Book Marketing Plan [Become an Amazon Bestseller]Are you looking to become an Amazon bestselling author? This proven, 3-step book marketing plan can get you there. Learn how to leverage advertising and book-deal websites to drive a surge of traffic to your discounted Kindle book and reach a bestseller list.  Download my FREE guide for marketing a bestseller How to become an Amazon bestselling authorAmazon has a bestseller chart (the top 100 books) for each of its categories. These charts update multiple times per day as new information comes in. The books that appear on the charts, and their ranking, are based on two major factors:
 In general, a book enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, with a digital price discounted to $0.99, will have a very good chance of rising up a bestseller chart because fewer barriers stand in the way of readers ordering these books. A Kindle Unlimited order, which costs a reader nothing incrementally, carries just as much weight in bestseller calculations as a paid order. And all paid orders, whether for $0.99 or $14.99, carry the same weight. Price doesn’t matter. And, for the most part, people are more likely to buy a book that’s $0.99 versus one that’s more expensive. Whether your book is or is not in Kindle Unlimited, you can still do a price cut and up your odds of becoming a bestseller. Since Amazon bestseller rankings are not just determined by total orders, but the recency of those orders, I suggest you look at a timeline of no more than one week for a price-drop advertising campaign – a good window is five days. Step 1 - Create a Kindle Countdown DealTo include your book in Kindle Unlimited, you need to enroll it in KDP Select when you add it to Amazon's KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) self-publishing platform. If your book is enrolled in KDP Select, you also can run what's known as a Kindle Countdown Deal for it. On the Amazon US and UK sites, you can discount your book below $2.99 for a week, while keeping a 70% royalty on sales (vs. a 35% royalty). You're able to run these deals every 3 months. I recommend you create a Kindle Countdown Deal, and reduce your price to $0.99. If your book isn't enrolled in KDP Select, you can still drop the price to $0.99 and become a bestseller, however, you'll be keeping less of the royalties (35%). Step 2 - Leverage BookBub display adsOnce you've discounted your book, you want to let readers know about your price drop. A great way to do that is to run display ads on BookBub, a site millions of readers use on a daily basis to hear about discounted Kindle books. These ads appear inside of emails BookBub sends its subscribers. Step 3 - Leverage book deal sitesBookBub lets any author run display ads on its platform. Writers also have the ability to apply for what's known as a BookBub Featured Deal. If your book is selected, it will show up higher up in the daily-deal emails vs. display ads, which appear at the bottom. Since BookBub has a limited number of spaces in its daily emails, it's quite selective about what books are chosen. In general, for your book to be selected, you need a great cover, great description, and many positive reviews on Amazon. You can update your cover and description well after your book has been published on KDP. Before applying for a BookBub Featured Deal, consider enhancing your cover and description. My company, Galdi Media can help:
If your book isn't selected by BookBub, don't get upset. You can apply again after a month has passed. Also, many other deal sites are out there. They don't have the reach of BookBub, however, they're considerably less selective. If you have a quality cover and description, and at least 10 relatively positive reviews on Amazon, your book should stand a very strong chance for selection by most deal sites. In general, these sites aggregate daily Kindle discounts by genre. Every day, subscribers receive an email with links to buy discount books in the genre(s) they like. All of these sites drive traffic to your discounted book’s Amazon page. Instead of spending time scrolling through Amazon looking for price drops, readers can be notified of discounted titles directly. As an author running a price drop, you can pay deal-aggregation sites to feature your book in a daily email. The cost can range from around $30 all the way up to several hundred, for a BookBub Featured Deal. List of book deal promo sitesThough a lot of deal sites exist, I have seen the best results from a handful (listed below). If a site isn’t on my list, you can still of course consider it. I have not personally tried every deal site available and some great ones may be there that I simply haven’t used. Though I may have seen good results from the sites below does not mean they are all a fit for your book or even genre. Do not feel obligated to try any site unless it makes sense for your specific offer. The list:
 The crescendo strategy for Kindle book promotionWhen determining bestseller rankings, Amazon likes to see a rise in daily sales. So, if you happen to get accepted for a promo on all nine of the deal sites mentioned above, you should avoid booking them all on the same day. You would be better off spreading them out through your promo days. In addition, you want to build toward your feature on the sites where you expect the largest reach so your daily-sales number trends upward. Let’s say you’ve been accepted on all nine sites and are targeting a five-day promotion window (Monday through Friday). You would want your promo with the highest expected sales result to go on the last day (Friday). You should schedule the other promos through the week to crescendo to your largest reach on Friday. Here’s a way to do that, with the sites ranked from 1-9 based on the expected reach for your book:
Before you apply for promotions on deal sites, rank them based on how effective you feel they’ll be for your book. The rankings should primarily be based on how large of an audience a site has within your genre (they make this information public online). First, contact your site ranked 1 (likely BookBub) and see what date you’re able to secure. If you’re accepted, make a note of the date, and, when you contact other sites, suggest dates in a window four days prior to your site 1 promo. If you’re not accepted to site 1, repeat the process with 2, then 3, etc. I suggest you begin contacting the sites early, at least two weeks prior to the intended start of your promos. Since slots are limited, and many other authors want them, the less time you give yourself, the less flexibility you’ll have for date choice. Even with a sizable time cushion, you still may not be able to perfectly crescendo your promos from 9 up to 1 across consecutive days. If so, that’s okay. As long as you create a general sense of daily growth, you’ll have a good shot of reaching a bestseller list. Combining platform ads and deal site book promosDuring a five-day promo window, you should run display ads on BookBub in addition to participating in deal-site promos. Like deal-site promos, you want to achieve a daily growth trajectory with your BookBub display ads. The easiest way to do this is to simply increase your total budget through the week, daily. Ex:
How many copies do you need to sell to become an Amazon bestseller?Certain categories on Amazon are considerably more competitive than others. If your book happens to be in competitive categories (ex, within “thriller” or “romance”), you will need to sell quite a lot of copies to reach the charts. However, a quality combination of platform ads and deal-site promos can get you there. To gain a sense of how many books you need to sell a day to break into the top 10, or hit #1, on various bestseller lists, check out the Publisher Rocket tool. Upping your chances to reach a bestseller chartLay out your goals. Which Amazon categories do you want to become a bestseller in? Do you want to simply reach the list (ie, top 100), or are you hoping to be in the top 10? Whatever the case, the odds of attaining your goals will go up if you run ads on BookBub in addition to participating in as many deal-site promos as you can. How much money you spend on BookBub ads should be based on your goals, plus your personal financial situation. The more money you dedicate to ads, the higher the chance you’ll sell enough copies to hit a bestseller list, and climb up a bestseller list once you’re on it. However, you also want to be responsible with your personal finances. If you are low on cash, then advertising your way to a bestseller list may not be right for you, at least at this moment. However, if you have some money to spend, and really want to be a bestselling author, investing in ads has a proven track record. Enhance your author marketing platformThough you can theoretically become an Amazon bestselling author by only applying the marketing tips in this article, you can increase your chances of reaching, and rising up, the charts by strengthening your overall marketing strategy. Some key tips for your author platform:
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