Amazon Best Seller Claims and What’s Really Behind Them
Amazon Best Seller Claims and What’s Really Behind Them
Episode 04 of Calling Out the Shadows: A Clarity Over Comfort Podcast
By Neal Winsomer · Published May 19, 2026 · Roughly 7 minutes
Amazon Best Seller Claims
Amazon Best Seller Claims are easy to buy and hard to earn. This episode breaks down how the badge gets gamed, the Brent Underwood case, and how to spot a fake claim.
THE SHORT VERSION
- Amazon’s bestseller rank runs hourly across more than 16,000 categories, which makes the badge easy to game.
- The Brent Underwood foot-photo case shows how a fake number one is bought.
- Spot fakes by checking the global Best Sellers Rank and the category’s number two and three.
LISTEN
As well as Amazon Music, iHeart, Pandora, and other podcast platforms.
QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS
Is Amazon bestseller a reliable credential?
Often not. The rank resets hourly per category and can be gamed in tiny, low-traffic categories. The orange banner is marketing, not proof.
How do you spot a fake bestseller claim?
Check the global Best Sellers Rank on the product page; a real one tends to sit under 5,000, a fraud over 300,000. Then look at the number two and three books in the claimed category.
IN THIS CONVERSATION
- How the hourly, per-category bestseller calculation works
- The Brent Underwood case
- What a real bestseller looks like
- How to audit a claimed category and where to vet beyond Amazon
FULL TRANSCRIPT
I really cannot stand the Amazon bestseller scam and how people out there use this term bestseller. I am incensed. They are not lying outright, but they are being fraudulent and not transparent about what they are doing. The basics: Amazon has more than 16,000 book categories. Many of them only sell a few copies per day, and the bestseller calculation runs every hour and resets every hour. So whoever sold the most copies in a given category in the last hour wins that orange number one bestseller banner for that category. Here is how it works for these scammers.
Sign up for Amazon KDP, the self-publishing portal. It is free and takes minutes. You can upload almost any file as a book. Amazon does not review the content; it checks metadata only. This was proven by a man named Brent Underwood in 2016, who uploaded a picture of his bare foot, no story, no words, just the foot. He priced it at the Amazon minimum, 99 cents, and picked two of Amazon’s smallest, low-traffic categories, Transpersonal and Freemasonry and Secret Societies. He bought three copies, and since Amazon updates bestseller rankings hourly, within minutes he was a number one bestseller in those two tiny categories. He screenshotted the orange number one bestseller banner.
How the bestseller badge is gamed
And now he can use that screenshot in his marketing, on and off Amazon, as an Amazon best-selling author. Amazon sometimes catches it and delists obvious schemes, but the screenshots already exist, and marketers keep using them on websites, LinkedIn bios, speaker decks, and social media. Another red flag is to check whether the book has fewer than a hundred reviews after this alleged bestseller run. Some of these authors even write a book called something like Become a Bestseller, then use the same trick to sell the course. It is a lie on a lie, a bestseller in a nowhere category for a minute.
What a real bestseller looks like is sustained sales velocity, hundreds to thousands of organic reviews, sales ranks that stay low for an extended period, and a book that is widely available and keeps moving copies. The easiest way to check is to go to the product details box, past the description and reviews, and click on the Best Sellers Rank. Look at the book’s overall global rank in the entire Kindle store or book section. A real one is usually under 5,000, selling hundreds of copies daily to real people. The fraud is 300,000 or worse, selling close to zero a day, which is one more sign that the number one badge was a brief algorithmic spike. You can also look at the number two and three books in that category. If they have zero reviews and terrible global ranks, the author chose a ghost-town category to game the system.
The Brent Underwood case
You can also vet beyond Amazon. Check Goodreads reviews and discussion threads, which are harder to fake. Search Writer Beware at writerbeware.blog, or the ALLi Watchdog at selfpublishingadvice.org. You can check Authors Guild scam alerts at authorsguild.org. You can reverse search the author’s name plus the word scam. There are a couple of paid services too, but you do not need to pay to tell whether a bestseller claim is genuine.
How to spot a fake claim
The basics: stop letting marketing manipulation trick you. Real bestsellers sell to thousands of global readers, not ten people in a hidden category. Bestseller is the easiest claim to buy and one of the hardest to earn. Take the time to vet and question it. If people use these models to promote, how authentic is what they are creating or trying to sell you? The orange banner, in the end, is marketing, not proof.
Expect more, dig deeper, and watch how these people actually act online.
ABOUT THE HOST
Neal Winsomer is the author of Calling Out the Shadows: A Father’s Stand Against the Current, a memoir and practical guide, and hosts this Clarity Over Comfort podcast, which he narrates himself. He writes from lived experience inside high-conflict co-parenting and marks throughout his work what is his subjective account and what is objective. He makes no claim to clinical expertise and offers no prescriptions. What you take from it is yours.
Published by Neal Winsomer Publishing LLC, an IBPA member (D-U-N-S 145038996), Gulf Breeze, Florida. hello@nealwinsomerpublishing.com
RELATED EPISODES
- Episode 02: When the Lie Becomes the Truth She Knows
- Episode 03: You Don’t Need to Read, Buy, or Review My Book
- Episode 05: 10 Months Down, One Month to Go
Calling Out the Shadows: A Clarity Over Comfort Podcast is hosted by Neal Winsomer. The accompanying book is available now from Neal Winsomer Publishing LLC in paperback, hardcover, eBook, audiobook, large print, and a Skimmer’s Edition. See all formats.
