Earlier this week, a BookLocker author wrote to us with a question. Why weren’t the commissions for sales of her book through Amazon.com showing up in her account, she asked. She had the receipts from customers to prove the sales occurred.

When we heard that she had the receipts, our collective gut sank - Amazon Bestseller Scam, we thought.

We drew a lot of fire for coming out against this practice a few years back. Here is how it works:

You find several dozen email newsletter lists with large subscription bases. You convince the list owners to run an ad at no cost for your book. You get them to do it at the same exact time and direct all the buyers to Amazon.com to purchase the book. (Oh, and don’t forget to tell your family and friends to all buy your book at that specified time, too.) As a further incentive for buyers, you offer some free giveaway. But they can only get the giveaway if they send you the email receipt from Amazon.com - proving they bought the book.

Now, if you are successful in getting all these people to buy the book at roughly the same time, the book will pop up at the top of one of the Amazon.com bestsellers lists. Then you can claim from that time forward that your book is an “Amazon.com Bestseller”. And you’ll get the contact information for all the people who bought your book through Amazon.com to boot.

The scam works by taking advantage of a loop-hole in the way Amazon.com calculates its bestseller lists. Amazon.com recalculates the sales rankings on an hourly basis for books with a ranking of #1 to #10,000. Amazon.com takes into account the sales rate of the book as well. If you manipulate the results of this calculation by selling a large number of books on Amazon.com in a very short period of time, you will rank as a bestseller for at least an hour.

We find the practice unethical because the book rises to the top from gaming the system, not because of the book’s own merits. Others just think it is a worthless effort. And furthermore, there are “book marketing gurus” out there charging upwards of $2,500 to teach unsuspecting authors the “sophisticated” technique I just described to you using the three above paragraphs.

But it turns out the Amazon Bestseller Scam is not what this author did. She did a twist on the idea, which I think is actually a pretty good marketing method. She simply agreed to donate a percentage of each sale to charity if people bought her book on a particular day. A win for everyone - books get sold, the charity gets money, nothing’s being manipulated, and the author gets the contact info. for her customers to which she can pitch future offers.

Here is where she went wrong, though. She should have sent them to BookLocker.com to buy the book. It’s more money in her pocket to do it that way because Amazon.com doesn’t sell your books for free. They take a hefty chunk of the sale price for the privilege of using their store. Plus, they pay Ingram, who then pays the publisher. This process takes four months - meaning if the book gets sold today, the author and the publisher won’t see the money for that sale until around June. (This is why the commissions were not in her account yet.)

And if she’d been a little more savvy, she could have used our sales tracking system (which BookLocker authors get to use for free) to track the source of the sales. We have a system that lets authors generate a URL with a unique code at the end. That code gets carried forward on all sales and appears in the author’s account, next to each sale.

So, for example, say you wanted to track the people who bought the book as a result of clicking on a link on your web site. You’d put a special URL on your site with the code “website” on the end of it. When a potential customer clicks on that link and comes to the BookLocker.com site, that code gets stripped off and attached to anything the customer buys. And while authors cannot see a customer’s personal information (due to our strict privacy policy), they can see order numbers and any tracking codes associated with those orders in their commission report.

All she needed to do was take the order numbers from the receipts customers sent to her and, using her commission report, match up who came from where. Very handy if you are trying to figure out what promotions led to the most book sales.