How to Become a Big-Publication or Amazon #1 Bestselling Author
Marc Guberti, USA Today and WSJ bestselling author believes that creating a #1 bestseller happens when people collaborate. That’s how he became a #1 bestselling author; he teamed up with over twenty other authors to co-write the book.
“It’s practically never just you promoting your book for you to their audiences. You get maybe fifty people to promote your book, do the whole outreach in advance.” Marc said.
And if you aren’t collaborating on the book, then you should at least collaborate on the marketing. The way you do this is by getting people who have lists that would be interested in your book to promote your book to their lists in return for a favor from you.
Examples of what you could offer include: promoting their upcoming book to your audience, or having them on your podcast if you host one, or promoting them in your Facebook group- whatever it is that you could do for them that would benefit them and get them to agree to promote your book.
There are two types of bestseller promotion you do can, either Kindle or paperback books. The bestseller lists are complicated; some are ebook-specific, others are print specific. Some require you to make your book exclusive, for example, Kindle books in Amazon must be exclusive for ninety days, then you can renew or remove it.
Others require you to not make your book exclusive to Amazon. So, for Marc’s book, for instance, it was published on Barnes & Noble and got sales through that platform before they even set the pre-order up on Amazon (which can only be done up to three months before your publication date).
So, if you want to hit a bestseller list, know the requirements, and give yourself enough time to plan your marketing strategy.
If you only have a short window, you can promote your book in Amazon and become a bestseller quickly that way, but if you want to get on a big- publication bestseller list, it will require months of planning.
And most authors don’t plan far enough in advance to do a big-publication bestseller promotion. But luckily, there are benefits to Amazon promotions as well. (You can learn more about the benefits at: http://ellenlikes.com/amazon-promotions or read the article at: http://ellenlikes.com/amazon-benefits)
To do a paid promotion in Amazon in one or more categories is not that difficult to do, according to Marc.
He explained it this way, “To become a number-one bestseller, research the categories. See what the number-one books are for different categories and their rankings. Pick a category with not that much demand that relates to your book, and then drive a ton of sales to it on day one.
You don’t even need that many sales. If you get three to five sales per day for a week for subcategories, that’s enough to put you to number one. It just depends that the categories you pick on Amazon.”
But whether you decide to go for a big-publication bestseller list or an Amazon category, the key is collaboration. The more people you can enlist to help you push your book up the charts the easier it will be to make your book a #1 bestseller.
Adapted from this week’s podcast with Marc Guberti on How to Break Through to Success (Growing Your Influence & Getting On Bestseller Lists)