In this week’s Books Business Abundance Podcast, Marc Guberti, who is a USA Today and WSJ bestselling author, and who started his entrepreneurial journey at age eleven and currently has over 100,000 students in his programs, shared that the way to become a bestselling author is through collaboration. Marc’s bestselling book was a collaboration book with over twenty authors who teamed up and co-wrote it.
“It’s practically never just you (in paid as opposed to free bestseller campaigns) promoting your book for you to their audiences. You get maybe fifty people to promote your book, do the whole outreach in advance.” Marc said.
And if you aren’t collaborating on the book, then you should at least collaborate on the marketing. The way you do this is by getting people who have lists that would be interested in your book to promote your book to their lists in return for a favor from you.
Examples of what you could offer include: promoting their upcoming book to your audience, or having them on your podcast if you host one, or promoting them in your Facebook group- whatever it is that you could do for them that would benefit them and get them to agree to promote your book.
There are two types of bestseller promotion you do can, either Kindle or paperback books. The bestseller lists are complicated; some are ebook-specific, others are print specific. Some require you to make your book exclusive, for example, Kindle books in Amazon must be exclusive for ninety days, then you can renew or remove it.
Others require you to not make your book exclusive to Amazon. So, for Marc’s book, for instance, it was published on Barnes & Noble and got sales through that platform before they even set the pre-order up on Amazon (which can only be done up to three months before your publication date).
So, if you want to hit a bestseller list, know the requirements, and give yourself enough to plan your marketing strategy.
If you only have a short window, you can promote your book in Amazon and become a bestseller quickly, but if you want to get on a big- publication bestseller list, it will require months of planning.
And most authors don’t plan far enough in advance to do a big-publication bestseller promotion. But luckily there are benefits to Amazon promotions as well. (If you missed it, I did a podcast and an article on this topic.You can listen to the podcast at http://ellenlikes.com/amazon-promotions or read the article at: http://ellenlikes.com/amazon-benefits)
To do a paid promotion in Amazon in one or more categories is not that difficult to do, according to Marc.
He explained it this way, “To become a number-one bestseller, research the categories. See what the number-one books are for different categories and their rankings. Pick a category with not that much demand that relates to your book, and then drive a ton of sales to it on day one.
You don’t even need that many sales. If you get three to five sales per day for a week for subcategories, that’s enough to put you to number one. It just depends that the categories you pick on Amazon.”
But whether you decide to go for a big-publication bestseller list or an Amazon category, the key is collaboration. The more people you can enlist to help you push your book up the charts the easier it will be to make your book a #1 bestseller.
Adapted from this week’s podcast with Marc Guberti on How to Break Through to Success (Growing Your Influence & Getting On Bestseller Lists)
www.BooksBusinessAbundance.com/podcast/22
Ellen Violette is an award-winning book and business coach & Grammy-nominated songwriter, who helps entrepreneurs, authors, coaches, consultants, who value their time and want only the best, become #1 bestselling authors and grow high-income businesses.
Ellen is also a multiple International #1 bestselling author, 3-time eLit award winner, podcast host, regular contributor to Published! Magazine, CEO of Create a Splash and Grammy-nominated songwriter.Her company is a full-service company for book services for authors and entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, trainers, and speakers. It also delivers done-for-you services. To learn more, go to www.booksbusinessabundance.com
