How did “Handbook for Mortals” get on the NYT bestseller list?

Publishing is a tough industry. Building an audience can be hard, competition is tight, profit margins even tighter, and most authors have annual wages below the poverty line. Making your way to the still-coveted New York Times best-seller list remains one of the biggest markers of success as well as a reliable way to sell more books. If everyone else is buying the book, surely you have to too, right?

Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales. That’s not the heights of publishing’s heyday but it’s still harder to get than you’d think. Some publishers spend thousands of dollars on advertising and blogger outreach to get that number. Everyone’s looking for the next big thing and that costs a lot of cash. For the past 25 weeks, that big book in the YA world has been The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a searing politically charged drama about a young black girl who sees a police officer kill her friend, and the fallout it causes in her community. Through publisher buzz and exceedingly strong word of mouth, the novel has stormed to the forefront of the YA world and found thousands of fans, with a film on the way. Knocking that from the top of the NYT YA list would be a major deal, and this week it’s going to happen. But something’s not right.

Handbook For Mortals by Lani Sarem is the debut novel from the publishing arm of website GeekNation. The site announced this news only last week, through a press release that can be read on places like The Hollywood Reporter, not a site known for extensive YA coverage. Sarem has an IMDb page with some very minor acting roles, several of which are uncredited, but details on the book are scanter to find. Googling it leads to several other books with the same title, but most of the coverage for it is press release based. There’s little real excitement or details on it coming from the YA blogging world, which is a mighty community who are not quiet about the things they’re passionate about (believe me, first hand experience here).

YA writer and publisher Phil Stamper raised the alarm bells on this novel’s sudden success through a series of tweets, noting GeekNation’s own low traffic, the inability to even buy it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and its out-of-nowhere relevance.

Another user, writer Erik. J Brown, noted the questionable quality of the book’s Amazon reviews, which Fakespot deems of unreliable and low quality. The book currently has 9 Goodreads reviews, all of which are 5 stars and some of which are duplicates. If you know anything about Goodreads, you’ll already hear the bullshit alarm.

Jeremy West, manager of OnBroadwayish, pointed to the book’s sales, which according to Nielsen Bookscan, are 18k for the past week alone. That’s weird. Very weird.

Buying your way onto the bestseller list is not technically illegal, nor is it that hard if you know how. Many conservative publishers have found success through bulk-buying books then giving them away as, say, subscriber gifts if you sign up to Newsmax or the like. The thing is, usually the New York Times make note of this and include this as a footnote of sorts to the list. Here, there’s nothing. Pulling this kind of trick is hard to conceal, but here it’s especially glaring.

How does a book with such a low Amazon ranking that’s ‘temporarily out of stock’ suddenly become the most read book in YA? How does something that has next to no organic blogging coverage or even Twitter buzz do this? If the only Twitter gossip for your book is variations of ‘Seriously, has anyone heard of this book?’ you’ve got problems.

If you have actually heard of or even read this book, please get in touch because we are baffled.

UPDATE:

Phil Stamper received this DM, which he shared with the user’s name redacted, which confirms our questions.

Jeremy West received a DM confirming another instance of this.

We don’t know who this mysterious bulk book buyer making a movie of the novel is, but we do know that Thomas Ian Nicholas from the american Pie series is supposedly attached to star and produce in any such adaptation (the author used to manage his band. On top of her many other jobs, Sarem works for Amplify, a music marketing agency. ). Geeknation, according to the Hollywood Reporter, are said to be planning a feature film franchise from the book.

My theory is that someone, whoever they may be, hopes to use the “#1 New York Times best-selling novel” moniker as a launching pad to a studio deal for this planned film. The problem with that is that studios, producers and the like still require solid numbers before making a call, and you can’t provide said evidence when you just bulk buy some books then never pick them up. Handbook for Mortals, conveniently, has an IMDb page ready to go.

UPDATE #2:

So this gets wilder. The IMDb page for the film, at least on mobile form, lists the author as attached to play the lead character of the story. Well, that’s one way to get your career going.

UPDATE #3:

Thank you to an anonymous source for providing this Bookscan detail. Itasca Books are a distributor, mostly for indie books, a way to get your book out there to as many stores as possible. According to Nielsen Bookscan, they helped to distribute a whopping 18597 books in one week, all across the USA. To do this all in the first week with no pre-sales or early numbers before that is basically impossible. As my source noted, ‘Bookstores/amazon/etc. almost never perfectly embargo anything.’ This is all far too neat to be anything other than organised.

UPDATE #4:

More news from Phil. Essentially, for Barnes & Noble, buying 30 or more copies of the same book is considered a corporate sale, something that would probably be noted by the New York Times Bestseller team. For indie stores, that number seems to be 80. A lot of work went into this scam (a second tweet in this update was removed to protect anonymity):

UPDATE #5:

Thanks to another anonymous source who works in the library world and provided us with some more revealing numbers. As she told me, she tried to find out if her library had ordered the book but they hadn’t, it wasn’t listed with their prefered vendor and it wasn’t on Edelweiss (a key source of review copies and promotional material for bloggers and librarians). Our source notes, ‘I did find it available from Ingram and was really surprised by the on-order numbers— they have 19,055 book on-order and no copies on hand. For comparison, the perennially popular James Patterson’s latest novel The Store, which came out 10 days ago, has 5,262 copies on hand.’

They also offered some screencaps to show those numbers for a stark comparison. All those books on order but nothing on hand? If you ask me, this is a big case of a scam greatly over-shooting its mark.

UPDATE #6:

The author used to manage Blues Traveler. They tweeted their thoughts on her but have asked for them to be removed to prevent harm to her. I respect that and have done so:

(It’s been a very layered day).

UPDATE #7:

Phil is the detective we need and deserve during these times.

FINAL UPDATE (?):

And lo, justice was served.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

Pajiba received details from two separate anonymous sources who got in touch, each claiming that author Lani Sarem herself admitted plans in multiple meetings with potential business partners and investors to push the book onto the New York Times Bestseller list by fudging the numbers. Both sources also noted that the author and publisher’s primary concerns were to get a film deal, with the movie having been promised funding if it became a bestseller, hence a bulk buying strategy with a focus on reaching the convention circuit. We have kept our sources anonymous for privacy and safety reasons, but we trust our contacts.

Pajiba will keep you updated as details come to us.

It’s been a long day, you guys.

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