Does B&N Manipulate its Rankings?
From Hugh Howey:
A bold question, but it isn’t the first I’ve heard of this happening. Several erotica and romance authors on KBoards have complained that their ranking on the Nook bestseller list does not reflect their actual sales. The most recent victim is Maya Cross. Maya reported on KBoards that her new release LOCKOUT was sitting at #5 in the Nook store. Her first book, LOCKED, soon began to shoot up the lists. But when it hit #126, it stopped. It didn’t go any higher. Even though it was selling very well.
This was only mildly suspicious until she woke up the next morning to find the former #5 bestseller, LOCKOUT, sitting at #126. LOCKED, meanwhile, had dropped to #127. The two books sat side by side, pinned, selling more than the ranking would indicate. And poor Maya watched as her sales gradually diminished due to the lower visibility.
. . . .
It turns out that two other authors have experienced the same thing and with the same number! Gail McHugh saw her book rise to #126 and go no higher. It appears that any flagged book, whether due to racy cover or racy content, is given a hard ceiling. Couple this with allegations that erotica books have been deleted from NOOK UK with no explanation and no recourse. Folks, this ain’t right.
. . . .
First, it’s bad for the customer. Is it a wonder that B&N is flailing when it refuses to serve the needs and tastes of its customers? Readers coming to their storefront should know what’s selling the best, as that’s a reflection of what they might want to check out. Otherwise, why have a bestseller list at all?
Link to the rest at Hugh Howey
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases. 
If this is true, it’s just another example of how little respect the Traditional Publishing establishment has for writers.
Also, if they really are manipulating rankings, who’s to say that they’re not also manipulating sales data?
Rank manipulation is scary stuff and I think that it borders on fraud.
Well, if they’re manipulating rankings, they are manipulating sales because a good chunk of sales are made by people browsing the bestsellers list. As one of the authors affected by this, yes, it is scary.
Agreed completely.
It’s B&N’s business and they can set any rules they like.
Those rules however, should be readily available to any publisher contemplating using B&N’s distribution. The publisher needs to make an informed decision whether B&N’s genre preferences will work to their benefit, or not, before signing up.
Does anyone know what the fine print says in this case?
If this is true, B&N are presumably treating the web store like a physical book store, and selling the ‘front table’ spots to publishers. Which could explain why Amazon is spanking their ass by offering customers what they want rather than what the publishers think they should want.
Good point. Except those store tables aren’t labeled: “This is what’s selling the best.”
I think transparency is the first issue they need to address, just as Tina pointed out. And I think readers, who are generally fond of authors, might be outraged that their tastes aren’t being counted in the tally and that the authors they enjoy are having their earnings dampened by an internal judgment call. The expectation is that these lists are a reflection of our purchasing patterns. I don’t think anyone in the bookstore is fooled into thinking they have a hand in what appears there.
Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. Doesn’t feel right, though.
We’ve read about the placement for the indie titles in questions but what do the top positions look like at the time? Are indies bumped down while trad titles are pushed higher? Not trying to be incendiary with this questions but rather find a cause; preferential placement for the the higher priced BPH title vs. the lower priced indie means a bigger cut for B&N?
Agree that B&N is free to do as they wish with their site but they need to look at those uploading with them as either partner-vendors or, at the least, as a secondary customer. In either case they should have a higher regard for writer’s giving them product to sell. With so many reasons to go exclusive with Amazon they should be doing more, not less.
It’s just one more indicator of why they’re in a failing position.
Oh, I agree, if they really are selling slots on the sales rankings, or even just flagging indie books so they can’t get into the top 100, then they should rename the list to something else.
But in my naive days before I began writing seriously, I thought the books on the front tables were the best selling books, and not put there because someone had paid for it to try to make them the best selling books.
Right. If they had a “featured books” section at the top that showed books publishers had paid to promote, I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
Fake sales rankings are another matter entirely.
Please understand that Amazon hides and suppresses content just as much as BN does. It’s also a current news story, but BN has trumped Amazon today in the news by holding a 21st century book burning. They’ve deleted large swaths of their romance catalog in an effort to ‘purify’ their UK site while still selling Fifty Shades of Grey.
It’s also easier to pin point BN’s suppression of books. The mechanics aren’t hidden well. Amazon is tougher to explain as the suppression is more subtle, yet just as damaging to authors.
