3 SURE WAYS TO HAVE YOUR NOVEL BECOME A BESTSELLER

 

{The Audio Book of Hibbs' tales is coming}

 

WAY ONE:

Be endorsed by Oprah Winfrey.

WAY TWO:

Get a film deal with JJ Abrams.

WAY THREE:

Debut at the top of THE NEW YORK TIMES Bestsellers List.

Now, ONE and TWO are in the hands of the Great Mystery, and He gets His Name honestly, so there is no telling there.

WAY THREE is another matter:

All you need is to write a big enough check.  We're talking about BIG here --

Selling the kidneys of your whole family BIG.

ResultSource, a San Diego-based marketing consultancy, specializes in getting books onto bestseller lists, according to The Wall Street Journal.

For clients willing to pay enough, it will even guarantee a No. 1 spot.

HOW?

It does this by taking bulk sales and breaking them up into more organic-looking individual purchases, defeating safeguards that are supposed to make it impossible to “buy” bestseller status.

And it’s not cheap.

Soren Kaplan, a business consultant and speaker,

hired ResultSource to promote his book “Leapfrogging.”

Responding to the WSJ article on his website,

Kaplan breaks out the economics of making the list.

"With a $27.95 list price, I was told that the cost of each book would total about $23.50 after various retail discounts and including $3.99 for tax, handling and shipping. 

 

To ensure a spot on The Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list, I needed to obtain commitments from my clients for a minimum of 3000 books at about $23.50, a total of about $70,500. I would need to multiply these numbers by a factor of about three to hit The New York Times list.

 

So it would’ve cost more than $211,000, and that’s before ResultSource’s fee, which is typically more than $20,000."

Not too surprisingly, Kaplan settled for making it on THE WALL STREET JOURNAL's bestsellers list!

Amazon disapproves strongly enough of ResultSource’s methods that it told WSJ it will no longer do business with the company.

So what do you think?  Have $211,000 to invest in getting on THE NEW YORK TIMES Bestsellers List?