Mom Confessions

"Late last month the release of Donald Trump Jr’s book “Triggered” led to some embarrassment for the president’s son when it was revealed that it’s inclusion as #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list involved suspicious “bulk purchases.”

The New York Times tracks this sort of behavior and puts a “dagger” symbol alongside any book it believes used institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, rather than earning a spot on the list the usual way: people going into stores and buying copies of the book."

... 'In just the past year: Jeanine Pirro’s “Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge,” Mark Levin’s “Unfreedom of the Press,” Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino’s Brett Kavanaugh profile “Justice on Trial,” Ben Shapiro’s “The Right Side of History,” Fox & Friends meteorologist Janice Dean’s “Mostly Sunny,” Cory Lewandowsky’s “Trump’s Enemies,” Jason Chaffetz’s “The Deep State,” Glenn Beck’s “Addicted to Outrage,” Dinesh D’Souza’s “Death of a Nation,” Howard Schultz’s “From the Ground Up,” former NRA TV pundit Dan Bongino’s “Exonerated,” and Fox News Contributor Andrew McCarthy’s “Ball of Collusion, have all received the dagger."

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house ... bestseller

The label of “best seller” is misleading anyway. Publisher houses choose the “best sellers” based on current trends and the author’s popularity even before books hit the stores. It’s a cycle, they announce it as a best seller, which means more publicity, which means more people will buy it, which means it will end up actually being a best seller.

Momto2boys973 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 15, 2019 8:39 pm The label of “best seller” is misleading anyway. Publisher houses choose the “best sellers” based on current trends and the author’s popularity even before books hit the stores. It’s a cycle, they announce it as a best seller, which means more publicity, which means more people will buy it, which means it will end up actually being a best seller.

True. I worked on a editing job about 15 years ago, editing a friend's first novel. Honestly, it was terrible. I suggested scrapping almost the whole thing and re-formatting. The characters were never developed and it was so trite. She self-published on Amazon, leaving the book as it was. Her husband bought over 10,000 copies, bringing it up to one of Amazon's top sellers. Only a few other copies sold.

Same could be said about reviews on Amazon. In this same instance, friends wrote 5-star reviews even though they had never read the book. It was honestly un-readable.