'Best-sellers' for sale: Korea’s small book market leaves rankings open to manipulation 

A scandal involving best-selling author Lee Ki-ju has revived scrutiny of an old publishing trick in Korea: buying books in bulk to climb the best-seller charts.

Lee was indicted without detention last Wednesday on charges of purchasing 1,631 copies of his 2024 essay collection “Ordinary Words.” Lee’s earlier works include the best-seller “The Temperature of Language” (2016).

Industry insiders say bulk buying has not disappeared — it has simply grown harder to detect. The days of simply traveling from bookstore to bookstore to rack up sales are largely gone. 

“That’s the old way of doing it,” said one publishing company head, referring to Lee’s alleged purchases. “These days, there are all sorts of ways to do it, including through book clubs.”

Much of the activity is therefore difficult to spot. “Only a handful of cases surface publicly,” said Kim Hyeon-jong, an executive at the Korean Publishers Association. “There are plenty of others happening quietly through reading communities and book review events.”

One of the newer tactics surfaced in a case that ended with a fine in July.

A publisher commissioned a marketing agency to promote a book. The agency held cultural events and book club gatherings where attendees were asked to purchase the book from designated bookstores and were later reimbursed. The arrangement generated sales of more than 1,000 copies.

The Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea, which monitors bulk-buying practices, determined that the behavior amounted to a form of sales manipulation and filed a criminal complaint against the publisher's head and others in January last year. A lower court ultimately found the defendants guilty.

Best-seller status carries commercial weight, but Korea’s small publishing market makes the rankings particularly vulnerable to manipulation. A relatively small investment in bulk purchases can send a title quickly climbing up the charts. Industry insiders generally estimate that sales of more than 300 copies a day are enough to put a book among the top 20 on a major bookstore's overall best-seller list.

Actor Park Jeong-min, who also runs the publishing house Muze, discussed the industry's challenges during an appearance on tvN's “You Quiz on the Block” (2018–) last year.

“I looked up how many copies of Kim Keum-hee's ‘First Summer, Wanju’ [2025] had sold in a day after seeing that it had become a best-seller, and it was only three hundred and something copies,” Park said.

A book selling of 100 to 200 copies a day at Kyobo Book Centre or Yes24 can make the retailer’s best-seller list, while category rankings can require only a few dozen daily sales.

“Many people are shocked that it took only about 1,600 copies, but for anyone familiar with the dire state of the publishing market, the figure is hardly surprising,” novelist Kim Byeol-ah, chair of the Gangwon Art & Culture Foundation, wrote on Facebook on Thursday, referring to Lee's indictment. 

After Lee's case became public, the publication distribution review committee sent an official notice to publishers and bookstores on the same day.

“We believe various forms of bulk buying are currently taking place in the publishing market,” the committee said. “We ask those in the publishing industry to refrain from bulk-buying practices that disrupt the orderly distribution of books.”

The relatively small number of books involved also makes suspicious purchases difficult to detect.

“If you’re looking at only a few dozen purchases a day, it’s extremely difficult to determine whether that amounts to bulk buying,” said an official at the Korea Publication Industry Promotion Agency.

Another complication is that bulk buying is increasingly disguised as ordinary promotion. Book club events and review campaigns can drive purchases, making it hard to tell where legitimate marketing ends and sales manipulation begins.

Even when a case raises suspicion, the committee has no compulsory investigative authority. Thus, it is nearly impossible to obtain hard evidence such as records showing that buyers were reimbursed.

The investigation into Lee's case began only after a whistle-blower at the publishing company involved in the alleged bulk buying came forward.

As a result, the committee refers only one or two cases a year for criminal investigation. Over the past three years, just two bulk-buying cases have resulted in court rulings.

Bookstores have also taken steps to police suspicious purchases.

“If a member buys multiple copies of the same book, we count them as a single purchase,” a Kyobo Book Centre representative said. “We also alert the committee when unusually large orders from nonmembers are shipped to the same address.”

Such measures, however, have struggled to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated methods for manipulating sales.

Some in the publishing industry are now calling for changes to how best-seller rankings are compiled and released.

“Compiling and publishing sales figures on a nationwide basis could largely neutralize bulk buying aimed at creating a best-seller,” said Baek Won-geun, CEO of the Book and Society Research Institute.

In the United States, the New York Times Best Seller List is widely seen as the benchmark. Its rankings are based on sales data collected from a confidential sample of bookstores nationwide.

The Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea collects sales data from major and independent bookstores through its integrated publishing distribution network to compile best-seller rankings.

But Baek said the system does not provide the information readers actually want.

“They combine everything, including study materials and children’s books, and don’t provide rankings by category,” Baek said. “That isn’t the information readers want, so major bookstores have no choice but to rely on their own lists.”

BY YOON SUNG-MIN [[email protected]]