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Plug Your Book!
33
the 4-million-title catalog. The top dog has an Amazon Sales Rank of 1,
and is racking up thousands of sales a day. The worst laggard is ranked
3,500,000-plus, selling perhaps one copy every few years.
Just for kicks, plenty of authors buy a copy or two of their book on
Amazon, just to watch their Sales Rank spike a few thousand notches
higher toward No. 1. But your Sales Rank slides right back down unless
someone else buys another copy pretty soon.
Whether an author is No. 5 or No. 539,000, many simply can’t resist
checking their rank several times a day. And since Amazon’s bestseller
list is recalculated hourly based on the preceding hour’s sales, the list
changes 24 times a day. It’s so dynamic, a short burst of sales can shoot
a book toward the top. And that’s what makes it fairly easy to create a
bestseller on Amazon—or rig one, depending on your point of view.
True, Amazon is the world’s biggest bookstore. But you’d need tons
more sales to make the New York Times list, which is based on weekly
sales from 4,000 bookstores and wholesalers serving another 60,000
retailers. With an Amazon Bestseller Campaign, however, you might
simply line up 250 people to buy your book at 3 a.m. next Sunday, and
you’re No. 1. Sure, it’s only for an hour, but you can put “bestselling
author” on your resume for the rest of your life, right?
Well, let’s get real. “Ranking high on Amazon certainly feels good,
but it doesn’t take many sales to achieve that,” said Jacqueline Deval,
publisher of Hearst Books and author of Publicize Your Book.
The problem is, Bestseller Campaigns are a seductive “quick fix” for
authors who feel they don’t have the time, energy, or know-how for real
grass-roots marketing. It’s frustrating to pour your heart and soul into
a book for months or years, and then nobody buys it. Amazon Bestseller
Campaigns can sound like a good solution, simply because they promise
instant success.
How Bestseller Campaigns work
The core of an Amazon Bestseller Campaign is an e-mail
advertisement blasted to thousands of people; some practitioners say it
requires at least 300,000 messages to make any difference at all. People
who get the e-mails are offered a one-time deal: a long list of “valuable
free bonuses” like e-books, audio files of seminars, and other digital
goodies, but only if they buy your book at Amazon on the day of your
campaign.
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