A Few Sales Tricks Can Launch a Book To Top of Online Lists
From Carl Bialik’s article:
Amazon says little about how it calculates its rankings, though scholars and publishers have attempted to reverse-engineer the system to determine how a sales ranking translates into actual sales. One major quirk: Used and new book sales are counted equally. So an author anxious about his sales ranking could put a few dozen of his books for sale for a penny apiece and ask a friend to buy them all.
Source: Wall Street Journal (free, subscription NOT required)

See Also: Cheats beating Alexa rankings with Trojan, researchers believe (via TEXYT)
Thanks to PW for the news tip.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 and is filed under Information Industry, Search News, Technology and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.