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36
Steve Weber
customer who buys Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times tends to buy
the following books, in precisely this order:
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
1776
His Excellency: George Washington
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey
Easy to see the connection, isn’t it? These five titles are the Also-
Bought list, the guts of Amazon’s recommendation engine. (You can see
the Also-Bought list for any book on Amazon under the heading
Customers who bought this item also bought….”) Customers
who’ve bought only some of the books on the list soon receive
recommendations for the rest in personalized e-mails or on the Web site.
This results in tons of sales, and Amazon has it down to a science.
Bestseller Campaigns, however, throw a monkey wrench into this
recommendation process. Instead of Amazon recommending similar
books, it spits out unrelated books. For example, one Bestseller
Campaign book, Hidden Souls of Words, is categorized
Religion/Spirituality but its Also-Bought list includes completely
different kinds of books:
The Attractor Factor: 5 Easy Steps for Creating Wealth…
How to Be Wildly Wealthy FAST: A Step-by-Step Guide…
Turning Passions into Profits: Three Steps to Wealth and Power
The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness…
Life’s Missing Instruction Manual: The Guidebook You Should…
What’s the connection? There isn’t any, except they’re all Bestseller
Campaign books. They were all pitched, high-pressure, perhaps to the
same lists of people, no matter what their tastes in books. A few people
bought, but some of them may have wanted the “valuable free bonuses,”
not the book.
And now we see the real problem: Amazon isn’t recommending
Hidden Souls of Words to anyone who actually might want to read it—
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