Amazon Best Seller Claims and What's Really Behind Them
Calling Out the Shadows: A Clarity Over Comfort Podcast

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.