M
No they can’t do anything they want. There are laws in place to protect consumers for false advertising and misleading business practices.
And if the law can’t be invoked, consumer outrage is certainly an incentive that has influenced business practices many times.
M
I’m one of the authors currently affected by this. I agree that it’s B&N’s storefront, and so theoretically they can do what they want, but there’s several issues with the situation now.
Transparency: They outright deny that this is happening. Liliana Hart, who is one of the biggest names in indie romance, asked some very high up people in B&N about this, and their response was that it was a ‘glitch’.
Consistency: There’s no rules for what can and can’t break through the magical wall. Fifty Shades of Grey is plastered all over their front page, so in theory, it shouldn’t be a content thing. And while some fairly tame self pubbed romance books are being pinned right now (see Cassia Leo’s Shattered Hearts books, which are right around mine on the B&N store: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s?dref=2207&fmt=ebook&size=30&sort=SA&startat=121&store=ebook&view=grid) others are allowed to climb to #1 and stay there (HM Ward’s Damaged held the top spot on B&N for a while, and it’s self pubbed.) Hell, right now there are multiple self published titled in the top 100, some of which are erotic.
Labelling: When people see a ‘best seller’ chart, they expect to see the books that are selling best. Not a pre-approved list of titles that may or may not be at the top in terms of sales figures.
What this currently amounts to is arbitrary decisions that are seriously impacting both the legitimacy of their ‘best seller’ charts and the bottom lines of their authors.
I agree with you, Donald. Rank manipulation is fraud because it causes a huge financial loss for the author. Think $50 to $100k in lost sales. I also believe the way these best seller lists are presented to consumers is false advertising and intended to purposely mislead readers.
Also Amazon’s business practices are just as egregious. I’ve posted some comments on Hugh’s post elaborating on the topic. Amazon removes entire sections of its book offerings from search. They bury books and hide them from consumers. Traditionally published books, however, are almost untouched. Isn’t it interesting that the margins are likely higher on those?
Indies are OUT on major bookseller sites. High margin traditionally published books are IN.
M
First, I totally love the investigative reporting aspect to this – indies absolutely need to protect themselves and gather together to protest any discrimination.
Yay! Go Indies, and go Hugh for advocating!
However, I absolutely don’t want, in any way, to throw cold water on this, but I’m feeling alittle nervous, and I’ve never felt that before in all the indie advocacy I’ve seen and done, so I think I’d better speak out.
Hugh, you’re a public figure now, and I would be careful here. You don’t want to get slapped with a suit for slander or libel or whatever. I could be worrying needlessly, and PG or other lawyers here would know better than I, but I would be sure to phrase everything tentatively. Like: “might be happening” and “needs further investigation”.
Most of us can say what we want without fear, it would be bizarre and immediately ridiculed if a corporation went after a random commentor on a blog, but you’re well known Hugh, so I’d be alittle careful.
I’m not, on any level saying ‘stop’, because I think what you are doing is terrific. Just be careful to use the term: “alleged”.
And please don’t shoot the messenger here. First, I could be wrong, and second my intentions are pristine.
You know, it would be the first call I ever got returned from someone at B&N. Might not be a bad thing!
(Seriously, though, I hear you. Thanks for the warning).
“Indies are OUT on major bookseller sites. High margin traditionally published books are IN.”
I don’t pretend to understand half of the things that Barnes & Noble does, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their behavior is being influenced by the relationship they have with Legacy Publishing via their physical stores.
However, Amazon is a different story. If Amazon is engaging in similar behavior it’s because the powers that be believe that it will bring them more profit.
I stopped expecting to be treated fairly long ago. People, and companies, will often act in their best interests, regardless of how fair that is to others.
The author of this piece has a pre-order page on Amazon at this very moment, something that very few Indies are privledged to have.
Is that unfair? No! It’s just good business. Amazon knows that Mr. Howey’s newest offering is eagerly awaited by many (myself included) and have made his book available for pre-order.
What I do find unfair is a bestseller list that is subjected to the whims of corporate policy, and I would bet that many readers would feel the same way.
What’s next? Money for Rankings? $50,000 for the top spot, $40,000 for #2 etc, etc,
Rank manipulation is not fraud because it damages an author. The author is not paying for anything. The customer is.
