What is the Secret to being an Amazon Best Seller – without spending ANY money or doing ANY extra promotional work?
First you need a well written book that has a good title and an eye catching cover…obviously.
Once you have that…
…the SECRET is to put it in the RIGHT category.
By ‘right’ I don’t mean the most appropriate one. I mean the category in which it is easiest to beat the others. For example: my book, My Beautiful Psychosis is a memoir but if I listed it in the ‘biography’ and ‘women’ category I’d be up against Michelle Obama Becoming.
So how do you know which category to list it in to make sure it is a Best Seller?
First, I made a list of ALL the categories my book could fit into on Amazon. It was a systematic process because Amazon has categories within categories within categories like branches of a tree. I followed all the relevant branches until I could go no further, copying and pasting them into a document.
Each category has a No.1 Best Seller, a book that Amazon has given a special orange border with a #1 logo. In the Best Seller section of Amazon, I clicked on each of the categories to find its Best Seller. I scrolled down to the Product Details section of each Best Seller to find the Amazon Bestsellers Rank number. This number is where the book ranks on Amazon as a whole.
Then I used the Kindle Best Seller Calculator. By putting the Amazon Bestsellers Rank into the calculator, I found how many books per day that particular book was selling. The category with the lowest number of sales per day was the one that required the least amount of sales to beat.
Here’s my Vlog about it. The relevant section starts at 3′ and the secret to being an Amazon Best Seller is at: 4’44”
Most of categories my book could fit into sell hundreds and even thousands of copies per day but I found ONE that was possible to compete in. So My Beautiful Psychosis is listed in Tragic Life Stories. This is not a category I would have thought to list it in. But it is the category that has the least amount of sales per day in: sometimes it is 25, sometimes 13 and other times it is as low as 1. Now I’m sure I can beat that!
My Beautiful Psychosis: Making Sense of Madness is published by Aeon Books and is now available on Audible as a Audiobook.
