Last week I wrote about how Mark Driscoll, formerly the pastor of Mars Hill Church, found himself in a plagiarism scandal in 2013. This is bad enough to hurt an author’s credibility and reputation, but his publishing sins went further than that. Mark was also guilty of gaming the New York Times Bestseller list – with church funds. Today we’re going to get into how Driscoll was able to manipulate the system to make his book Real Marriage a New York Times bestseller. Gaming the Bestseller System It’s well known in the publishing world that bestseller lists are able to be manipulated. The New York Times bestseller list is the best known, but others include The Wall Street Journal bestseller list and the USA Today bestseller list, among many more. Usually, these bestseller lists are reflections of data aggregated from booksellers across the country, from mom and pop indies to commercial retailers. The idea is to look for trends at the broadest level possible to identify what books are selling the most in any given week. The New York Times provided a helpful run-down of how their list works, to shed more light on what seems like a complicated, secretive affair. They state in this breakdown that they try to prevent manipulation of the bestseller system: “Our lists reflect the reporting from our confidential panel of tens of thousands of retailers. We do not reveal those sources, in order to circumvent potential pressure on the booksellers and to prevent people from trying to game their way onto the lists.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/reader-center/behind-the-new-york-times-best-seller-not-best-reviewed-lists.html And yet, that is exactly what happens. Behind the scenes, there are companies that specialize in gaming the system. It’s not illegal; in fact, it’s rather brilliant. These companies act as a mediator, putting in thousands of orders of a single book through resellers throughout the nation to make it look like these are all organic sales. The books appear for a week on the lists as a reflection of the influx of sales, and then they quietly disappear, never to be seen again. But for the rest of their lives, those authors get to call themselves “New York Times [or Wall Street Journal or USA Today] bestselling authors.” It’s an extraordinary marketing ploy that opens doors to speaking engagements and many other profitable enterprises. One company in particular, ResultSource, specialized in helping Christian writers – especially influential and high-profile pastors like Mark Driscoll – get onto the NYT bestseller list. ResultSource is still in operation today, still helping high-profile authors cheat the system. Mark Driscoll hired ResultSource to do this for Real Marriage, and Mars Hill paid them about $25,000 for coordination of the book sales. Then, on top of that, they had to buy over $200,000 worth of books – an order that ResultSource dispersed through resellers all over America. According to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, Driscoll received royalties on those books. Usually, authors do not receive royalties on books that they pay for themselves (because they receive them at a steep discount) – but in this case, since the payment was from Mars Hill and ordered through various other resellers, Driscoll personally profited from those church funds. And that’s how Driscoll became a New York Times bestselling author. Is it really wrong to game the bestseller lists? Like I said, the business scheme is rather brilliant. It’s not illegal. But is it right? Is it ethical? For Driscoll and other pastors who have apparently hired ResultSource with church funds, it’s a clear error. You shouldn’t use your church’s money for your personal gain – especially while claiming that it is all for the “glory of God.” In this case, it was all for Driscoll’s glory – more publicity, more speaking engagements, more royalties. To be fair, Driscoll did reportedly pay back some of the royalties to the church, publicly apologized, and then had “New York Times bestseller” removed from the book’s marketing collateral. Mars Hill claimed that it made over $200,000 by reselling the book themselves (I don’t know if they’re referring to profit or revenue). But the podcast also reported that when Mars Hill closed its doors in 2014, there were “boxes and boxes” of unsold copies of Real Marriage that got tossed or donated. That’s a sad reality for many books, but even more dispiriting for a book that was supposedly a New York Times bestseller. I have less issue with authors who fund this gaming of the system with their own money and then profit from that. But I still don’t like it. Gaming bestseller lists hurts book readers, authors, and the bestseller lists themselves in a number of ways. The bestseller lists’ credibility is damaged. Book buyers can’t trust whether a book is authentically a bestseller. The legitimacy of books that really do sell well is called into question and doubted, hurting the authors of those books. It’s a sad situation because bestseller lists are such a helpful tool – if they are honest reflections of the data, and if the underlying data isn’t manipulated. We can’t write off bestseller lists entirely as a scam, or think that everyone who gets on a bestseller list paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there. Some books can and do make it there organically and authentically. We just have to accept that it’s hard to know for sure. I’m curious what your thoughts are. What’s your vote? Is it wrong to game the bestseller lists, or is it smart and strategic? Tell me I’m wrong. 🙂 Photo by Karim Ghantous on Unsplash
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