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The author starts with 'David Kadavy is bestselling author of The Heart to Start'. I find this odd, because he only managed to sell 11,000 copies. Don't get me

The author starts with 'David Kadavy is bestselling author of The Heart to Start'. I find this odd, because he only managed to sell 11,000 copies. Don't get me wrong, 11k is nothing to be ashamed and 11k more than me, but surely that does not constitute bestselling, does it? Then I read on and 'Selling more than 11,000 copies in the first year is great (okay, 8,000 if you don’t count the 3,000 I gave away)'. Wow, so actually you sold 8,000 and not 11,000. Apart from this one line the author repeats over and over again about selling 11,000. But he didn't be sold 8,000 but constantly misrepresents that number everywhere. I don't know if his books are great or not but the hyped headline, inflated numbers and spammy feel of the blog post make me unwilling to try it.

kadavy 8y ago
Thanks for reading. I'm pretty open about the fact that "bestseller" is relatively meaningless, but that I use it anyway. Some people will say that you only have a "real" bestseller if NYT or WSJ say so. And, as described in the article, you could sell 3,000 99¢-cent ebooks in a week and be a WSJ bestseller. Well short of 11k or 8k for that matter. No guarantee you'd sell another book after that timeframe. Authors manipulate these lists all of the time. Especially NYT, which is curated. Just about anybody can get a "bestseller" tag on Amazon. Is that somehow not a bestseller? It's an argument in semantics. I talk about it more in this article: https://writingcooperative.com/yes-your-amazon-best-seller-is-a-real-best-seller-185832c8fcc4 https://writingcooperative.com/yes-your-amazon-best-seller-i...