Have you ever wondered what it takes to become a bestselling author on kindle?
Besides a lot of writing and patience there is a way to move the process along much faster than just clicking the publish button on KDP.
Start your Market Research
Here is a link to the Amazon Kindle stores best sellers page. From here you’ll want to find your genre and niche. You can also search for one if you’re still in the discovery phase.
This is a helpful list that Amazon makes available for both the free and paid current top 100 titles.
A lot of authors will mention SEO, advertising, book promotion, author platform, and other fancy terms, but I would like to stress a much simpler idea: book categories.
before attempting to reach the best selling position, you should ask yourself the following question: in which category am I able to easily reach the top shelf?
Analyze your Competition
You should first look at whether your book is in a short-term or a long-term market.
These are short-term markets because technology is constantly changing and tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are constantly making updates and changes. That means you have to constantly update your books if you want them to stay relevant.
Books on weight-loss, self-help, novels and any kind of fiction are generally long-term markets and you are more likely to be earning royalties for years to come if you publish books in these long-term markets.
How Many Sales Do you Need to Hit #1?
You can find out EXACTLY how many books you need to sell to hit #1 on Amazon in any of the 44,000+ categories using our free Amazon Book Sales Calculator here
When you open up the sales calculator, you can just type in the Amazon Best Sellers Rank of any book on Amazon (for Kindle Ebooks or Print Books) and it will tell you exactly how many sales you need in a 30-day or a 24-hour period to hit that sales rank on Amazon.
Pick 2 Categories to Target
If you find 10 relevant categories and one category shows that you only need 10 sales in a day to become #1 and the other category needs 1000 sales in a day to hit #1, you will need to choose the one with the smallest amount of sales to rank for when you start out.
This way you can hit #1 in relevant, low-competition categories as you start out so you can gain momentum and attract more readers who are browsing Amazon’s bestseller lists.
Start with the least competitive, most relevant categories for your book.
As you get more and more book sales, you can move your book to the next, more competitive category that requires a bit more sales to rank well for. You can then repeat this process until your book is ranking at the top of the most competitive categories in your market.
Ask Amazon to Put your Book in the Ideal Categories
This is where things can get complicated if you are only used to selecting your categories in KDP or in CreateSpace.
To make sure you find the most relevant and useful categories for your book, you need to do your research on Amazon’s website, where all of the 44,000+ categories are available (this is where your readers are browsing).
Then, once you’ve found the categories you want to select, you will need to contact Amazon at www.kdp.amazon.com/contact-us.
Simply write a letter and they will change your categories for your book within about 24 hours.
Sounds easy right?
Anyone can be a best-selling author…simply write a book and then choose a category that no one else is using to list your book.
Chances are with a little promotion, you will rise to the top of the chart.
The only problem is that you will likely get very few sales because competitive categories are where the money is at.
