WASHINGTON
The Raw Story
By Scott Kaufman
Monday, March 10, 2014
According to documents obtained by WORLD, a Seattle pastor spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars of his church’s money to put his book on The New York Times bestseller list.
The documents indicate that Mark Driscoll, the founding pastor of Mars Hill Church, and one of the church’s elders, John Sutton Turner, paid ResultSource Inc. (RSI) $210,000 “to conduct a bestseller campaign for your book, Real Marriage on the week of January 2, 2012. The bestseller campaign is intended to place Real Marriage on The New York Times bestseller list for the Advice How-To list.”
WORLD reporter Warren Cole Smith told KOMO News that “[t]he idea was to make it look like all of these books were spontaneously bought by individuals.”
Smith added that “[a]ll the major bestseller lists discourage the practice and they put safeguards in place to prevent people buying their way onto the New York Times bestseller list.”
The contract signed by church elder Turner — obtained by Warren Throckmorton — states that RSI needed the church “to provide a minimum of 90 different addresses for shipping the books to the author’s clients for the bulk purchases. The addresses need to be spread around the country with no more than 3 addresses per state [because] the NYT bestseller list requires a minimum of 90 geographically disperse addresses.”
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