale model. You know who was selling a lot of electronic content at that time using an agency model? Did you guess Apple? It was Apple.

You know what happened in April 2010 right before the Macmillan “Buy” buttons were removed? Apple launched the iBooks platform.

Do you see the picture coming together? In April 2010, the big five publishers in the United States elected to switch from a wholesale model of bookselling, under which Amazon controlled the retail price of books, to an agency model of bookselling as promoted by Apple, under which the publishers would control the retail price of books and Amazon would receive a share of revenue.

Amazon lost their minds. Remember, just in time for Christmas three years earlier (November 2007) Amazon had launched this thing called The Kindle and sold it to a whole lot of people with the promise that e-books, in addition to being instantly available on the Kindle device, would be $9.99 or cheaper. Up until April 2010, under the wholesale model, publishers had been selling their books (including their e-books) to Amazon at the wholesale price and Amazon had been pricing those kindle books at $9.99 even if it meant they (Amazon) lost money on each sale.

Don’t ask me why Amazon would throw money away like that, like you don’t already know. Amazon was perfectly happy to lose money on every Kindle book sale for a few years while they drove all the other e-readers out of business so that one day, in this Year of Our Ford 2021, they would own the e-book market so completely that they can send any book they want right to the top of the bestseller list anytime they feel like it.

I do a lot of buying from Amazon, in part because I am a person who does not enjoy going to stores. I don’t like to touch things before I buy them. I don’t like to wander up and down the aisles of a bookstore and see what’s there, smell all the books, pick up each book and read the back cover copy to decide what I want.

I like books but I don’t enjoy bookstores. I said what I said.

But if you like bookstores, if you enjoy going into a store and doing all that garbage I said a second ago, then—I have been saying this for years and years—you better purchase your books at the store and not from Amazon, or those stores will cease to exist. Don’t go strolling around the bookstore to pick what you want and then buy it from Amazon on your phone. Not if you want the bookstore to be there next time you feel like walking around and smelling glue.

Yes the “book smell” is bindery glue, that’s why print-on-demand units smell different than offset printed units. When you inhale “book smell” you’re huffing glue.

That wasn’t really a fight I felt like I had to pick. I don’t like going to stores. When I want to go to “a bookstore” to browse, I go to the used bookshop. The one in Crofton, MD, in fact. It’s called ReReads, you should go. But if you want to fight for bookstores to exist, you have to shop at bookstores.

Imagine a world where the only place to buy books is Amazon. Now imagine that the only books being published are the ones that Amazon’s publishing employees choose. According to my very scientific calculation, the latter seems to be about eleven years after the former.

Hey, if you’re not busy next Wednesday, there’s still time to register for the inaugural meeting of Paper Cuts, a virtual writers’ group hosted by RE:Written. All experience levels are welcome. If you’ve been thinking about starting a writing project you should definitely come. 

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