A book promotion "don't do"

There are some things you shouldn't do for book promotion. Here's a question that just came to me, via email, from a "prospective book publicity client":

Hello Dear,
I am an author who is currently working on a book and I wonder if you offer a service where you buy 500 -100 copies of a book to increase the sales rank of an author?

Kind Regards
XXXXXX [I have masked the name of the author to protect his/her identity)

Because of the odd language, I suspected that one of two things is true about the sender of the email. Either the email was written by someone for whom English isn't a first language, or the author isn't playing with a full set of Legos. Or, perhaps, both of those things are true.

Anyway, here is the reply I fired off to the author:

In a word, no. I don't engage in practices I consider unethical.

Stacey Miller
S. J. Miller Communications
www.bookpr.com

*sighing* I know we all want to sell books, and our ranking in online bookstores does matter. However, there's a way to promote books, and then there are book promotion ploys to avoid. Hiring a book promotion specialist to purchase books from a bookstore (a traditional bookstore or an online bookstore) is, plain and simply, a dishonest practice, and this book publicist would never even consider it.

Hopefully, no book publicist would.