What’s
the marketing formula for getting a book to be a bestseller? Is there such a formula, and if so, how does
it get applied?
Let’s
start with a few simple observations and questions:
·
Great
books don’t automatically become bestsellers
·
Many
bestsellers are mediocre books
·
There
are many bestseller lists – which ones do you want to make, how high do you
want to get, and how long will you last on them?
·
Being
a bestseller can generate more sales and open doors to authors to get more
speaking gigs, book deals, movie deals, media exposure, etc. It can also do nothing at all.
There
are several ways to get on a bestseller list and for now, let’s focus on the
one that’s driven by a lot of publicity.
The
easiest way (but nothing’s easy) to get on a bestseller list is to generate
pre-orders. This means months before
your book is officially released, people can buy it. They go to a store or
online at amazon and pay in advance. The
book’s delivered around the publication date.
All of the pre-orders count towards the first week of sales. This gives you a lot of time to build on that
number.
For some genres and bestseller lists, such as Non-Fiction, Hardcover for Publishers Weekly, just 3,000 sales could be enough to make its bestseller list. If you take three months to build this up – that’s fewer than 250 books per week. That’s your best shot!
For some genres and bestseller lists, such as Non-Fiction, Hardcover for Publishers Weekly, just 3,000 sales could be enough to make its bestseller list. If you take three months to build this up – that’s fewer than 250 books per week. That’s your best shot!
The
next best way to make a bestseller list is at smaller media outlets. For instance,
some newspapers publish their own regional or local bestseller lists. Making The Miami Herald Top 10 could be doable, especially if your title particularly appeals to the local area.
Online,
the easiest way to get on a list is at BN.com, since it requires fewer sales to
rise up its charts vs. Amazon. But even
if you pursue a higher Amazon ranking, you just need one good hour. Yes, sales are calculated hourly, so if you
sell, say 120 copies in an hour through some special promotion, you may, for a
moment, crack the top 50 or 10 of all books being sold. Further, they have many genre and subgenre
lists that with just a few dozen sales here and there, could be yours to
own. You could legitimately say you’re
an Amazon bestseller if you rank in the top of a genre. Let’s say there’s a genre like Non-Fiction/Travel/Photography
and your book is 12th for an hour.
You are a bestselling author.
So
how can publicity help?
Any
time you do a concentrated, targeted sales effort, you stand a better chance of
gathering enough sales to qualify for a list.
This is why all-day blog tours can be effective, as well as all-morning radio
tours where you are interviewed like by 20 radio stations. This is why when a book is about to be
released, like a movie, the premiere week is filled with one media interview
after another.
Authors
can call in favors and time their bulk sales efforts and social media blasts to
hit simultaneously. Remember, just a few
dozen or hundred book orders in a concentrated time period could boost you onto
a list.
So
many books don’t sell beyond one thousand copies, but even such titles could
become bestsellers if they time and group their sales.
A
winning formula might look like this:
·
Encouraging
friends and family to pre-order books.
·
Soliciting
bulk sales from organizations.
·
Doing
lots of book signings during the book’s launch week.
·
Participating
in blog tours and radio tours during the launch week.
·
Getting
strong reviews before the book releases.
Good
luck!
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