In 2004, “950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies.”
— Publisher’s Weekly, July 17, 2006
You don’t necessarily have to sell a lot of books to become an Amazon bestseller, and there are distinct advantages to this title.
Once you become an Amazon bestselling author you can forevermore be referred to as a “bestselling author.”
If you have joint venture partners, with a bit of planning, you can engineer a mass e-mail campaign with incentive bonuses to buy your book from Amazon on a certain day. Your book becomes an Amazon bestseller in one of your categories using this method.
Nobody knows how many copies it takes to hit the bestseller mark because Amazon has its own proprietary algorithm.
I receive reports from my book distributor each month, but no data on which bookstores sold how many books.
Amazon will not give you a plaque to verify your bestseller status, so we monitor Amazon every minute and photograph a computer screen shot to verify books as bestsellers.
Amazon updates their numbers every hour. Yet your book becomes a bestseller “by rate” rather than numbers of copies sold. This means we must sell as many books as we can in the shortest amount of time!
When my clients ask me what Amazon bestseller status actually means, it makes me laugh. My business partner and I have the attitude that “It’s all made up” — meaning life in general. We create in our lives by what we believe to be true, and we have the ability to create another belief for ourselves and change our lives.
It is the same for bestseller status. It means whatever an author or a reader wants it to mean.
In my workshops, I sometimes ask students what dollar value they would put on becoming a # 1 Amazon Bestselling Author. The responses range from $65,000.00 and higher to almost nothing. But most of them see it as a great advantage.
For my books, it has been an extremely advantageous, by:
1. Attracting more Sales at Higher Prices
2. Attracting Better-Quality Customers
3. Standing out from the Competition
4. Conferring Expert Status
5. Assigning Celebrity Status
6. Creating Instant Credibility
The same is possible for you!