Achieving an Amazon #1 Bestseller with Tom Corson-Knowles

Welcome to the Real Fast Results podcast!  Today we have a
very special treat.  Tom Corson-Knowles is an absolute expert
in Amazon publishing, and he does very well when it comes to
sending the books that he publishes to the top of the list on
Amazon.  Welcome to the show Tom... Today's Promise
I'm going to show you the five-step system to get any book
to become a #1 bestseller on Amazon.  Whether it's a
print book or an eBook, this will work for you. Benefits of Gaining
a Bestseller Status There's a lot of benefits of gaining a
bestseller status. Here are a few that come to mind:

Obviously, if your book is #1 on Amazon, you'll be able to
say that you're a #1 Amazon bestselling author.  So, you can
add that to your bio.

It can help you get more speaking gigs, if you're a speaker.

It can help you to get booked for more podcast gigs like
this, and on radio and TV.

It can enhance your bio and the credibility you have in your
field.

There are many other benefits as well...

Actually, just being a #1 Amazon bestseller can give
you a little badge next to your book in search.  So,
if someone searches for your book, or keywords related to your
book, and sees your book in the Amazon search, it will actually
have an Amazon bestseller tag which will say "Amazon
Bestseller".  That can really, dramatically increase your
conversions, and you can actually end up getting more sales just by
virtue of having a book that's at #1 on Amazon. That
designation only sticks while the book is #1 in any category,
at least one category on Amazon. 5-Step system to Achieve an Amazon
Bestseller The 5-Step system is really simple.  Number
1 is you want to find a relevant bestseller category on
Amazon.  There are over 27,000 bestseller categories
just in the US on any day.  That's between books and
eBooks.  So, there is a ton.  There are many, many to
choose from, and some of them aren't very competitive at all. 
So, really what you want to do first is just find as many relevant
ones as you can, to see what your options are for later.
Obviously, if  you're writing a children's book or a
romance novel, it's only going to fit into those
categories.  You're not going to put your romance
novel into a business and marketing category.  That just
wouldn't make sense.  So, you're going to want to find the
relevant bestseller categories first, and that just takes a bit of
research. Number 2 is you have to analyze the
competition.  So, once you've found the relevant
categories, you just want to find out who the competition is, what
they are like, and see what you can learn to make your book better,
to make your cover better, and to make your book more marketable.
Number 3, you'll need to calculate how many sales you need
to make in order to hit #1 in each of the categories that you've
researched.  That way, you're going to know, "Okay,
in this category I need 100 sales in a day, and in this category I
need five sales in a day."  Then you can know, based on your
campaign, on your budget, and on your promotional abilities, how
many copies you can sell and which categories you can reasonably
expect to be #1 in.  The rest may be a little too competitive
for you at this time. Then, number 4, you're going to
choose two target categories because Amazon will actually allow you
to choose two bestseller categories for your book. So,
you're going to choose the right two categories for your book,
based on that research that you've done. Number 5 is really
easy.  Just get Amazon to put you into those
categories.  That sounds super-easy, but it can
actually be kind of difficult when all you're doing is publishing
your book in your Kindle Direct Publishing account, or in
CreateSpace, they don't actually give you the 27,000 categories to
select from.  It's because Amazon's internal database doesn't
sync with the external data that's actually used to list their
books. Step 1 - Find a Relevant Bestseller Category The
quickest and easiest way, for most people, is just to go to
Amazon.com, and type in, or search for, some books that are
bestsellers.  Actually, I'll have a link in the show
notes that will take you directly to a page on Amazon that lists
all of the categories of Kindle bestsellers and print book
bestsellers.  If you don't have that, basically, you just need
to find a book that's a bestseller on Amazon.  Then, you need
to scroll down to "Product Details" on that book's page and click
one of those bestseller rankings, and that will take you to that
page as well. That's the first move; just finding those bestseller
categories. Then you're going to browse through those lists
and find the ones that are relevant to you.  If you
have a business book, you're going to look into "Business &
Investing" as a parent category.  Under that, there's going to
be hundreds of child categories, or smaller categories that are
nested underneath that one. You're going to browse through all of
those different categories and see which ones are relevant for you,
and just kind of write those down to keep track of them.  So,
that's Step #1.  It's just researching all of the relevant
bestseller categories. You can actually be listed in 20 or
more categories on Amazon, but you can only select
two.  The way that works is you try to select the two
child categories, like the smallest, most niche categories, and
them those can be listed in more parent categories.  For
example, there's a "Direct Marketing" category, which is under the
"Marketing" category, which is under the "Business & Investing"
category.  So, that's just three categories right there, just
from that one category that you've selected. Some people might be
thinking, "Do you start by putting in a keyword related
to your book?" No, so you actually have to go and find
the either the direct category page on Amazon, which we'll share in
the show notes, or find a book that's a bestseller already and then
scroll down to "Product Details" and click the hyperlinks in those
product details to those categories, and that will also take you to
