Make your book a best seller

How do you get your book published and make it a best seller?

First, there is the issue of making the book deserve to be best seller and that comes down to doing everything you can BEFORE it’s published to achieve that.
In the rush to get published, especially self-published, you can put your book at a disadvantage by making mistakes. So, here are some key things to get right..

• Make sure your book has been properly edited and proof read.
• Think carefully about the title and make sure it does the job of letting the potential reader know what it’s about.
• Make sure that the cover is well designed and again helps the potential reader make a decision to buy it.

Once your book is published you need lots of positive reviews on-line on every place that it’s for sale.

You also need as much publicity as you can get preferably through traditional media (like your local newspaper, national papers and magazines) as well as on social media.

Once all that is under way you have set the scene for some sales and what you really want is for sales to be “viral”. What that means is you need readers to start recommending the book to others, for those people to read it and then tell even more people until gradually more and more people are buying it and telling others. Ideally, the whole thing snowballs and you’ll see sales progressively rise until the book gets into the best seller list. But all that can take time – years even. So is there any way to speed it up? Yes there is but before we get to that we need to be clearer about what it means when a book is called a “best seller”.

What’s a Best Seller” anyway?

There are lots of published lists of “best sellers” including those published by major book sellers like Amazon.

Starting with the obvious, the book for which the most copies are sold this week is the number one best seller this week and the book with the next highest sales figures in the number two best seller, and so on.

The top 100 books on the complete ranked list of sales are normally called “The Best Sellers”. So, even if your book is at position 100 in the ranked list you can justifiably call it a “best seller”. At the very top the books might be selling at a rate of 3,000 per day but at position 100 the rate might be 1,000 per day or much less – even down to 300.

There is a further complication though – and it can be useful.

As you are no doubt aware books are classified, and sub-classified into what are sometimes called “genres”. As well as the overall book sale list there are lists for many different genres. In some cases the lists are of sub-classifications of sub-classifications.

This means that there are best seller lists for the genre which applies to your book and to be a best seller in that genre just for a few day doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to sell your book in really high numbers. For example, in some genres you can get into the best seller list if you are selling 20 books a day – sometimes even fewer than that.

So, when you launch your book and get the support of your fans what you need them to do is buy their books in a flurry over just a few days. With luck, you’ll bob up into the best seller list for your genre and with a bit of additional promotional effort you might cut months off the viral route to ongoing best seller sales.

So that’s how you might make your book a “best seller”.

Obviously, there is a lot more to it than this, and we’re not going to give away some of our trade secrets of how best to do it.

If your aim is to be a “best selling author” we can improve your chances considerably.