How about a quick tale of greed and gaming the system to start your week off?

This one’s all over the Young Adult publishing community, so my apologies to those of you who are tapped in there for repeating old news.

For the rest of you, the best overview of the story I’ve found is at Pajiba.

You should read the whole piece, but if you’re in a hurry, the core of the matter is that someone seems to have concocted a scheme to get a book onto the New York Times bestseller list. Not because they wanted to jumpstart sales of the book, but in order to get financing for a movie based on it.

Right. A movie based on a book nobody’s read. But wait, it gets better: the publisher is a website nobody* visits anymore. The author of the book is set to star in the movie. The cover may have been plagiarized.

* Though, to be honest, they get way more traffic than I do.

How’s that for entertainment?

The most startling thing I learned reading about this is that you can get onto the NYT list with 5,000 copies sold in a week. I know it’s a common complaint that reading for pleasure is a dying art, but it still boggles me that the threshold is so low.

But that’s what made this scam possible. Somebody–or rather, several somebodies–placed phone orders for multiple copies of the book through bookstores across the country. The orders were sized to be just small enough to be counted as individual sales, rather than corporate bulk orders.

The book isn’t actually available, so all of those orders will eventually be canceled, but they hung around long enough to be reported as sales. More than 18,000 sales, in fact. As a result, the book jumped straight to Number One.

A book you can’t buy, with few legitimate reviews knocking a title that’s been sitting in the top spot for a couple of month? Not gonna happen. So people got suspicious. Much Twitter discussion and detective work followed. The upshot is that the NYT released a new bestseller list for the week which does not include the work in question.

Note, by the way, that I haven’t mentioned the book’s title or the author’s name. I don’t see any reason why I should give them any additional publicity. If you want to know, read the article I linked at the top of the post.

But that’s really what I find most depressing about this affair: the author and the team behind the movie have gotten far more publicity than they expected–it seems clear that the whole point was to use the “bestseller” status to get the movie deal done; publicizing it ahead of the signing probably wasn’t part of the plan.

As we all know, however, there’s no such thing as bad publicity in Hollywood. I’ll be very surprised if the movie doesn’t get made. And when it comes out, I’ll be even more surprised if it doesn’t use a “Based on the NYT bestselling book!” line in the ads. Because it did appear on the list, even if the paper has since disavowed it. And people will go see it because they’ll vaguely remember the title, without remembering why they heard of it.

I have to wonder: if the crew behind this scam hadn’t gotten greedy enough to go after #1 instantly, but instead spread those 18,000 orders over a few weeks, debuted in the middle of the list, and then jumped upward, would anyone have noticed? Well, assuming they had taken the precaution of making it possible for people to, you know, actually buy the book.

I suspect if they had gone that route, they would actually have sold enough copies to crack the list legitimately. Probably not the top of the list, but still…

Of course, then the reviews would have come in. If it’s true that good reviews sell books, it’s also true that bad reviews do the opposite (though not as strongly–don’t forget the “so bad it’s good” phenomenon as well as the conspiracy theories: “if so many people are trying to kill it, there must be something there They don’t want us to see.”) And, by all reports, the reviews wouldn’t have been kind.

Speaking of reviews, by the way, consider this one of my occasional reminders that if you’ve read The RagTime Traveler, I’d appreciate you posting a review on Goodreads, Amazon (or wherever you bought it), or anywhere, really. I doubt we can push TRTT onto the New York Times bestseller list, but I’d love to be proved wrong. Hey, it’s only 5,000 copies in a week, right?