This guy became a 'best-selling author' in just 5 minutes — here's how he did it

Brent Underwood

Brent Underwood was fed up with shady authors gaming the online publishing industry to attain "best-seller" status, so he put his foot down — literally.

Last month, Underwood spent $2.97 and five minutes of his time on Amazon publishing the e-book "Putting My Foot Down: A Book Featuring My Foot" — a pageless novel featuring a lone cover photo Underwood snapped of his left foot. 

Within minutes, Underwood's opus had become an Amazon best-seller.

His plan worked. The troll had won.

As Underwood now recalls to Tech Insider, his plan was borne out of frustration at the online publishing industry. Once an honor to have your work deemed a "best-seller," the title has since been inflated the point of meaningless, Underwood says.

Scores of savvy marketers, for instance, offer programs that promise to help people become "best-selling" authors, despite not clearly defining who would bestow that title. According to Underwood, many may use similar tactics that he used — albeit less extreme — to become best-selling authors themselves, a title they can then peddle to recruit new business.

For these services, people may charge upwards of $3,300 to help people reach the coveted, if poorly understood, best-seller list. And rarely, Underwood says, do they deliver on that pricey promise.

"I knew what they were doing," he says. "I knew they were just doing this Amazon best-seller game where they'd pop on for an hour, sell a bunch of books, screenshot that, and call themselves a best-selling author for the rest of their life."

Fed up, Underwood wanted in.

Brent UnderwoodFirst, Underwood took a picture of his foot. Then he uploaded it to Amazon as the cover photo for his debut masterpiece, "Putting My Foot Down."

Realizing he'd have a better shot at it becoming a best-seller if he assigned it to a niche genre — a feature Amazon lets any self-publisher control — the book became the latest work to hit the scene in both the "Transpersonal" world and the realm of "Freemasonry & Secret Societies." 

He set the price at $0.99, bought one copy for himself, and told his friends to buy two more.

"An hour and a half, two hours later, it was already number one in the Transpersonal category, and Amazon throws up the '#1 best-seller' banner," Underwood says. "I knew it wasn't going to take very many copies. I didn't know it was going to take three."

Brent UnderwoodUnderwood may be a best-selling author, but his glory was short-lived. Amazon removed the book shortly after he wrote a piece in The Observer explaining how the world's largest retailer just got played.

But every best-selling author needs a follow-up to his masterpiece, so with the help of the indie blog Thought Catalog, Underwood took 30 more photos of his foot and had them bound in an actual paperback book, contract and everything.

That book is still available on Amazon, this time with thoughtfully designed cover art, author blurbs, and press clippings — all celebrating the author's brilliant writerly mind.

Brent UnderwoodThe whole point of his project, Underwood says, was to question what constitutes a legitimate book now that the internet makes it possible to sell whatever you want.

He points to the book "Everything Men Know About Women" by Dr. Alan Francis, in which every page is blank, as a popular example that nonsense can still be considered literary.

"It became a higher-level thing of 'Well, what's a book?'" he says. "And who is Amazon to decide what is and what isn't a book when they have all these other things in that category?"

Though he wasn't trying to effect any real change, Underwood says one of those shady marketers must have seen his piece in the Observer. Before his experiment, he says he came across a site that promised best-seller status "Even if You Have No Book Ideas, Writing Skills, or Any Clue Where To Start" in a "5 Phase Formula." That site is no longer active.

Another woman emailed him saying she was planning on entering into business with one such marketer, but read Underwood's piece and backed out.

As for the sequel to "Putting My Foot Down," he says there are no real plans to follow up on the book's initial success, but he always has one safe option if he decides to pursue it.

"All the photos thus far have been of my left foot, but the right foot never gets any attention," he says. "And that's what keeps me balanced."

Brent Underwood