Ted Cruz Busted For Buying His Own Books As NY Times Refuses To Put Him On Bestseller List

[hankhenry]

10. Bulk buying is a common and shrewd technique in the publishing industry.

I worked in publishing quite a few years and am still indirectly working with the industry. What Cruz did is actually very common in the industry. It's just called bulk buying. An organization or marketing company (often one that you hire) buys your book in bulk, often pre-pub. This helps boost you on the best-seller list. It costs you money to do this, but not as much as you make in the long run. A short jump in sales means notable best-seller projections. You are invited on morning talk shows. You often get paid for this and you get to promote your book.

The book industry is often seedy and manipulates the numbers. Margins are VERY thin and the competition is thick. The article itself even said, "New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Politico, 'We have uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold... Our goal is that the list reflect authentic best sellers, so we look at and analyze not just numbers, but patterns of sales for every book.'”

So the raw numbers you see listed by Amazon, B&N, and NYT are not even mathematically accurate. The patterns and analysis she cites are actually nothing more than promoting a book. The numbers are a fib. Those numbers are often what they hope to sell. Their so-called numbers are nothing more than creating a buzz.

As for Cruz, I suspect one of two things. There was some dispute about the bulk buying process and/or someone got into a telephone argument. I actually would not be surprised if it's a small contract glitch that NYT capitalized on to sell even more of his book. The NYT, after all, lists all kinds of political books on its lists, so this is really nothing exceptional. Now, they can actually leave him off the top (10, 25, or whatever) of the list, make room for yet ANOTHER book from someone else, and still have the publicity to sell his book. You see crap like this all the time.