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An author bought his own book to get higher on bestseller lists. Is that fair?

For any author, being able to describe yourself as a bona fide bestseller is key to conferring your career with a certain gravitas – and will often bring you even more sales. In the UK, while most book charts are tallied by Nielsen BookScan, the Sunday Times bestseller list – like the New York Times chart in the US – has become the gold standard. But making the bestseller list isn’t necessarily as straightforward as tallying sales. Not all is fair in romance and war (and other genres) when it comes to getting to the top of the charts.

Take the case of Mark Dawson, a British writer who just over a week ago hit No 8 on the Sunday Times hardback list with his thriller The Cleaner, released by the independent publisher Welbeck at the end of June. This is a great achievement for any author or small publishing house, but Dawson had done something remarkable: he bought 400 copies of his own book, at a cost of £3,600, to push his sales high enough to make the top 10.

On the latest episode of his Self Publishing Show podcast, Dawson explained why he did it. When Nielsen released its midweek chart, Dawson had realised that The Cleaner was sitting at No 13, having sold around 1,300 copies that week – just outside the coveted top 10. He hit on the idea of buying the book himself in the UK, to sell to readers overseas. “We’d like to get to the top 10 … we’ve been trying to think of ways we can do that that would count those sales as sales for the chart,” he said.

After sending an email to gauge interest, around 400 people in the US said they would buy the book if he bought the copies himself first. So Dawson went to a children’s bookshop in Salisbury. “I said, ‘would you be interested if I placed an order for 400 hardbacks of my own book?’,” said Dawson on the podcast. “They were like, ‘Yes, of course.’”

Several authors on social media have since shared their concerns over Dawson’s strategy, including thriller writer Clare Mackintosh, who said it was “disingenuous” that Dawson, when celebrating his top 10 spot on Twitter, had not also shared that he had personally bought almost a quarter of the books that got him there. Dawson maintained he was just fulfilling orders, though on his podcast he specified that he had expressions of interest from abroad rather than firm sales.

This is not the first time an author has been suspected of similar tactics. In 2017 a young adult novel was stripped of its No 1 spot on the NYT bestseller list after it was discovered that a series of huge pre-orders for Lani Sarem’s Handbook for Mortals had been placed in specific bookshops that report their sales to the NYT. (Sarem claimed she was buying her book for events, but she was later removed from the chart.) Compare that with Donald Trump Jr, whose book Triggered also made the No 1 spot when the Republican National Committee (RNC) spent $94,800 (£74,000) on a bulk order a week before it was released. (An RNC spokesperson said the purchase was made to “keep up with demand” among Republican party supporters.) Sarem’s book was removed from the list, while Trump Jr’s books were marked with a dagger, the NYT’s way of flagging a bulk order. Whole firms have even been set up to help authors buy their own books, because making the bestseller list is a surefire way to sell more – one 2004 study found that making the NYT bestseller list saw debut authors’ sales increase by 57%, while the average for all authors was a 13% boost.

But if it is not against the rules to buy your own book, is it morally and ethically correct? Some might argue that bestseller lists are not indicative of a meritocracy anyway; the big publishers use their clout to push certain books through advertising and PR campaigns, and will fork out to have their titles placed in the most lucrative positions in bookshops as standard practice. Dawson is just taking on the risk himself. But to buy your way on to the charts also feels undemocratic. With median earnings for UK authors being just under £10,500 a year, paying more than a third of that to secure a bestseller tag angles what should be a level playing field towards those writers privileged enough to be able to personally afford it.