ReganBooks, known for Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star and José Canseco’s steroid exposé Juiced, has a long history of courting sensationalism. But the publisher—or more accurately, its parent company News Corp.—found the stopping point. Last week HarperCollins (owned by News Corp) announced that its imprint ReganBooks was to publish a book titled If I Did It by O.J. Simpson. The release would follow a two-part interview series set to air at the end of November sweeps on Fox (also owned by News Corp.).

The television tie-in immediately produced problems. Ratings and advertising revenues during sweeps help television networks set their advertising rates for the rest of the year. News Corp. decided to air the O.J. Simpson interview on Fox on two of the last days of sweeps and follow it up with the release of the book on November 30. Broadcasting companies often use outrageous ploys to pull in higher audience numbers and increase ad revenue.

This time, media buyers thought the sensationalist stunts had gone too far. Several buyers told Fox flat-out that their clients would not be advertising during the program. Some reports said Fox’s ad salespeople didn’t even try to sell the time because they knew the response would be negative.

Bookstores were just as reluctant. Although the book had hit Amazon’s top 20 list before it was released, Borders, Inc. announced it was going to donate all net profits earned on the book to a nonprofit organization for victims of domestic violence.

The message to News Corp. was that no one wanted to touch the project. Both projects were scrapped when News Corp.’s chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch issued a public apology.

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” Murdoch said. “We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

The backlash is considerable, and the incident is unique in the history of the entertainment industry—although Simpson’s “hypothetical memoir” was something of a singularity as well. All the books that had been shipped will be returned and then destroyed.

The question that remains is the long-term effect on the industry as a whole. Is there such a thing as a limit to our sensationalist appetites—and have we discovered it?

I think it's safe to say that we are all relieved to know that News Corp. has decided not to publish O.J. Simpson's controversial book If I Did It and that it will not air Judith Regan's Fox interview with Simpson. Several bookstores, including Border's, had decided to donate all proceeds from the sale of the book to charity. Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said today that some copies of the books have already been shipped to stores. Those books will be recalled and destroyed, she said. The New York Times reported yesterday why executives at News Corp. decided to pull the plug on the project. Read the NYT article at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/business/21simpsoncnd.html?ref=media.

The allure of the Amazon.com sales rank is well known to many an author, as is the bewilderment it often brings. How convenient—a number that tells you in hard, empirical terms how your book is doing! But alas, the Amazon sales rank is a fickle mistress. After noticing wild fluctuations in their placement, authors and publishers often fall prey to obsessive rank-checking, waking up at night in cold sweats to boot up the computer and surf to Amazon.com, spending endless hours staring bleary-eyed at the monitor: Refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh.

Yet for all this scrutiny, the Amazon sales rank remains cloaked in mystery.

Derived from a complex algorithm that the folks at Amazon are not about to give out, the rankings take into account more than just how many copies of a certain title have been sold. There are varying decay rates, predictive curves, tiers with different refresh rates, historical analysis. Rather than regurgitate the inconclusive findings of studies that try to identify Amazon’s secret formula by buying books and painstakingly analyzing the changes in rankings, let’s first identify what we know for sure about the system.

• The smaller the rank number, the more books you’re selling. Perhaps this is obvious, but to clarify—the number one spot is reserved for the top seller. As your relative sales go down, your rank number goes up.
• Not all books are updated hourly. And in fact, some books are updated more frequently than that, as the seasoned refresh button junkie will tell you. It all depends on the range you fall in. Books between 1 and 10,000 are re-ranked at least hourly. Books between 10,000 and 100,000 are re-ranked once a day. Those beyond 100,000 are re-ranked weekly.
• After you sell one book, you get a rank. There is one slot per book, so no two books have the same ranking. As your book sells more, it moves up the ladder; as other books outsell yours, it moves back down.
• Total historical sales are part of the equation, but not a huge one. For instance, Martha Stewart’s latest book has no problem towering hundreds of slots over, say, Catcher in the Rye at the moment. This is because her book has sold more copies at a faster rate within a recent time span, not because she’s sold more copies overall.

