Become an Amazon Best Seller!

A couple of summers ago my novel The Perfect Shoe, hit the Amazon Best Seller's List for African American Romance. You can imagine my excitement as I watched my ranking move hour-by-hour closer to the number one slot, then finally seized it at around 12 am.


It was a hard day's work, but it gave me a title that can't be taken away - I'm a best selling author. Once you become an Amazon bestselling author you can forevermore be referred to as a “bestselling author.”


So how can you do it?  Well first of all, Amazon updates their numbers every hour. This means we must sell as many books as we can in the shortest amount of time. Nobody knows how many copies it takes to hit the bestseller mark because Amazon has its own proprietary algorithm, but if you have joint venture partners, with a bit of planning, you can engineer a mass email campaign with incentive bonuses to buy your book from Amazon on a certain day. Your book becomes a bestseller “by rate” rather than numbers of copies sold. Your book becomes an Amazon bestseller in one of your categories using this method.

Launch an Email Campaign - use your mailing lists to launch a book release campaign, asking your contacts to purchase your book on a specific day and include an incentive for purchases.. You may want to send a pre-launch message, to help your supporters understand what you are trying to accomplish and give them time, if they need to fit the price of your book into their spending plan. 

Use Social Networking - There are great tools out there that will allow you to pre-plan your posts, and can be set up to routinely post to your profile as a reminder to purchase on a specific day. These tools will allow you to post to multiple social networking sites at once.  No need to log into various places, and your message is consistent.

Create a Sense of Urgency - Be clear in communicating that you would like your supporters to purchase your book on a specific day.  It's discouraging to try to reach this goal to have people to say "Okay, I will get it next week." 

Communicate your goal - Let your supporters know exactly what you are trying to accomplish. Tell them you are striving to be an best seller. They will be more likely to help you than if you just say, "can you buy my book today."

Don't forget to reach out to people personally. Scroll through your phone and look at all of those numbers you've collected. Most of them already know that you're an author, but it's likely that there are some who have never purchased your work.  But how many of them will support you if you clearly communicate your goal? You'd be surprised. Keep in mind that the worse thing someone can say to you is "no."

Could you use more help like this?  Sign up for my literary consulting services priced at only $1 a day. 

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