those categories.  When you just type in a keyword, those
books may not be bestsellers and it might not take you to the
direct list.  Just to be clear, you can use keywords,
but what you're looking for are books on a bestseller list
specifically related to your subject matter, and essentially,
working backwards from there. Step 2 - Analyze the
Competition Step #2 is to analyze the competition, and this
is a step that I think a lot of authors just completely miss out
on, and you can learn so much at this stage.  Really,
I think this is something you should be doing constantly. 
This is not just a one-time thing.  You should always be
checking out the competition.  Primarily, what you want to do
is, once you've found those relevant bestseller categories for your
book, you want to browse those bestsellers on Amazon.  Look at
the top 20 books in each of those categories. Really dive
in deep.  What are their book titles?  What are
their subtitles like?  What are their book covers like? 
What are their book descriptions like?  What are their reviews
like?  Read the positive reviews and the negative reviews, and
see what customers like about those books, love about those books,
and what they don't like about those books.  Just by doing
this basic research... I mean, you can spend hours and hours on
this and learn so much information that can help you not only to
market your book better, but actually to create a better book. So,
if you're researching a market on Amazon, and you see that all of
the top books in this market. People really liked certain things
about them, but there is one, or two, or three things that people
really hate about these books. And they are leaving negative
reviews about them, that really lets you know. If you
really want to write a book in that market, and really want to
stand out from the crowd, you'll obviously want to incorporate
those things that the other books left out.  The
readers or reviewers on Amazon will tell you all of that
information.  It's all there and available.  The thing is
that no one does this. Very few authors actually read the
negative reviews of their competitor's to find out how they could
actually be improved. It's sad because it leaves a
ton of opportunity on the table for anyone who is willing to do
that extra grunt work. It's the same thing... It's not just
non-fiction.  This works incredibly well for fiction as
well.  I know that some of my fiction students have used the
same strategy and have just blown it out of the park with their
books because they incorporated scenes or themes that the reviewers
of their competitors have told them were really important to them.
Step 3  - Calculate Exactly How Many Sales You Need to Hit #1
Step #3 is you need to calculate exactly how many sales you need to
hit #1 in each of your categories.  The reason you
want to do this is just to be very clear and have reasonable
expectations.  It's unlikely that you are going to be
#1 in all of the Kindle Store, right?  Because, in order to do
that, you'll need tens of thousands of sales in a very short period
of time. You can easily hit #1 in many different
categories, but you need to know how many sales you actually
need.  So, the way Amazon does this is there's
actually something called the Amazon bestseller rankings, which
we've talked about a little bit.  Basically, Amazon ranks
every book in order of how competitive.  The #1 book is the
most competitive, has the most sales, #2 the next, and so on and so
forth. When you look at some of these books... Let's say the #1
book in "Direct Marketing" on Amazon, and you scroll down to the
product details, you'll see the Amazon bestseller ranking in the
Kindle store, or the print store for print books.  Let's say
the book's ranking is 10,000, so you would need to beat that 10,000
bestseller ranking.  The problem is that you can't tell by
looking at the number how many sales you need. So, what I've done
with the help of this brilliant data guy is we've created this
super-advanced calculator that tells you exactly how many sales you
need in either a 24-hour period or over the duration of a month in
order to hit any sales rank on Amazon. Check out the relevant
bestseller categories in Step #1, find the bestseller ranking
within the "Product Details" section of their books, and then just
copy and paste those numbers into the sales calculator.  And,
it's totally free, by the way, and the link will be in the show
notes.  But, you can just type it into the sales calculator,
and it will tell you exactly how many sales you need in one day, or
in one month, to hit that bestseller ranking. The main
ranking is the Amazon Bestseller Rank, and there's one for the
Kindle Store, and there's one for books.  That's just
the overall rank.  So, it goes from #1 to about 4.5 million
because there are about 4.5 million eBooks signed up on Amazon
right now.  That's the overall Amazon bestseller rank, and
then there's your ranking inside of a certain category.  So,
your overall rank is going to be based on the competition with
every other book on Amazon, but inside of your category, you'll
only be competing with the books that are listed in that
category.  That's why you don't have to be #1 on Kindle; you
can be #1 in some of the other 27,000 bestseller lists. Which of
the Two Numbers Do I Need to Plug into the Calculator? Any of the
generic, overall Amazon bestseller rankings.  It's going to be
between one and 4.5 million.  You just copy and paste in that
number, which is listed on the page of every single book listed on
Amazon that has sold at least one copy.  Copy that number into
the calculator, and it will tell you how many sales you need to hit
in order to hit that ranking. Step 4 - Choose Two Target Categories
Step #4 is you're going to choose two target categories.  So,
you're going to actually select your categories on Amazon. 
Like I said before, when you publish your book on Kindle through
KDP, or a print book through CreateSpace, or any other
Print-on-demand (POD) publisher, or Amazon merchant account, you're
