[andrewhillman]

I believe NYT has a bookstore list for reporting orders. This is how the best selling books make it on this list. The buyer (someone tied to the book) probably knew the store was on the NYT list and made a massive order. The NYT will need to tweak things going forward. Any store telling people they are on the NYT Best Seller reporting list should be removed from the list.

[cratermoon]

The story specifically mentions that there were suspicious calls asking if a store was a NYT reporting store, followed by bulk orders with no delivery date.

[andrewhillman]

I was scratching my head because I didn't recall reading this. After dinner, I grabbed a glass of wine and I went back and read beyond the first 5 paragraphs plus the embedded tweets.You gotta do what you good do but don't get caught.

[leeoniya]

it's blackhat SEO, but offline (where it still works)

[wjnc]

From the OP: "Buying your way onto the bestseller list is not technically illegal, nor is it that hard if you know how."

It's a pretty awesome ploy, with one caveat: to make real money, somewhere, someone should produce something of value. Even if they offline kickstart this book into "#1 bestseller", at least the movie should be good enough for YA.