Wall Street Journal Looks at Those Amazon Campaigns

One major quirk: Used and new book sales are counted equally. So an author anxious about his sales ranking could put a few dozen of his books for sale for a penny apiece and ask a friend to buy them all.

Outside the top 1% or so of books, few sell multiple copies a day, so little separates books with rankings tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, apart.

Hence, sales pitches such as those from Mr. Frishman to new authors eager to become best-sellers, if only for an hour and only on a single site. "Everyone wants to call themselves a best-seller if they can," he says, even if it means doing so by luring would-be buyers with bonuses.