This is Why I Suck at Marketing

So, just read a story today by an author who has 'New York Times Bestselling Author and USA Today Bestselling Author' branded on all of their books. All of their books.

And they've only been writing since last year, and they don't really have that many reviews on most of their stuff. Now the story wasn't bad, really, it was just all action and not much plot and minor character development. We just go from action scene to action scene, and the book is probably about 55K words long, so it doesn't get to the point of actually being too much action.

But still, I'm looking at this going, 'how did this person make both of those lists?' Especially when they don't say which of their books made the list.

Well some internet searching and I found it. They got into this huge mega box set deal, and there were some good authors in the set (over twenty authors in the box set total). The entire set made the bestseller lists. So yeah, technically he's a bestselling author now.

I would never have thought to put something like that down.

It's like all of those authors who write their bios in third person like someone else is talking about them, or who go through their reviews on the page, pull out a few, and put them up in the 'editorial review' section. Hell, I've gotten reviews from third parties, completely unsolicited, and I've never put them in there.

I really do not understand marketing for ebooks, or just books in general, I guess.