Secrets of the Amazon best-seller list
A not-so-pretty peek inside the obsession of every author
By Marion Maneker at MSNBC

It's almost a philosophical riddle: Do sales drive the best-seller list, or do best-sellers get all the sales because buyers see them on the list? As much as we'd like to believe that the crowd picks the best books, a strong presence in retail locations — front-of-store positioning and tempting discounts — still counts a great deal in determining how well a title sells.

Nonetheless, authors are in it for the glory, and the visibility and bragging rights of being a "best-seller" retains the glamour of years past.

In the old days, the New York Times best-seller list meant everything. But it doesn't come out until weeks after the sales take place, and it only updates on Sunday. Today's author needs a better, faster sounding board. And she's found it in Amazon's unblinking sales rank, the 24-hour barometer of book sales. Indeed, it's a rare author with self-control who, as soon as the book is published, doesn't obsessively check the list these days, which is updated every hour.

Yet for all that, few people understand how the Amazon list works or its relative importance in the publishing industry. Amazon's method of ranking books remains something of a black box with the fancy word algorithm used to describe it.

For the full fascinating piece go to MSNBC online.