Selling spots in an “Editor’s Picks” promotion seems just as deceptive, but I’m pretty sure both Amazon and B&N do this, and always have. Indies just don’t have access to it. I think it’s naive to think that the major retailers don’t sell promo spots in this way. That Amazon doesn’t sell bestseller spots isn’t some sort of indie right, it’s just smart on Amazon’s part.
B&N is free to to define “bestseller” however they want. The name itself implies a measurement over time, and there are any number of measurements to choose from.
All that said? From what we’ve seen from B&N and the Nook store, I’d think “incompetence” is a much better bet than “intentional manipulation.” Although if someone were going in and manually changing ranks using wildly inconsistent criteria, that might fall under incompetence? Either way, B&N is not a reliable business partner. But this isn’t news, right? There’s been a B&N deathwatch since forever.
“There’s been a B&N deathwatch since forever.”
I’ve got October 10th, in the pool.
Are we naming the date they actualy close doors or the date they announce their going-out-of-business sale?
Thanks, Susan, now we need TWO pools!
The announcement date, and just to be fair, I’m also running one on Amazon. I’ve got October 10th, in that one too. October 10th, 2289
And only because by then we will all be assimilated into the Amaborg.
Shhh, the Amaborg Project is still a secret.
That’s where Bezos is investing all of Amazon’s “non-existent” profits. He plays a looonnnngggg game.
Put me down for B&N’s announcement on January 6, 2014.
(And I won’t tell anyone about the Amaborg Project.)
It’s a deal, Seven of Nine. Oops! I mean, uh, It’s a deal, Suzan.
Agreed. They’ll give it another Christmas season, which they’ll bungle, and then close.
Opaque rank manipulation is icky, but this situation brings up a good question.
If I’m going to Barnes and Noble to buy a picture book for my grandson and all the covers I see plastered across the home page are for erotic novels, I’m going to be pretty turned off and maybe go shop elsewhere.
I’m assuming B&N’s motive behind this alleged manipulation is to present a certain level of social decorum on their front page. If that’s the case, and if their real sales data would show the top fifty spots filled with erotica, what are they supposed to do? Should they just not list bestsellers on the front page at all?
I’m honestly asking. I can’t think of a great solution to this off the top of my head.
If the fifty top spots would be filled with erotica, based on sales, then those books ARE the best sellers and should be on the front page, if that’s where the “best seller” list lives.
Smashwords, to name but one, has a filter you can invoke to prevent erotica titles (adult content titles, actually) from showing up. B&N might have the resources to do the same if they want to dig into their pockets a bit.
In other news, if anyone says amazon does the same thing expect 50 posts immediately defending amazon for ‘preserving its superior user experience.’
Ah, accusation by hypotheticals. ‘You’re another’ is not only a logical fallacy, but a childish argument. ‘You WOULD be another if you ever got the chance’ is not only a logical fallacy and a childish argument, but a flat-out lie, since it presents a judgement about your opponent’s character without any evidence.
Not well done.
I can live with that.
I’ve never heard anyone here leap to defend Amazon based on it’s user experience. I think your point is that indie writers worship at the altar of Amazon, but that’s irrelevant in a discussion about whether B&N is doing something wrong.
Wait, are you a B&N fanboy leaping to defend it?
Nope.
Hugh, thanks for bringing this to light.
The number ’126′ is very suspicious. If you are browsing all books based on popularity, a format displaying 25 titles at a time would prevent a ‘fixed at 126′ book from ever appearing on the first 5 pages. (It would be the first book listed on the 6th page.) That would prevent the vast majority of people browsing the rankings from ever seeing it. So, a suspicious number.
Right now, under the ‘Books’ menu, the ‘Top 100′ link is the first option. I checked that out and it was displaying 20 titles at a time, not 25. That number will vary over time, though, and might vary depending of device and browser (viewing it with a Nook versus me viewing it through Firefox).
B&N has every right to say “Keep your smutty books off of our site!” but not to say that, push 50 Shades, and secretly limit others. And by the way, legality aside, fixing your popularity lists is dishonest. You don’t want a lying business partner, right?
I was talking to an author earlier, who I shall leave nameless for now, and she raised another interesting point. She now realises she is stuck behind the wall at B&N too, and she thinks that might be part of the reason she didn’t hit the NYT best seller list with her latest release (which was in the top 10 overall on Amazon).
