If you choose to offer your book on Amazon, becoming an Amazon best-seller is a good idea. By reaching that milestone, your book gets seen by more potential customers, leading to more sales and ongoing best-seller status. But how exactly does this work, and how does having just one version of your book make it easier?
Great questions. Let’s answer them, shall we?
How Books Become Amazon Best-Sellers
Is your book fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or prose? You may think the answer is your book’s genre. While it’s part of your book’s genre, Amazon goes deeper. Much deeper.
On Amazon, you can categorize your book in the appropriate categories. And there are—well—quite a lot of categories from which to choose. How many categories does Amazon.com offer? That’s a mystery.
What isn’t a mystery is that to help your book become an Amazon Best-Seller, you don’t have to outsell all the other books on Amazon. You just have to outsell all the books in one of your book’s categories.
To do this, follow these steps:
- Choose your categories.* If you’re DIY publishing, Publisher Rocket is a great tool to help you do that. It’s what we use for all our books at Argyle Fox Publishing.
- Use the preorder phase to sell books. By letting readers preorder your book, your book can become a #1 New Release in a specific category.
- Keep selling books. Use the momentum from your book’s early success to maintain sales until you reach Amazon best-seller status.
*When choosing categories, don’t lie. A few years ago, authors gamed the system by picking categories that were easy to hit best-seller status, regardless of whether the categories applied to their books. Thankfully, Amazon has wizened up on the practice and now penalizes you if you use the wrong category. So, choose appropriately.
How A Single Version Boosts Your Book Status
It’s hard to decide between paperback, hardcover, or ebook. So, you publish in all three formats. After all, publishing in every format increases your readership, right? Maybe.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem with this offer-everything approach. It slows your rise to Amazon best-seller.
How?
Each of your book versions has a unique ISBN. When Amazon is determining what books are best-sellers, the Amazon algorithm doesn’t combine sales of all your book’s versions. Rather, the online store considers every ISBN a unique book title. If you’re trying to become a best-selling author, here’s how this might slow you down.
- Imagine that you must sell twenty-five copies of your book to be the #1 New Release in a book category.
- You sell fourteen paperback, sixteen hardcover, and three ebook copies of your book.
- This looks like thirty-three copies total, but it’s not. It’s fourteen, sixteen, and three.
- Since you didn’t sell twenty-five copies of any single version, your book isn’t listed as a #1 New Release, which makes it harder to reach best-seller status.
Is it impossible to hit best-seller status with multiple versions of your book? Of course not. But you can’t sell a single book if you never get your book off your computer. That’s where we come in. If you need help getting your book off your computer and into readers’ hands, it’s time to take the first step toward becoming a published author. Submit your manuscript for consideration today.