My Buying Community Wants to Help Authors Beat the Kindle Store Best Seller List
It’s long 
been known that publishers (and even some authors) have bought their way onto prestigious best seller lists, but until now it hasn’t been very easy to pull off the same trick in digital best seller lists.
My Buying Community wants to change that. This site launched some time back with the simply goal of helping authors game the Kindle Store best seller list, and it just crossed my desk this week.
Like the MyKindex site which operated for a period of time last year, MBC connects authors with a willing pool of book buyers. The site looks to be entirely author funded, and from what I can tell as a reader it works along the same lines as the services that sold reviews to authors like John Locke.
A user signs up, request to purchase a book, and after the purchase is verified the user is credited the price of the ebook plus an additional 30%. After a user buys enough books to pass the minimum payment threshold, they can request a Paypal funds transfer.
Or at least that is how the site is supposed to work; I just signed up today and I am still waiting for the credit for the ebook I bought. It’s a $.99 title in the Kindle Store with 4 five star reviews.
It’s not clear yet whether this site will have any effect on the Kindle Store best seller list, nor does the site claim it can do that. Instead it merely says that it connects readers to new authors.
But the site operates in a shady manner, and I learned of it via the developer of My Kindex, which did boast of manipulating the French Kindle Store’s best seller list, so I am more than comfortable with attributing nefarious goals to this otherwise nondescript site.
My Buying Community claims to have 10,000 members, and if that is true and the site marshals all of its members to buy a single title then they well could affect that ebook’s rank in the Kindle Store.
Hopefully Amazon is already aware of this site, and is taking steps to thwart it.
Comments
flyingtoastr March 31, 2014 um 11:28 am
The Kindle bestseller lists are already bullocks. Remember when 50 Shades was busy selling 15 million print copies but was excluded from appearing on the general bestsellers because it was classified as "erotica"?
All bestseller lists are gamed by publishers, authors, and retailers. This isn’t remotely surprising.
Peter Winkler March 31, 2014 um 7:09 pm
"The Kindle bestseller lists are already bullocks."
Don’t you mean "bollocks?"
carmen webster buxton March 31, 2014 um 12:12 pm
It’s interesting that someone came up with a solution to gaming the system. Amazon does not allow one account to buy the same Kindle book multiple times, except as gifts, and gift sales aren’t final until the recipient accepts the gift. Print authors with enough cash can simply buy cartons of their own books but Kindle authors need to find someone to buy it for them.