The most important thing to remember about your sales rank is its temporary and relative nature. The Amazon rating is more like a popularity contest than the litmus test for a book’s success. The number you see on the page is merely how you’re selling compared to other titles in a very brief period. Two or three purchases of the same book within an hour can send a title skyrocketing up the rankings. Sure it’s exciting to leave a few thousand of your competitors in the dust, but unless the buying continues at a good pace, you can slip from the higher rankings fairly quickly.

By the same token, don’t feel sick if following your rankings feels like riding a particularly nasty roller coaster. For a more accurate assessment, get an average ranking: check the rank once an hour for twenty-four hours if you’re in the top 10,000, once a day for a week or two if you’re between 10,000 and 100,000, once a week for a couple of months if you’re lower than that. This will give you a much more stable picture of how your book is selling online. Services like titlez.com can show you a graph of a particular book’s historical rankings. Titlez.com is in beta testing and currently does not list all titles, but you can request that a particular book be added. At booksandwriters.com, you can register to receive email reports on your rankings for a small fee.

Remember also to take seasons into account when assessing your sales rank. Students buying for the upcoming semester can clog the top spots with textbooks and paperback classics in the late summer and midwinter seasons. Likewise, books without gift appeal will probably see a significant drop in the holiday months.

But in the end, the sales rank is meant to be, in Amazon.com’s words, merely “interesting.” Don’t sweat it if you can’t figure out why your number is exactly where it is. Instead, focus your energy on making your product page as informative and consumer-friendly as possible. It has been our experience in optimizing Amazon pages that the product’s rank improves as it collects additional content. Whether good reviews and number of hits have a direct effect on the sales rank formula is unclear; it’s more likely that books with more detailed pages simply attract more buyers. Either way, ensure that your product page does a good job of representing your product.

For those of you interested in deducing sales numbers from rank and trying to crack the magical algorithm, read Morris Rosenthal's What Amazon Sales Ranks Mean or this report from MIT's ebusiness center. If you don’t have the time for übercomplicated mathematical gymnastics, just remember that your ranking depends on many variables we’ll probably never fully identify. Enjoy the spikes in your number—you’re selling copies fast—but don’t forget that the Amazon.com sales rank does not make the book.

Is there a place for product placement in books? With advertisers’ ever-increasing fears about the demise of the thirty-second TV spot, product placement has become a more and more popular way of promoting consumer goods, whether we’re aware of it or not. Books have mostly remained an untapped resource for advertisers, but readers are aware of brands in books. And some publishers and marketers are starting to explore the possibilities that can create.

Product placement, in its simplest form, is an advertising tactic in which a real product is placed in the context of a television show, movie, video game, or book as the result of an exchange between an advertiser and a media client. Showing a product in entertainment media can produce results. One of the most famous product placements occurred in E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. Reese’s Pieces were used in a pivotal scene; sales of the candy increased by 65 percent. Product placement is controversial, however, because often nothing marks the difference between paid advertising and entertainment content.

In movies and television, the trend has been gaining steam for a long time. But in books, the controversy over product placement started just a few years ago. In 2001, author Fay Weldon was paid by Bulgari to mention the famous jeweler twelve times in her novel The Bulgari Connection. Recently, Jordan Weisman and Sean Stewart, authors of Cathy’s Book, included a mention of a specific type of Proctor and Gamble’s Cover Girl lip gloss in the book. In return, P&G advertised Cathy’s Book on its teen website, BeingGirl.com. No monetary exchange, just your basic I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine. Simple, right? Wrong. Many object to this case in particular because the book is aimed at a young—and presumably less jaded—audience.

However, adult chick lit thrives on unpaid (we think) homage to designer treads like Prada and Jimmy Choo. If we are already promoting brands and products in adult contemporary fiction, then it’s inevitable that young adult fiction will follow suit. If it does, does it matter if the promotion is paid for?

In a report published by Scholastic, 46 percent of teens ages 15–17 are low-frequency readers. They say the number one reason they don’t read is that they can’t find anything that interests them. Product placement could conceivably help close that gap, if corporate marketers can pique interest in a book through means unavailable to a publisher. And if that can help get teens reading, it’s unlikely many publishers will complain.

For more information about this topic from both sides of the spectrum, check out Commercial Alert and Wikipedia's article on product placement.