Now, obviously we can’t know anything for sure, and I’m not certain how places like the Times aggregate sales, but if they use sales rank as an indicator, then this is an even bigger thorn in our sides, because it makes it much harder to get that important recognition.
Yeah, this is troublesome, and that author (and authors like “her” – I’m assuming the pen name is female) have every reason to be seriously pissed off. But the NYT has never, ever been fair about their lists. Ever. And I don’t know that I would start expecting them to be now.
As far as erotica covers…the first 50 shades book has a tie on it. Several erotica books now have a benign image on the front.
I don’t doubt that this might very well be happening. As a matter of fact I am sure that B&N is doing something to deal with the problem of erotica dominating the front page. (And since B&N caused the problem of pre-planned best sellers in the first place, I wouldn’t be at all suspicious that they are selling slots.)
I think, though, that this is a part of the paradigm shift. Best-seller lists — especially when not broken down by genre — are really a legacy tool.
In the old model, where you kept things scarce and limited the reader’s selection, the goal was to get the largest group of people to buy the same book as possible. To do that, you had to offer books that few people really truly loved and cherished. You had to go for the lowest common denominator. And also it helped to suppress books which small parts of the big audience would truly love — because those turn off other parts of the audience….
And right here we see an illustration of why best seller lists are bad; Erotica was pushing all the other books off the list. So one audience was being served by the best seller list, and others were not. And that’s the same problem we’ve had with best seller lists for years — manipulated or not, the existence of the list caused other books to be neglected.
Erotica has an extra problem of having covers and titles which offend, and also turns off large enough portions of the audience — so that paging through too much of it causes people to leave the site in frustration. (Ironically, it is much like religious fiction in that people who aren’t interested in it are completely uninterested in it, and so combing through a long list of it is a waste of their time.)
But the problem here, imho, isn’t that erotica, or indies, are taking over best seller lists and then being kicked off them. The problem is that erotica and indies are illustrating to the Powers That Be the actual problem with their own bad tool:
Generic best seller lists are not the ideal front page tool of the new era.
And yeah, those erotica and indie authors who can benefit from this bad tool should get the opportunity to benefit as long as they can. Ultimately, the solution is not to simply ban them from the list, but to deemphasize that generic list altogether. Break it up, start serving the niches better.
It’s not just erotica though Camille. On Hugh Howey’s blog, another author named Blake Crouch replied that he’d hit this magical wall as well, and he’s a self published dark thriller/horror writer. The policy is inconsistent and seemingly without reason.
My covers are extremely tasteful, my titles are not suggestive at all, and the content is tamer than Fifty Shades. Cassia Leo’s books, which are filtered right now with mine, have almost no erotic content at all. They’re new adult romances.
Also, if they are concerned about books with erotic content, why is Fifty Shades literally the first thing you see when you open the nook site? There are multiple areas on various Nook landing pages that are dedicated entirely to Fifty Shades.
There is no consistency here. And their lack of communication about this isn’t acceptable.
Frankly it does sound like either a glitch or a filter applied to books pubbed through the PubIt or NookPress portal. If it’s intentional, maybe it only sweeps through the top 100 every few days or whatever, accounting for the few that get through and then plummet. Or, alternatively, if a glitch, it’s a process tied to something that runs only intermittently – alsobot recrunches or something.
It does not sound erotica or romance exclusive. It also doesn’t sound particularly…competent. Either way. And addressing whatever it is seems like it would probably require more than B&N can muster at the moment.
€¥£%#, someone buy Nook.
I’ve been told by someone that it’s a manual process that gets applied to specific books (I’m waiting to get more info on this). It can’t be an automatic pass that runs over the top 100, since when Lockout was shunted from #5 to #126, other self published books with explicit content were left in the top 100. They’re still there now.
Like I said, there’s absolutely no consistency to the policy. If they want to make rules like that, that’s their prerogative, but they owe it to the people who are paying them and the people providing them content to be clear about what that entails.
I think you missed the point, Maya:
I was pointing out that this is a much larger problem that makes all of these concerns moot. Erotica (and indies, as I said) gets the attention for something being wrong — but what’s wrong is the bestseller system itself.
It’s going to collapse along with the rest of the old paradigm. (I mean, it will still be there, just as there are still buggy whip manufacturers, but it won’t mean what it has at all.)
