The recent start of the Summer Olympics called to mind a night, several years ago, when I had drinks with a local entrepreneur who’d sold his company for a life-changing amount of money and then turned his attention to helping Chattanooga grow.
During the course of the conversation, he told me about how he once got Gary Vaynerchuk to speak at a conference in town, and how, in exchange for this appearance, Gary negotiated the bulk purchase of his latest book.
“So now I have about 4,000 copies of Gary’s book sitting on pallets in a warehouse,” the entrepreneur concluded, as a kind of punch line.
I hung on that detail because, at the time, I’d never heard of such a blatant instance of gaming the best-seller rankings. Gary must’ve decided it was more valuable to add “best-selling author” to his résumé than it was to have the equivalent amount of money in his bank account, so he hired a ghostwriter to produce a book and then bartered with acquaintances to juice its sales. He now freely refers to himself as a “6x NYT Best-Selling Author.”