You left out my favorite trick: politics! For example, say that you're running for President, and you want your campaign book to be a "top 10 list" best seller. Well, just have your campaign pre-order 4,000 or so copies of the book. That plus 1000 or so real sales will be enough to get you into the top 10 list, and at only about $55,000, it's practically a steal. Even better, the proceeds come right back to you because you're sure as heck not gonna give your campaign a discount.

I have a story about a well-known "best selling" author

Some years ago received a random package in the mail - turns out it was 40+ copies of this authors new book. Had no idea what to do with them so they just sat around, I never even read it

A few days later I notice some blogs running giveaways for the same book - figure they got deliveries of it as well. Go to a conference and in conversation find that a bunch of people also got the same package

I didn't put together until years later that this is all part of self-sales to boost best seller rankings.

Apparently if you know which book stores are surveyed by the NYTimes you can call them up and order a handful of copies of your own book and boost your own sales

It's no coincidence that this author heavily pitches themselves as a multiple-NYTimes best seller. It likely pays off because I have a good idea of what their appearance fee is and it's mid-5 figures+

This reminds me of the early 90's when Billboard's music sales charts switched from subjective reported to SoundScan (actual scanned sales).

That truth was the breakout tipping point for country music. It also makes you wonder how legit/truthful any charting previous to SoundScan actually was.

> As Amazon continues their vertical integration, it's not clear whether this problem will be addressed or not.

Amazon might make things a lot worse. The “recommended by amazon” windows 10 keys are mostly fake ripoffs at this point with pages of complaints in the reviews

Edit: added quote

Book sellers are rarely stuck with unsold inventory. They almost always have the ability to send unsold inventory (though not magazines) back to the publisher for full credit.

Amazon's bestseller ranking is famously gameable by having a flash mob order the item all on the same day

It seems like amazon has access to more real metrics like total kindle time per book.

But perhaps it doesn’t serve them to diverge from the bestseller model.

A friend used to work for an organization whose function was to buy books from NYT-reporting sellers for purposes of inflating the sales numbers of a given title, to manipulate it onto the bestseller list. They were usually paid by the publishers, but sometimes directly by the authors themselves.

This has been going on for a very long time.

EDIT: Phrasing.

I misread it the first time as one month (May->June) but it was May 2018 to June 2019(!).

Someone probably did, and the person they told didn't take it any farther. The chain broke somewhere.

For which security?

Seems unfair to dismiss it that way. Here is the decision, Blatty vs New York Times Company, decided December 29, 1986:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-supreme-court/1843273.html

The Times won on First Amendment (freedom of the press / speech) grounds. Blatty couldn't win, since the list would need to be "of and concerning" him:

> "To begin with, the list does not expressly refer to Blatty or his novel. Nor does he contend otherwise. Quite the contrary: the failure of Legion to appear on the list is the very basis of his action."

Perhaps most interesting for me is that the Times survey of bookstores included a pre-written list of the books they want sales numbers for:

> "To obtain sales figures from bookstores, [the Times] sent to the bookstores forms which [it] prepared; the forms for works of fiction contain and contained a printed list of 36 ‘bestselling’ books which has and had the effect of encouraging reports as to sales of books listed on the forms and discouraging reports as to sales of books not listed on the forms”

> Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of The New York Times Best-Seller List Desk editors based on standards for inclusion that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations.

So basically, they use editorial discretion when ranking bulk sales. Which means they are prone to exclude books they don’t like and include books they do like. Excluding some bulk sales but not others isn’t objective. Institutional and bulk sales should all be excluded from the counts.

Taking your question at face value, yes, and it’s true of every private news company. They are first and foremost entertainers, and even those who hold themselves out as agents of change require a large audience.

Read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" if you want to know what motivates media companies. (Spoiler: Advertisers first and foremost)

It applies to nearly every organization that's been advertising itself as news for easily the last 20+ years.

They are all - every last one of them - suddenly nothing but editorial opinion and entertainment as soon as they show up in a courtroom.