I can still see it being a useful metric in certain situations, but fundamentally I agree with you. The challenge is finding more efficient ways to display books to consumers that may be of interest to them.
But in the mean time, this is still affecting us deeply and amounts to discrimination (as already discussed, it’s arguably legal discrimination, but that’s beside the point). I’m not done with this issue. It’s affecting so many more authors than I initially thought, most of whom don’t even realise.
Not saying you shouldn’t fight.
I’m just pointing out that if you’re on a sinking ship, the struggle to be allowed into first class may not be the best use of energy.
As a matter of fact, there weren’t enough life boats on the Titanic, and guess how they selected the survivors?
Right, but right now, the folks here are fighting to stay on the boat. Because the first class lounge is full of goodies!
And the Titanic is not an apt metaphor here because in this case, the first class passengers are successfully fighting to stay on the boat too.
Is it possible they are taking the top couple of books from each genre and creating a single larger bestseller list? In that case, only so many romance, horror, thriller, historical, and other books would be allowed on the list at any one time so some bestselling books would be held down off that main list.
I don’t know if anyone’s doing that, but I think that’s a very valid way to create a master list that allows the most variety to appear.
This is fascinating all around. If (when!) I get to #126, I’ll look closely at what happens next.
The erotica question (and I understand this isn’t limited to that) is interesting–does anyone really know what percentage of powerful sellers are erotica now? Or where they would be on some fictional “pure” bestseller list?
My thought on the anomalous treatment of Fifty Shades et alia is that this series has become immune to scandal. We’ve all seen those covers with the tie, etc., so many times they don’t even register as erotica. They are just mentally shelved as some of those “big popular books” that, I’ve heard, constituted one in five books sold last year. I think what would be really surprising is the ABSENCE of Fifty Shades on a list.
P.S. Call me naive. I really thought those stacks of New Fiction on the tables at the front were the books we vaulted onto the table by buying them. Sigh. I’m so gullible. I’m going to go find myself a hot 29-year-old billionaire and fall into his arms.
How transparent is the NYT Best Seller List?
Guys, I’m sorry to throw cold water on this, but B&N has always manipulated its bestseller list. When you go into the store & you see #1 bestseller from B&N, a traditional publisher paid cash money to put that book in that position. It wouldn’t surprise me if B&N weights traditionally published books differently in its algorithm for e-books and won’t allow an indie published title to go higher than 126–which is below 125, which is about where most readers quit looking for something, according to statistical analysis.
Remember, B&N is very tied to the traditional publishing industry, and makes a great deal of its money on licensing upfront spots in the stores, paid advertising, placement and so on. The bestseller list is advertising, and I’m sure the publishers who pay B&N for placement get preferential treatment. It’s part of B&N’s business model.
I hope you guys can change it with this campaign, but I doubt it. The NYT, by the way, is also a skewed list and always had been. The only print list that isn’t skewed that I know of is USA Today, and honestly, I haven’t researched that in about 3 years.
I wonder: if some writer with a track record and a lot of money pays B&N to do product placement for that writer’s next self-published novel in an “accepted” genre (not erotica, for example), and that author organizes readers to buy the book on Nook in the space of one week, would we see that book go higher than 126 on the bestseller list? That’s the experiment which will tell if this is actual prejudice against self-published titles or if it’s all tied to the corporate bottom line.
Just sayin’
One of my favorite games is trying to figure out how stuff like this gets implemented (yeah, that says something a bit disturbing about me, but there it is). With the caveat that the information we have could be incorrect and is certainly incomplete, I started thinking about what sort of requirements could have been given to the development team to result in the observed behavior.
Requirement: I want a system that allows me to “tag” certain books to ensure that tagged books never appear in the top 125 in the general bestseller list.
As a developer, I would build two separate pieces to this system. One is the system that allows authorized users to tag books, setting a flag in the storage system (probably a database, but not necessarily).
The other piece is a change to the calculation of the list. I start with the unmodified list. I create two smaller empty lists, an untagged list and a tagged list. Starting at the number 1 bestseller, I take each title and put it into either the tagged or untagged list. When the untagged list reaches 125, I start creating the new bestseller list. The top 125 untagged list becomes the top 125 on the modified list. I then insert the tagged list I have collected in the next set of spots on the modified list. Finally, I bring over all the rest of the titles in their current order. By this point, I don’t really care whether or not a title is tagged.
