I entered the book marketing world falling for a scam. Now, I’m grateful for it as ShelfLife wouldn’t exist if that never happened.
That scam was thinking that becoming a “Bestseller” was going to mean that I had real people reading and learning from my book. Turns out, all you need is to be listed in an obscure category like “keyboarding” and have 10 people purchase your book on the same day in order to become an Amazon Bestseller. A lot of the people (not all) that offer bestseller packages use fake accounts and email lists of non-serious readers who will download a book for free.
It doesn’t stop there. You name the list, and there is someone out there who has figured out how to hack the numbers and get you on lists from USA Today to the NYT. These packages can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000.
Now, if your goal is to increase your speaking fees, or leverage that “bestseller title” to get interviews and media placements then sure – it might be worth it. My warning is simply not to expect paying for one of these packages to mean that real people are reading your book.
But, when you work to hit the lists legitimately and run a campaign properly, it’s the activity and motion of hitting the standards that is the biggest value of hitting the status of a bestseller list. Instead of checking if off, you’re authentically doing the work. It’s much harder to do the work than just paying someone to do it for you. It’s about the intrinsic value you get from doing the work to hit one of the lists. Even if you miss the list, your company, organization, or presence will still have grown because of the legit marketing you will do to hit a list.
Long story short, don’t confuse being a bestseller as the benefit of being a bestseller.
3 Secrets
- Different lists are also read by different types of people. The WSJ list which has gone away (for now) is for business readers. The NYT list is read mostly by people looking at the kids lists or fiction lists and some high level non-fiction books. The USA Today list is read mostly by readers looking for health and fitness books. A lot of people try to make the NYT list as it’s one of the most historically running lists but being on a list that doesn’t have your reader persona, won’t really move additional sales.
- For those curious if they can hit the standards to hit the NYT lists, here they are currently but do keep in mind they do change often. Also, the NYT Bestsellers list is actually a sophisticated poll that justifies why certain books should be on the list and others should not be. They don’t go off of pure sales because of the fact that it can be easy to fake sales. They are looking to validate the sales and see if they’re legitimate or not.
1. Retail distribution. In any given week they are looking for you to have 8,000-10,000 sales from bookstores. That means having 15,000-20,000 units on bookstore shelves.
2. Pre-Sales: A minimum of 20,000 presales to shoot for 7,500-10,000 sales per week for a few weeks. The goal is to have enough pre-sales to be able to direct some of those sales to the right retailers in the right time frame.
3. Ebooks: Have 10,000 ebook sales.
4. Online Conversation: 350 Blogs, 90 Podcasts, 90 Vloggers, 50,000 consumers on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter talking about the book.
5. Traditional Media: Mentioned in 100 unique markets on tv, radio, and print outlets each. - The USA today list takes a title and looks at ebook, print, and hardcover sales and combines them all together for a total number and then lists the top 150 books in all genres combined. The USA today also has reporting criteria for various sales channels and you must have more than just an ebook. I don’t have further information on what those channels are.
2 Links
- We’re back! After a month break, Brad Stulberg joins us on Before The Bestseller to talk about becoming The Master of Change and use it to your advantage. Next time he comes back on to talk about how he’s sold over 100,000 copies of his books. Listen into our chat here.
- Our new website it live where we’ll be posting all of these 3-2-1’s moving forward 🙂
1 Quote
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”
~Maya Angelou
