> Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales.
That sounds pretty cheap. For a book that costs $10-20 that would be $50-100K to buy your way in. I'm not sure what the margins for books are these days (particularly the split between publisher and retailer) but that doesn't seem that expensive.
You can do what they did for L. Ron Hubbard's doorstop-ology "Mission Earth", where they'd buy the books in stores, give them back to the publisher, and buy them from the stores again. Booksellers were noticing that the books which came from the publisher already had their store's stickers on them.
It represents 50,000 actual books sold if the demand is legitimate. If you make sure to only buy from reporting stores, it's only 5,000 actual books sold.
> Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales.
That sounds pretty cheap. For a book that costs $10-20 that would be $50-100K to buy your way in. I'm not sure what the margins for books are these days (particularly the split between publisher and retailer) but that doesn't seem that expensive.