I believe that this scenario explains all the observed facts.
Here’s a question:
What is the mix of books in the #126-#252 slots?
I heard a lot of claims that before this happened that the best seller list was “dominated” by erotica and indies.
If those titles are now being blocked from the top of the list, then it is most likely to happen the way William describes.
That would mean the titles at the top of the list would be indie and erotica free, but the very next section down would be an unbroken list made up entirely of erotica and indie books. Has anybody looked to see if this is so?
And I just checked and there are indies in the first couple of pages, and there is no cluster of indies or erotica further down….
New theory: they aren’t punishing indies or erotica or “blocking” them. They’re either doing nothing and this is luck, OR… they are taking co-op money to push certain books up higher on the ladder, which is displacing the books that were already there (regardless of what those books are).
This really fits the B&N mindset, and it would be incredibly easy to do. Just flag the books you want to promote, and have their sales worth more than other books. (Or any of a dozen other ways.)
It makes much more sense than flagging the indies, which will keep coming and coming at them.
There is a small cluster of books around #125 that hasn’t moved for days. The reason it’s just a small group is, these are the flagged indie titles that SHOULD be above #125, but aren’t. There’s not going to be more than 5-10 of them at any one time, so that’s the amount that back up against the wall. It’s not that every flagged title instantly goes to #125, it’s that every flagged title can’t progress any higher.
It’s too big of a coincidence the number of people that have reported hitting EXACTLY #126. If B&N was weighting things, there would still be some variation in the spot where indie authors found themselves slowing down.
Also, there are still indie books, including some erotica, in the top 100, but if your displacement suggestion was accurate, they’d have been pushed down when my book went from #5 to #126.
B&Ns lists often have all sections that remain static, and then move wildly. It isn’t just around #126.
Also, when I say “cluster” I mean an UNBROKEN cluster — what you describe as happening would cause an unbroken knot of books which have been moved. All of the flagged books from above that point would appear together. That isn’t happening for anything but free books. (However, the combo of print and Nook books could cause some oddities here.)
Finally, B&Ns default page length for the main bestseller list is 30 books, not 25. So #126 really isn’t a magic number that proves anything. It’s more one of those things that we invest meaning into because we’re looking for meaning.
Look, I agree that B&N is undoubtedly manipulating numbers. They always have. There is NO REASON for them to go to such extreme efforts to hurt any particular set of books though. (To get the results we’re seeing, it would have to be a more complex effort than people have mentioned here.)
They can much much much more easily accomplish want by advantaging the books they want to succeed. It not only fits the evidence better, it’s what they have always done.
The #126 hasn’t just come from me. Other authors have reported that EXACT number from weeks or months ago from before I even noticed this.
I really think it’s pretty simple and makes perfect sense. Let me try one more time. This is the way my info indicates that it works:
Books get flagged. There is a wall after #125 that is designated as being reserved for these books. Say there are 7 flagged books that should be in the top 125. These books will be held back to occupy the spots 126-132, while the next 7 books slip into their ranks. Every other book in the store will be bumped down 7 places to accommodate, including every other flagged book that isn’t currently over the required ranking.
The order of these 7 books will be based on what rank they should have. So if the real ranks of these books are #10, #20, #30 etc., that’s the order they will be displayed in. If those ranks change, they will switch places. So the order of that pocket of books can change. Once their real rank drops below #125 though, then they join the bigger pool again.
Let’s look at the current examples. Look at what occupies #126 right now. Sandman, by Morgan Hannah MacDonald. That book is screaming up the charts on Amazon at the moment. It’s currently on sale for $0.99. Yet it’s been at #126 the entire day. Want to bet it won’t go any higher?
Look at #127. Tangled. That book was in the top 10 on the whole of Amazon a day or two ago. It’s getting rave reviews everywhere. Want to know the rank it was stuck at during that time? #126.
Eventually, coincidences become too unlikely.
We don’t know that this is just happening to indies. It could be happening to legacy published books as well. We almost certainly would not hear about it if it was.
One of the reasons that I think the observed results are the effects of a manual intervention is that there is no obvious cluster of a certain type of book starting at the 126th spot. There are also some indie books in the top 125 and some erotica in the top 125.