Not sure why the downvotes. If a news provider can’t promise to try to tell the truth in a legally binding way, but just claims to be editorializing, it’s no wonder there is so much public distrust of the news.

A lot of influential figures publish their reading lists, like Bill Gates [0], Elon Musk [1], and Patrick Collision [2]

[0]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-201...

[1]: https://medium.com/swlh/elon-musks-reading-list-every-book-h...

[2]: https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf

browse goodreads! go to local author talks! go to a local book club ran by someone well-read! totally agree with the above supporting long form review publications like the new york/ london/ paris review of books; they typically will write about a general topic whose sources are 1-3 books that are listed. If the long form piece peaks your interest you know exactly where to dig in for more information.

Best seller lists skew towards "branded" writers typically pushing (in my opinion) a diluted version of an existing thought that is re-marketed for our time. There is nothing new under the sun, so stick to the classics. Life is much too short to read mediocre books. (:

NLP text analysis by NNs to identify features that humans can't perceive but are shared across genres that are liked by the user.

(I'm only half joking - book discovery is a pain point in my life and I fantasize about this every time looking for a new read)

Browse a book store is the obvious answer.

But this makes sense, because a store will generally buy items that it thinks it can sell, so it'll come down to humans making choices about what's a good book. Of course, publishers will be pushing their latest items through their marketing chains, and so new books will make it to stores based on marketability to the store owner.

In the digital realm, this is less of an issue, and can accept more books, but makes the whole shopping experience very noisy imho.

However, I personally like to read those little recommendation cards that the shop assistants make. I've bought a few books outside my normal genre that way, and haven't been let down yet.

By sticking to the classics and letting time act as your filter.

Oddly enough, that's not been my problem for some sime now. Note that I largely read nonfiction....

1. Find a topic of interest.

2. Start reading at some arbitrary entry point, though generally favour texts with references.

3. Branch from there.

- Find the authors you most respect / who most make you think, and read their publications, and track down their sources and references, or where they're cited. Notes, footnotes, references, bibliographies, and citation indices are gold.

- Find the topics, questions, ideas, methods within the topic that you're most interested in and drill down on those.

- If you find yourself needing new skills in the course of explorations, pick up on those.

- Don't hesitate to ask for recommendations.

- If there's a concept that seems unclear, chase that down to its origins, and trace variants as the concept evolves

- Incidental histories and biographies can often provide further illumination.

- Eventually you should start constructing your ow structure or modle of the field or space (or subsets / components of it/them). This can further drive your exploration.

I think the key is looking for longevity. A book at the top of a bestseller list for a week is a mere blip. Books start catching my attention when I seem them out there for about 3 months- its not some flash in the pan or selling just because the author previously wrote a good book. Around 6 months, you start getting stuff that is almost certainly going to at least be entertaining. If something has been on the list a year or more, this is likely going to be a thought provoking book and something highly enjoyable. This scale has never really let me down- except maybe in the case of The Alchemist. That was such a miss and the language just so... vapid... that I actually downloaded a copy off the internet just to see if I got a bootleg mistranslated version or something. I read tons of books, 99/100+ times a book on the NYTimes Bestseller list for more than 6 months has been worth its time to read.

Despite the obvious conflict of interest, you can get pretty far by talking to bookshop staff. They’re around the books all day, so it’s pretty much inevitable they’ll leaf through them and form their own opinions.

Read quality book reviews. I would especially recommend the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, but there are dozens of long-form journals of this kind.

Most newspapers also have book review sections, as do many academic journals.

Presumably if you're interested in someone or something, you can also simply peruse the internet to see what's out there, i.e. you can start with your interests rather than with what's popular or well-advertised.

I find Goodreads recommendations pretty good, which are presumably based on a souped-up version of "people who liked $YOUR_LAST_BOOK also liked X".

If it's on a bestseller list, it's already discovered. It's also going to be pushed by every book retailer.