It’s easy to take figures at face value. That’s especially so when they’re printed on paper or even on a screen.

But dig slightly deeper and you’ll often find a can of worms involved in boosting sales figures.

Let’s have a look at a few – online and offline…

Using free books to create best sellers

This is what sparked this post.

Depending on when you’re reading this, the free book may or may not still be available.

But here’s an image of the sign-up part of the page:

The book was being offered “free” but asked for $7.95 towards post and packing.

Compared with Amazon, that’s a fairly hefty charge for postage but that did cover anywhere in the world so it sounds reasonable.

I don’t know the precise figures but my guess is that this is what’s known as a self liquidating offer where most – or hopefully all – the costs are covered.

Of course, there are upsells as well – everything from an audio version of the book upwards.

And the publisher gets fresh emails on their mailing list.

And – important for the purposes of this article – they get the social proof of the book being a best seller. Not to mention the potential for testimonials from lots of people who’ve bought the book and maybe even read it.

I’ve seen this technique used before for boosting perceived sales.

It works nicely.

The book itself is almost a red herring. By the time it gets printed and sent out about a month after it’s been ordered, chances are most of the readership will have moved on and will put it to one side to “read later”.

That will probably include me. It’s certainly happened with a couple of the other free-except-for-postage books that I’ve bought. The only one I read was from Frank Kern and that was because he offered an online version immediately after purchase. That way I got the instant gratification from the purchase and a copy that I could possibly read later as well.

The book will also be able to claim that thousands of copies have been already been distributed. It’s unlikely it will use the phrase given away but I’m sure there will be the implication that they’ve been bought even if the lawyers make sure that isn’t said outright.

Even before the online revolution, I used to occasionally get free paperback books. There were offers in magazines and elsewhere. So this isn’t a new way of boosting sales figures.

It happens with newspapers a lot…

Here in the UK, Waitrose give away an estimated million free newspapers a week. The only requirement is a fairly low minimum spend – and that can include the price of the newspaper.

It’s unclear who is paying for these free newspapers but my guess is that it’s not Waitrose.

My guess is that the copies are used to boost the circulation figures of the newspapers. After all, these are “paid” sales in as much as the sale goes through the till. But then it’s immediately credited back as a discount when the customer presents their loyalty card.

You might ask what’s in it for the newspapers?

The answer is definitely in the phrase “circulation figures”.

Advertisers pay according to the circulation of a newspaper or magazine.

All things being equal, the higher the circulation, the higher the advertising cost.

The marginal cost to a newspaper of printing more copies is low – a bit more ink, a few more dead trees, slightly more weight in the lorry sending it across the country. But the revenue increase from higher priced adverts is attractive.

Again, the supermarket isn’t the only place the newspapers are effectively given away for free – hotels, airlines, etc often do this. But those aren’t paid-for sales and are usually reported separately so that advertisers know the copies aren’t ones that people have paid for.

And elsewhere

Sites like Udemy show the number of students enrolled in their courses.

When you go to their site, you see that figure and the retail price.

But you don’t know how many people paid the full price, how many paid a discounted price (Udemy regularly run promotions) and how many joined for free before the price was introduced or changed.

It’s a guessing game.

Nothing wrong with that – if you’re an author of a course on Udemy (and elsewhere – I’m not picking on them deliberately and they tend to have good quality control and good courses) you can offer it to potential students free or cheap. It helps build credibility and once you’ve got one course you can announce your next course to your current students.

Amazon Kindle authors are encouraged to give away books for free – they’re allowed a set number of days to do this in each promotional period.

Not to mention Amazon’s offer of free Kindle books to Prime members.

It’s a good technique and it helps push books into the best seller lists. So much so that Amazon changed how they treated these free “sales” so that they didn’t distort the figures quite as much.

What does this mean for you?

As a buyer, it means you need to use caveat emptor a lot.

Snake oil salesmen have been around for years – they’ve just moved from offline to online.

Screenshots are easy to fake – less easy if they’re recorded live on video but even that’s probably not too difficult for a techie to get round.

Sales figures as we’ve just seen only show some of the detail.

People can buy likes on Facebook – even though it’s almost certainly against terms and conditions.

Tweets and retweets are available.

Any figure is subject to distortion.

As a seller, it means you need to work out how you can use this to your advantage.

If you’ve got a following on places like Facebook, maybe you can ethically bribe some of those followers to help promote you. An exclusive report or video would work nicely for that.

Put your thinking cap on.

Because if you don’t, you can guarantee some of your competitors will.

If you’d like to add your thoughts, use the comments box below.

Naturally I’d appreciate it if you’d use the social buttons to Tweet or add this to Facebook or wherever 🙂

And if you’d like more help to implement these ideas, contact me.