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Comment by lencastre | Hacker News Reader

wikipedia articla here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Dawson_(writer)

> In 2020, Dawson's book The Cleaner reached number 8 in the Hardback Fiction section of The Sunday Times' bestseller list after he purchased 400 copies of the book, seeing it to have previously been in position number 13

The scumbaggery is endemic, not isolated to creative repurposing of other people's sentences!

Is that all it takes to get from 13 to 8!? I guess nobody reads anymore.

That sounds more serious. That's literally fraud, unlike taking random sentences you liked from other books, which is quite benign, in my opinion.

It's well known that best sellers lists are manipulated in this way, but there's not a lot you can do about it. If I just ask 400 friends to buy my book, and compensate them in home cooked meals and quality time, is that unfair manipulation? It's tough to draw a line.

Buying your own book is deceptive, but it's not illegal. Just sketchy gamesmanship.

This happens in the US too (esp nonfiction, and political stuff).

How is that fraud?

Artificially inflating sales numbers to get higher on bestseller lists seems like an intentional deception to secure unfair gain. How is that not fraud?

He did buy those books, though -- correct? Were those not real sales of real books that were paid for with real money?

There's no implication that he crossed out a number on a report before artificially enhancing it by increasing it by 400, is there?

I feel that both of these examples are reprehensible in this context, but that only one of them rises to the level of fraud.

(I mean: There are companies performing stock buybacks all the time for various reasons, and some of those reasons can include improving the market's perception of that stock's value.)

There's no automatic connection from immoral to illegal. I can think of lots of intentional deception that secures unfair gain that is not illegal.

I was under the impression that fraud is fraud regardless of whether it is illegal or simply immoral. (Not a native speaker.)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud

> 1. (law) The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics.

> 2. Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved or unlawful gain.

> ...

Sure, I think the matter of contention here is whether buying your own book is deceptive (as a mandatory element of fraud). So if the body publishing those figures of sales hasn't reached an agreement with you that you'll refrain from that behavior then I don't see a way for it to be deceptive and so not fraudulent.

This definition is broad enough to apply to all of commerce.

Here’s an alternative POV that could be illuminating:

To be financial successful as a writer (or any creative endeavor), if you do not have special access, you must either gain special access or get into the business of publishing yourself.

As noble as “gain access” may seem by comparison, it has very few seats on the ride & the power law seems to have the perverse effect of narrowing the number over time.

The business of publishing is & has always been substantially about manufacturing hype. You might get one generational talent at its start, but mostly you are selling the talent you have.

As much as we all seem to want opportunity to be earned on meritocracy alone, we don’t spread our attention that way and we certainly don’t distribute in any kind of premeditated way to ensure our values are applied to society. Perhaps algorithmic content distribution will change that one day, but so far it mostly hasn’t.

So for any new work, even for authors you know & love, to get sufficient revenue it has to grab significant attention in a brief period of time.

Underlying all hype machines is usually some kind of gameable metric of attention - views, endorsements, critical review.

All publishers have a formula for how they get some of it or they fail at their job. Publishers will be the first to tell you what they do isn’t enough because everyone does it.

“New York Times Best Seller” is a great example. Generally considered a fair standard of what is interesting, it mostly drifts off Amazon rankings with some mollifying factors.

Part of the durability of this system is that when one person has been found to hack those rankings, like here by purchasing 400 of their own books, it appears that they are a dishonest person gaming the system.

Every NYT Best Selling author I’ve met either personally orchestrated, or had it done for them, volume book sales to friend’s businesses & conferences to achieve the same affect.

Perhaps people who are insufficiently clever should be morally punished for the crime of showing us our own foibles.

But the “scumbaggery is endemic,” which is now one of my favorite sentences, is as easily cast as disapproval for a few people as it is a statement of how people in large groups choose what is interesting to talk about.

Either way, we’ve got no solution for society working the way we think it does vs working to exploit the way we think it does.

I thought the Internet might, but so far it seems better at distributing the latter than solving for the former.

Because everyone you know does it doesn't mean it isn't scumbaggery.

Thanks, I thought I was just out of the loop. The word "bestseller" means less and less every day for me.

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