Six ways to get your book onto Amazon Bestsellers Book Lists

Self-Help for Self-Publishers

Full disclosure: I am currently among those statistical authors whose book sells earns them less than $500 per year. In fact, my top selling title, When You Meet a Djembe Drum, only sales on average two copies per month. However, this children’s book regularly makes it onto the Amazon Bestsellers Book List in its respective categories. I am going to share six ways to get your book onto a Amazon Bestsellers Book List. Granted you my choose not to follow my advice, given my earlier admission.

Let’s assume your book is so well written and well formatted that its an irresistible page-turner for the people who buy the book.
But that alone will not guarantee that a book’s sales are enough to get on a bestsellers list. There are other factors at play. It has a lot to do with how a book is positioned in the market place.

In book publishing there are tools to amplify a book’s marketability beyond an intuitive knack for coming up with catchy book titles. For any book to have the best chance to sell enough to get on a bestsellers list, publishers must develop an understanding of the
the market. Your book sales depends partly on the size of that book’s market. Writing for a specific niche helps the book become more marketable to that audience. Here are some tools that help a book get sales and get onto the bestsellers lists:

1. Hone in on the book’s market before you are done with writing, formatting, and publishing your book. Write for as narrow a niche category as possible. On Amazon, there are so many categories and subcategories for products and for books that each distinct market can be very small. Meaning a book has to sale fewer copies in a category to make it onto a particular bestsellers list. There is less competition and a book can more easily out sale the top seller on that list. Which relates to the advantage having a niche provides your book title.

2. Properly categorizing your book using BISAC codes from Book Industry Study Group ( BISG ). Using their subject headings list helps you to find the best codes for your title. You must have at least one code for any book. But a title can have up to three codes. The reason a book needs a BISAC code is that it is part of book marketing. It helps with the discoverability of a book. All books need them, however self-published books need them the most because indie-publishing is a solo book making and marketing operation. It is important to take care and not choose random BISAC codes for your book. It can be tricky finding the best BISAC codes. It takes getting to know your book, understanding its target audience, and researching the other books already out on the market that are similar to yours. I don’t find it easy to locate the codes on the BISG site. So I go directly to book listings and research the different books’ categories. That online research eventually leads me to the codes my book needs. I’m sure there is an easier way to do it. That’s how I get it done.

3. The title has to be catchy, as people used to say. But the book has to have a title that’s not only catchy when you hear it, like When You Meet a Djembe Drum, but it must also have keywords somewhere in the title to make it searchable online ( and findable ). This is especially the case for the subtitle. That is because the subtitle does the job of giving even more specific information about what is actually in a book. While the title can be interesting and provocative to the potential readers, the subtitle further tells them things like how a book is laid out for them to consume the information. For instance, on a fiction book cover you might see a subtitle that simply reads ‘a novel’, but a nonfiction cover could have the subtitle ‘7 Steps to Financial Freedom’.

4. The book description is another tool to sell your book once the title, subtitle, and cover grabs the attention of potential readers. Again, because this is the age of internet marketing, descriptions must also have some keywords in them to work with online search engines. It is said that the best of the best keywords should go in the title and subtitle. But we’ve got to throw a few in the description too.

5. The rest of the assortment of keywords you have found and collected during the research process get inputted during the upload of the files on the self-publishing platform. That is the self-publishing company that will help distribute your book to online retailers, bookstores, and libraries. These keywords and phrases will be listed when you are prompted to do so. They further make your title ( book ) more online searchable to be found and bought.

6. The book cover gives readers a first impression. They will decide on whether to pick it up by looking at the books cover. It is a must to have a really thoughtful and well designed book cover. After all what’s a book with out a cover. Use the cover to make your book standout. That is what I attempted to accomplish when designing the cover for When You Meet a Djembe Drum. I wanted the image on the cover to tell the story in a minimal way. Even though it is a nonfiction book the images show the play movement of hand drum playing. It says to the reader that there is a fun story awaiting them behind the cover.

In conclusion, the combination of marketing and books metadata are as important to book sells as writing a good book. In order to make sells in a saturated book market, take advantage of niches and lessen the competition. That is how When You Meet a Djembe Drum makes it on the Amazon bestsellers book lists in both its categories. In addition to a narrow niche make sure your book is ready to be found by matching the proper Subject ( BISAC ) Codes for it, and incorporating the best keywords into the book’s description. By God’s grace your book will make it onto the bestsellers lists and even reach the top spot. I wish your book the best.

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