How to make your book an Amazon bestseller

Part 12 of becoming an independent author

There’s a lot of discourse over the value of the term ‘bestseller’ nowadays mainly because it is allocated in a very arbitrary way to so many authors and books and no-one really knows what it means.

Similarly, there’s a lot of dismissal of a book that gets to number 1 in a category on Amazon, especially as some categories are so niche, that it only involves selling a handful of books.

Many people say ‘bestseller’ no longer means anything because so many authors use it. That may be true, but if it’s earned and you’ve been called a bestseller by someone else, by their measure, why should you not say it? And let’s face it, readers are smarter than they’re being given credit for with this discourse - they are not likely to be swayed by a book just because of a ‘bestseller’ status. And even if they are, is any real harm being done other than an indie author gaining another reader? Ultimately the proof is in the pudding and if your book doesn’t engage them, that’s a bigger issue than overuse of a word.

What I’ll discuss today is how I managed to co-ordinate a concerted marketing effort into making my YA Dystopian book, The Nameless, into a number 1 bestseller in two categories (stacked ones at that with the likes of The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games in it), number 3 in all Children’s Science Fiction books, as well as top 1500 books on Amazon overall.

And what it took with real quantification in terms of numbers, spend and return, as well as the overall profit from it.

The real trick to getting a bestseller badge (and ignore the scoffers for now - most of them haven’t had a bestseller badge, so it’s more jealousy than anything) is to sell a lot of books, either in print or e-book, overall a concentrated period of time, around 24-36 hours in my case.

Now you might argue that being 1500 hardly constitutes a bestseller, overall, but who is to say that only print sales, or only those in the top 10, or those that sell 1000 copies in a week, are the only ones who can say bestseller. Ultimately the term means to sell the best (most) in some defined finite time. If I sell more than The Maze Runner over a set period, should I not proudly mention this? Or should we all play small to the big books by big publishers and not rise above our station?

I think you know what I will be doing, and what you should really be doing, too.

But being a bestseller - that’s the outcome - as I always preach, it’s the process that really matters. The work you do in advance of something is what causes the effect that everyone sees.

Stacking promo deals

You may, or may not, have heard of the short promotional deals you can do with your e-book on Amazon where you can reduce your book in price, often to £0.99, or make it free for up to 7 days every quarter (if you’re enrolled in Kindle Unlimited).

Well, these are often posted about by authors on social media, and you’ve perhaps seen those ‘it’s only 99p on Amazon for a limited time’ etc.

Anyway, if you’re traditionally published author, that’s about the extent of what you can do - tell people about it.

But if you’re independently published, and therefore you retain all the royalties and not just a fraction, you can invest in these deals using big newsletter promotions.

Newsletter promotion sites

These are companies (sometimes small or very large) that have large or enormous mailing lists of readers who have signed up to get emails about cheap or free e-books.

It’s a good system for all involved really. You, the independent publisher (trad publishers can and do pay for these as well), can pay the company a fee (they range from double figure to triple figures for the bigger ones) to be included in their cheap or free mailing list on a certain day, coinciding with the day(s) that your book is reduced or free.

The reader gets a bunch of cheap e-books (that they may or may not read) and you get some (or a lot of) sales. The company also wins as they make the money from all the publishers paying them.

So the marketing strategy of many independently published authors is to stack these promotional newsletters for a particular day or two and really take advantage of the discounted e-book you’re offering.

These can generate hundreds or even thousands of sales in a very short period of time and often pay for themselves (ie the author makes more money than it cost them to be included in these promotional newsletters).

The specifics of my strategy

Now you know the basics of how these things work - here’s an insight into what I did more precisely.

Now, my YA is my bestseller by a long way. YA simply sells more than MG, even when not really pushing the YA. It’s really making me rethink my releases strategy and order to be honest.

So I went with that, and discounted it for a period just after Christmas until the New Year. I figured that lots of people get Kindles or other e-readers as presents, or maybe they have more time to read in that dead time between the 25th and 2nd. I know I do.

And then I went for the big fish. Bookbub.

If you haven’t heard of Bookbub before, this is the rather large tuna that is the most desirable of newsletters to be included in. It’s mailing list is HUGE

Anyway, I got accepted and it was to feature on the 30th December. So I input all the reductions to all the regions and also made sure those corresponded to what I had on my KDP dashboard and waited.

But I also decided to stack my deals and also did newsletter slots with Written Word Media (via Bargain Booksy), the Fussy Librarian and Goodkindles (I think!).

I also obviously posted about it in my own newsletter and socials, too.

In essence I created this eye of the storm on the 30th December where I knew I would sell hundreds of books.

The results

I spent in the region $350 (£270) on the promos and in return the sales were about £500 in that week and the days that followed (there’s always a tail with these promos, so best to count any sales in the week or two after as well). And there was about 440 books sold in the 48 hours or so of the promos, plus a bunch more in the tail, especially, weirdly, a whole bunch of paperback and hardbacks.

So it was profitable period, with the book being number 1 in two Amazon categories. At one point I’d sold about 250 books but was still not number 1, so it’s not an easy category. It was only as I passed 300 or so that it got to number 1.

One of the most interesting things about that intense promotional period is the long tail that comes with it.

There’s an immediate tail of good sales but even when you stop marketing - I have literally done nothing since then, not even posted about the book - the sales still come, albeit much less frequently and the kindle unlimited page reads are very regular.

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So I hope that was useful to get an insight into how I did that particular marketing tactic (if that’s the right word!) for my book.

I’ll try to do a few more of these in the future for various bits and pieces that I’ve done that have moved the counter, albeit not as intensely as this one did.

I’m not sure what I’ll talk about next time - if you’ve made it this far perhaps you can leave a message below to suggest a topic?

Until then…