I've always contended that there are a number of people gaming the KDP system.
Today I'll offer evidence of it.
You can make yourself look very good if
you have a few hundred, or even a few thousand bucks, to spare by going to the
store and buying "gift" credit cards and then use them to buy your own books
after lowing the price to 99 cents (or free) and then leave yourself reviews
with a credit card that isn't linked to your real name. You can register a gift
card under any fake name, phone #, and address you like. Then Amazon has no way
of knowing who you really are, and they'll accept your reviews of your own
books. Kid's stuff-101, right?
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
The vast majority
of mainstream authors will sell about as many print books as they do Kindle
books. Providing the Kindle and print editions come out around the same time,
their sales rankings will be pretty close. Hardback sales usually take a
nosedive after the print/kindle edtions come out, so you generally can't count
those. However, sometimes the Kindle edition will come out while the hardback is
still selling well and there isn't yet a paperback edition, or if there is one,
it's something like a large print edition or a mass produced edition if it's a
classic, and those don't sell very good. In that case, the Kindle and hardback
editions may rank very close in sales. A good example is Bill O'Reilly's Killing
Lincoln. The only paperback edition of that book is a large print edition, so it
doesn't sell well at all. But look how close the hardback and Kindle eidtions
are in sales ranking:
Hardback - 60 # ranking
Kindle -
174
Here's an example of someone I won't name, but it's a self-published
author who sells extremely well through Kindle books, but look at their
Createspace paperback sales ranking of the same book which has been out for a
couple of years now:
Paperback - 1,365,020
Kindle - 1,352
Now
let's look at a book by a good traditional author. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
is on the best seller's list again because of the new movie coming
out.
Paperback - 17
Kindle - 144
Lady Almina and the Real
Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle by the The Countess Of
Carnarvon is big because of the PBS Downtown Abbey series:
Paperback -
38
Kindle - 461
If someone self-published uses KDP (Kindle books)
& Createspace (or Lulu) and has their book(s) available in both Kindle and
print editions, and they're a big seller, then their sales rankings should run
close to the same in both Kindle and print since the buying public purchases
about as many Kindle books as print books right now. (Actually, paperback sales
are generally still a bit higher.) If you see a large descrepency, between the
two, you can bet it's probably somebody gaming the system. After all, it's cheap
for someone with a good job to spend a thousand dollars on gift cards in order
to produce sales and phoney reviews by just lowering the price on their Kindle
books now and then use gift cards to spend a dollar on each in order to make a
few purchases and leave reviews, and then raise the price back up the next
morning. But how do they do the same with print books without loosing their
shirts? They can't. The Kindle books didn't cost them anything to make or sell.
But they can't lower the price of print books below a threshhold that covers all
the costs of it, and that isn't cheap, so gaming the system with print books is
very difficult unless you're very rich.
The gist of things is this: If
Kindle sales rankings are very high, and print sales rankings are very low,
there's reason for concern.
