Hey Revenue Writers,
This past week was exciting, I had two people I’m working with in my Full Throttle 6 Week Build Your Own Revenue Machine Coaching Program publish their book to Amazon and 2 other coaching clients hit #1 Amazon Best Seller Status.
You can check out these fellow Revenue Writers Books and encourage them in their journey at the links below.
launched Kingdom Business Breakthrough: Step by Step Guide for Women of Faith to Start an Online Business. published Memory Makeover Secrets: A Simple Path to a Great Memory and Better Grades in Half the Study TimeThen
launched and hit best-seller status with Position Yourself: The Four-Step Roadmap to Know, Show, and Grow Your Personal Brand AuthorityLastly, my son, Sol Stanley, hit best seller status on Amazon with his science fiction novel he released last month titled Mystery of the Sun: Air-Riders Book 1.
Why do I tell you all this?
I want to encourage you.
You can publish your book. You can become an Amazon #1 Best-Seller, and no, you don’t have to hire me to help you do it.
I wanted to break down exactly the strategy I’ve used to hit best-seller status with my non-fiction books and also with my son’s fiction book to hit best-seller status so you can too.
The Drafting Maneuver: Slingshot Your Book to Best-Seller Status
Hitting a best-seller list is simple, but not easy.
I use what I’m calling a Drafting Manuever. In racing, drafting is a strategy where one car closely follows another to reduce air resistance, conserve energy, and build momentum, allowing the trailing car to slingshot ahead at the right moment. That’s exactly what we do if we want to slingshot to #1 and claim the Amazon Best-Seller spot in a category using the Drafting Manuever.
There are 4 major steps to use the drafting strategy and propel your book to success:
D – Define Your Category
R – Run Ad Tests
A – Assess What’s Working
F – Fly By the Competition with Book Promotions
T – Track Your Ranking
Let’s take you through each step in the process so you can draft your competition and get that checkered flag.
D – Define Your Category
Choose Amazon categories where hitting #1 requires fewer than 20 sales.
This ensures you're competing in a winnable race and positioning your book on the race track in a category where momentum matters most. For my son’s book, Mystery of the Sun, we identified a category of book that included Superheroes that only needed 11-16 books to sell in a single day to hit #1.
EXAMPLE: Kindle Books > Teen & Young Adult > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Superheroes
Now we knew the speed of the competition and believed our book could compete.
Choose 3 categories like this.
That way if someone else hits the accelerator at the same time in one of your categories you can potentially compete in the other 2. You don’t want your big move and money to be wasted. It also helps you get more exposure if you are ranking in more than 1 category.
Every category deeper you go, you also compete in the bigger more competitive categories, so niche deep and you can compete in all of them.
In our example, my son is also competing in the huge categories of Teen & Young Adult and Science Fiction as well as his niche Superheroes category.
R – Run Ad Tests
Launch five Bookbub ads to test different ad copy, audience targeting, and author comparisons.
This step helps you identify which combinations are gaining traction, tests out the field, so you know how to speed up past the competition when you need it most. My son and I used Chat GPT and our own ideas of what we thought might work to create 5 different ads all with the same, images, format, and colors, and just changed the headline.
Next we used Bookbubs Author targeting to target a blockbuster author we knew matched well and the similar authors feature to find more authors that had smaller and potentially more receptive audiences compared to the “big” audience.
We ran tests to both the big author and a smattering of smaller authors with each of the ads for $5 each for 2-3 days.
A – Assess What’s Working
Analyze the performance of your Bookbub ads to determine which copy, targeting, and audiences drive the best results.
Use this data to focus your efforts on what’s delivering the most momentum and proving the most acceleration for your money. For our example, we noticed “Solar Chaos” consistently out-performed the other headlines. So we stopped all other ads and only ran that one to all authors.
This gave us more bang for our buck.
As we ran this ad we saw up to 2-3% CTR (click through rate) on some of the smaller authors.
F – Fly By the Competition with Book Promotions
Combine your winning ad set with a book promotion through a service like Bargain Booksy (or a similar site).
We chose Sci-Fi deal of the day.
It was more expensive but gave us bigger and more focused reach.
You simply add your book details and check out.
This add turbocharges your momentum, helping you overtake competitors and climb to #1.
In our case it went out to 297,000 email addresses!
T – Track Your Ranking
Keep an eye on your category rankings, ad performance, and sales data.
This allows you to adjust your strategy as needed, run more Bookbub ads on your big day, and ensure you are on track to hit your position on the Amazon Best-Seller list. The lists are on a delay 12-24hrs.
So if you sell enough to become a best seller you won’t see the ranking reflect usually until the following day.
In our case, Sol sold 28 books in a single day.
Smashing the needed 11 books in a day. He was able to grab his Amazon #1 Best-seller ranking.
Take a screenshot, your proof it happened.
And that is how you DRAFT to become an Amazon #1 Best-seller. To continue on the list you’ll have to keep investing money, time, energy, and relationships into selling copies, but even for one day you can claim “I am an Amazon #1 Best-Seller.”
If you want to get the orange “Best Seller” badge on your listing, you’ll need to stay on top for 3 straight days or more.
This strategy works with other types of promotions other than book email lists.
You could do a podcast blitz instead of a book promotion. You could run Amazon or Facebook ads instead of Bookbub ads. Find a partner to share your book with their email list.
Just choose some chanels and create your own DRAFT.
My next book, Mini Book Marketing, focuses on the different channels you can use to take your book from Published to Popular.
It’s available for pre-order and I plan to release in the next month on Amazon. (it says next year, but i’ll be moving the date up)