The reason why you want to know how to run a bestseller campaign on Amazon goes beyond bragging rights. When done right, it will provide a significant boost to your book’s visibility and sales, as well as help garner book reviews. I am speaking here about Amazon Kindle Bestseller Campaigns.
Before jumping into the hows of a bestseller campaign… at the risk of stating the obvious, you want to start by writing a great book.
Visibility
When set up right, your book will show up high in the categories your potential readers are browsing in… this way it can be discovered. Amazon is a giant search engine, and like Google, people don’t go beyond the first page to search for results, so ranking high matters. In the case of Amazon, it is the opposite – a low number ranks higher with #1 being at the top. It is key to getting found by new prospective buyers.
Your book can also show up in the Hot New Releases section and potentially other sections that will give it additional visibility in front of your target audience.
Categories and Keywords
Your category and keyword research, when done right, along with optimizing your An optimized listing, will help your book continue to rank well long beyond the bestseller campaign.
When I refer to optimizing your listing – I mean carefully selecting your categories and keywords to help your book get discovered, and taking advantage and using all of the 2 categories and 7 keywords Amazon allows a book.
The optimization of a book listing is a combination of art and science. Sometimes authors see their book as belonging in a certain category, which may not be the ideal one, nor the one or the only one their ideal reader will search in. There are probably a number of ways your reader will browse for books like yours… so remain open. Research can help you identify the optimal categories and keywords. You can conduct your research by polling your target audience, researching similar books on Amazon, using a keyword tool, or hiring an expert.
You can always tweak or change your categories, however, if you aren’t sure why your book isn’t ranking the way you would like, changing the categories and keywords without getting professional input, is a bit like playing the lottery, and leaving the result to chance.
The momentum of a bestseller campaign is valuable on Amazon as it gives you a number of sales. It also boosts your book’s ranking and visibility. Keeping your promotion going beyond the initial campaign can really solidify your book rankings for an extended period. We continue to run a promotional campaign for a few days after the Bestseller campaign. Keeping the price at .99, we see steady sales, increased reviews, and long-term rankings boost. The books that have used this strategy continue to rank and bring in sales month after month with no additional promotion.
What Not To Do – Credibility Busters
- Beg or hound friends and family to buy your book. Instead, join a number of book groups that allow you to post your promotion, or hire a service or professional to run your campaign.
- Claim bestseller status when your book has no reviews listed. Think about it, is it credible that a book would become a bestseller and no one would have reviewed it? Instead, get a few reviews before running your bestseller campaign.
- Post your book online with the bestseller seal on it, before its even published [if it somehow happens to pass Amazon scrutiny this way] before you even start your campaign or reach bestseller status. Instead, hire a graphic designer [a Fiverr for $5] to add the graphic, and upload a new cover once you have actually achieved bestseller status.
- No Author page. Amazon gives you this great free marketing tool with Author Central, so why not take advantage and set it up before promoting your book.
Find out about our done for you bestseller campaigns here