Becoming an Amazon Best Seller

Becoming an Amazon Best Seller is not as hard as you think. Amazon gives an author plenty of free tools to figure out how to get their books into the best seller’s list for their particular category. To do this all a writer needs is one free tool to dig out the gems. That free tool is Amazon itself.

If you go to Amazon, click on the Amazon Kindle Store you will see a large listing of categories. Each category contains its own best sellers list. Now to figure out where the categories are at, you will need to drill down deeper into the sub categories to find out your competition and whether or not you can get your books into the best seller position.

Below is An Example of How to Become An Amazon Best Seller

In the example below, I brought up the category called HUMOR/CARTOONS. In this category we see there are 726 eBooks. The amount of eBooks are within a range we can compete in for this category. Yet there is still a little more work to do before we can figure if we can breach the best sellers list for the category.

Now what we need to do is figure out how many books are ranking within the first 100 spots of the category. To do this we need to go into the first two pages and dig out the numbers. In the example below the first book is ranked number one for the category. To compete your book will need to either sell more books a month or get a ton of reviews. You still have a chance to rank in the best sellers for the category because there are not many competing books and your book will have what Amazon is looking for to rank you high up and get you the traffic needed to over take the competition.

After going into each of the books within the first two pages, you will have a good idea how hard or how easy it will be to get your book on the first page and into the best category list. Not many books that are listed on page two of the results will be best sellers, normally those books are on the first page. But we need the information from the page two to get the over all picture.

Keep in mind you may not have the staying power to continue selling a lot of books, yet your position in Amazon will remain somewhat constant. But our objective here is not to sell a lot of books over the long term. We want to drive a lot of interest fast to gain an upward movement into the best seller’s area.

Now to get to the first page, a handful of reviews and enough interest to grab a best seller’s spot, you need to first ensure the name of the category is in your title. For example, in this category I would name a book something in the way of “Cartoons: Humor and Illustrations to …”  you can fill in the blanks. What I did was put the word “Cartoons” in the title and that is what Amazon needs to get a book categorize properly.

Next you want your book in the KDP select program. Sell it for free for one to two days. This is start a traffic avalanche right to your book. I have done this a number of times and hit the number two spot for the overall best seller’s Kindle list. It is not hard to do. After the two days are over, set your price to .99 for the next five days and contact anyone you know who can read and review your book. I have hit the best seller’s list with just two reviews. So don’t worry if you don’t get many reviews.

After the five days are over, set the book for no less than $2.99 and enjoy the residual income and best seller’s rank. The more books you write with this method, the more readers will get to know you and the easier it will be to immediately gain best seller status for your books.

About Dustin Costa