not going to be able to select all of the bestseller lists that are
available for your book.  Essentially, the reason is that
Amazon uses an internal database, and that's where it shows up on
KDP when you publish your eBook on Amazon. But, when you actually
look at the bestseller rankings on the website, the ones that your
customers are finding on their computers, on their iPhone, on their
iPads and their Kindle devices, those are all BISAC categories,
which are essentially industry-standard categories.  This
essentially gives you all of the databases for like libraries and
all the various book industries use the BISAC category. 
So, that's why Amazon has two different databases, and they
just don't link up perfectly.  So, the simple
solution is just every category you see on Amazon's website is the
BISAC category; it is the correct category. Since you're doing your
research on the website anyway, all you really have to do is just
copy and paste those categories and just send Amazon a support
email in your KDP account or your CreateSpace account saying, "Hey,
can you please change my book to these categories?"  Then, you
can just copy and paste them directly from the Amazon website, and
they'll make that switch for you.  So, it's super-easy. 
That's Step #4 and Step #5.  In Step #4, you're choosing your
two target categories from Amazon's website. Step # 5  - Send
an Email to Amazon Step #5 is sending an email into Amazon in order
to get them to put you into those categories. How Does This Help Me
to Become a Bestseller? Essentially, how this works is Amazon only
lists the top 100 books in each category on their website, and on
their list, when customers browse.  So, if customers
are browsing the bestseller list to buy books, which they very
often do, they are only going to see your book if your book is
ranking in the top 100 of your given categories.  If
your book is ranked #200 or even #101, it's not going to show up in
those searches and you're not going to get exposure from it.
Simply by changing your bestseller categories to categories
that you can rank in the top 100 for, you're going to get more
exposure, and you're going to get more traffic to your book, which
obviously means more sales over time.  That's one of
the huge benefits, but there's really a lot more.  You know,
the thing with the publishing business is that it's very
incremental.  Every little bit helps.  If an author is
only selling 100 copies a year, it seems like it would be such a
huge stretch to get to 1,000 copies a year, but really, it could be
as simple as just changing the categories, or changing the book
cover, or changing the subtitle, or changing a line in the book
description. A simple change can make a huge difference over time,
and this is one of those changes that we've noticed can make a huge
difference.  We've had some of our clients' books sell
hundreds and hundreds of books.  A lot of the time, we'll have
clients that come from competitors, other self-publishers or
publishing services, where they were self-published and they just
wanted us to take it over and do their marketing, and simply by
changing things like their categories, we've seen increases in
sales as much as 173%.  It sounds like such a small thing like
"Why do they do that?  Who really cares," but those small
changes can make a huge difference over time. It's a long-term
business. I think a lot of people have gotten into the Kindle
publishing craze and are looking at it as a short-term opportunity
to make a lot of money. But, it's the publishers that really look
at the long-term that have been the most successful, by far. 
We've been able to do things now, like doing book deals in
different languages, and distributing books in Anacosto, and
physical CD audio books, and all kinds of deals. If we had only
focused on, "How can I make so much money this month," or focused
on just short-term stuff, we wouldn't have been able to stick
around to see these huge opportunities come around.  I
think whenever you can focus on the long-term, and on quality, and
on adding value to customers, that's where you're really going to
get the biggest return over time. That's why I think
categories are such a big deal.  It is about providing a
better experience for your customers.  If you select the wrong
categories, or just choose two random categories on Amazon, you
might not be in the right place. You might not be where your
customers are really looking for books like yours. 
Since most authors haven't done this research, simply by
doing it, you can always set yourself apart. Connecting
with Tom You can check out my blog at TCKPublishing.com. 
There's tons of great information and articles there.  That's
where my book calculator is as well.  I do have a free
training course for those who want to find out how to format your
eBook for Kindle, how to get it published on Kindle, and how to do
book launches and promotions.  It's all free at
eBookPublishingSchool.com.  I also have a podcast called the
Publishing Profits Podcast.  Every week we interview
bestselling authors, publishing attorneys, accountants, lawyers,
and agents.  Really, anyone in the industry that's doing
awesome stuff and knows what's working right now for authors. 
That's PublishingProfitsPodcast.com. Resources: Amazon Book Sales
Calculator

List of the Top 100 Most Competitive Amazon Kindle Bestseller
Categories


List of the Top 100 Least Competitive Amazon Kindle Bestseller
Lists and Categories


Kindle Direct Publishing


CreateSpace


How to Effectively Use a POD (Print On Demand) Publisher With
Robin Cutler
Real Fast Results Community If you are diggin’ on this stuff
and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would
you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure
that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review
it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know
your results. Please share those results with us at
http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results
happen!