CRAFTY LIBERALS….Over at NRO, Byron York writes:
[Glenn Greenwald’s] How Would a Patriot Act? appears to have become something of a (quiet) publishing phenomenon, outperforming ? at least in the early stages ? other, higher-profile anti-Bush books, not to mention all the other best-sellers on the list these days. Why? No one seems to know. “We’re often caught by surprise by these,” says Tom Nissley, senior books editor for Amazon.com.
This is what passes for a mystery these days? On Tuesday, big liberal blogs started pushing their readers to pre-order Greenwald’s book on Amazon, with the specific goal of driving up its Amazon ranking. And it worked. Mystery solved.
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, York’s article contains some useful advice: “We rank by orders, not by sales,” Nissley says. “We only count orders ? we count an order of 1,000 copies the same as an order of one.” So if you’re trying to goose somebody’s ranking, be sure to place five orders for one book each instead of one order for five books.