Some titles top out at 126 and others take a big plunge to 126. That suggests that the cause is external to the normal system, unlike the free books starting at 1001. It makes me wonder what factors draw the attention of my presumed “tagger”.
Money was spent on achieving this effect. It seems to require active participation. How does B&N profit from this type of system? If my evil twin were running B&N and he had this system, he would be selling “Knock a rival off the charts” opportunities. And a running a protection racket for publishers (pay a fee to ensure no one can knock off your titles). But I do not have an evil twin, so I do not want to speculate.
They have been doing this with free for a long time. Free books are automatically given an extra 1000 points in rank and have been for a long time. They don’t split the lists into paid and free, which is part of the problem. Paging through 14 pages (at 90 a page) of the bestseller list, you reach the first free book–ranking: 1001.
If this is true, then when you see the first FREE book, there should be a cluster of freebies at that point.
There is such a cluster. (However, I don’t see any such cluster of non-Free indies.)
It’s not obvious if you just look at the main fiction best seller list (and not at a Nook-only list, which I don’t know if there is one). The main list combines all formats to decide where to place the book on the pages – even though if you click on the different formats, each one will have a different ranking. (For instance, Patterson’s free book is listed as being in the 3000s as a Nook freebie, but the paper version is in the 600s so it appears much higher on the list than Nook books in the 1000s.)
This practice also favors books from the big publishers, because they sell a lot more paper books than indies do.
Is there any recourse for this?
I would think that lying about best-selling books is fraud.
It damages the author’s reputation and using the phrase “best selling” says to browsers that this is a factual list, not a “curated” (manipulated) list.
B&N absolutely has the right to sell prominent placement, to sell placement on “hot” and “popular” and “trending” lists and all that…but to lie and say that some books are “best-selling” (factual statement” when they are not and to deny some books entry to that list when they are empirically selling better than the books on the best-seller list…
That is lying and fraud. It damages authors but it also actively deceives customers…There has to be some way to address this. If no other way, to ensure that the major media gets ahold of this and gives B&N a ton of bad publicity for lying to all of its customers.
Agreed. I tried to shed light on their similar attitude toward books in their stores. My book was a NYT bestseller, and they refused to carry it because they are trying to get Simon & Schuster to pay more millions for co-op space. A lot of authors have been affected by this. I think if readers knew, they might take their business elsewhere. It’s amazing to me that this isn’t covered in the Arts or Business sections of major papers.
“I think if readers knew, they might take their business elsewhere.”
They already are. Every time I’ve been in a B&N in the last few years, it’s been a dead zone, even in stores (and at times) that used to be packed.
I’ve also noticed fewer books and more “gifts” on each visit. It almost makes you think that upper management doesn’t really want to be in the book business any more.
Major newspapers have bestseller lists. That are manipulated. I got contacted by a reporter for a major unnamed daily two months ago who wanted to know about bestseller lists. I told her all I knew; how they could be manipulated, which ones could be bought, which ones were known to be reliable. After doing two weeks of work, she brought this story to her editorial committee. Then she e-mailed me the link of the story that did run, *not* under her byline. It was a generic piece about the way that some bestseller lists–like those in retail stores–are purchased. No mention of newspaper lists, no mention of all the stuff that I told her, that was on record from as long ago as the 1990s, nothing about how those paper lists were unreliable and the effect that had on writers’ careers. Was I pissed? No. I’ve run into this before. (I’m a former journalist. For-proft publications/media are slaves to their advertisers.) But she had worked hard on this story, knew something was there, and was furious she couldn’t pursue it.
Reporters are trying, but their papers/media conglomerates are complicit.
Bloggers are the only way to get this out, but folks, you have to acknowledge that this bad practice isn’t limited to B&N. It happens in many, many, many venues. If you don’t acknowledge that, the publishing industry and the people you’re trying to influence will dismiss you as naive.
Great points. And sad also. The more I read the more I understand why so many bestselling books were… Well why I had such a hard time believing they were that popular. Knowing that many of the lists are bought gives me faith in readers again. Because maybe it wasn’t the readers that made the book a bestseller but good old greenbacks and then the poor mislead readers bought the book convinced it had to be good and so they find it good because they don’t want to have spent that much money and to be “on the wrong side of the in crowd”.
Thanks for bringing sanity to the crazy world of book publishing. Have you written blog post on this topic that someone could use as jumping off points?