When you’re running an Amazon bestseller campaign (or any bestseller campaign, for that matter), timing is everything. So what happens when things don’t go to plan?
Advertising dollars are wasted, marketing activity gets put on hold, and if you’ve been building up anticipation in advance, you can lose a lot of the buzz you generated. Ultimately, you might not hit your goal of becoming a bestseller.
At Grammar Factory, we ran our first bestseller campaign last June when my book, Book Blueprint, was released by Morgan James publishing. We scheduled the sale, booked in our advertising, shared it on social media and via our newsletter, and the book hit the bestseller lists for its categories within a day.
I then thought, ‘Why not offer this as a service?’
So we did – we’ve run bestseller campaigns for a number of our publishing clients now, with books across a range of subjects. Every time we follow the same formula – schedule a price drop, ask the client to solicit reviews and schedule advertising activity throughout the week that the book is on sale.
I have to admit that I’d been getting a little cocky. Why wouldn’t I be, when it always worked?
Until it didn’t.
Here’s the story of my last 48 hours – or the bestseller campaign that went wrong.
Background: How bestseller campaigns work
Before we get into the shenanigans, it’s important to understand how bestseller lists and rankings actually work. A bestseller list is a list of books that have sold the most copies in a certain period. Lists like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller lists are updated on a weekly basis (some also require an editorial review), while the Amazon bestseller lists are updated hourly.
If your book sells the most copies in your category in an hour, you’ll hit the lists.
How do you hit the lists?
To get a book onto the Amazon bestseller list, you need to look at two things:
- 1Driving traffic to your book’s sales page
- 2Optimising conversions so more people buy when they get there
Driving traffic could simply be sharing your book on social media, sending out a newsletter, and emailing everyone you know asking them to buy it, or you might invest in an advertising campaign, which is something we coordinate for clients who sign up for our Publishing + Marketing package.
Optimising conversions involves dropping your book’s price for a limited amount of time (remember, timing is everything – you want to create urgency), and soliciting positive reviews (I’m assuming your book’s cover and the copy on the page are all up to date).
Simple, right? What could go wrong?
The story of the Amazon bestseller campaign that nearly didn’t happen
Two of our authors (Tanya Williams, the author of A Childfree Happily Ever After and Wayne Pales, the author of The Digital Utility) were planning bestseller campaigns for this week. Tanya was having us run the campaign, while Wayne asked us to schedule a discount on his book but planned to manage his own marketing.
Both of them went off and solicited reviews while I scheduled a price drop to 0.99 from March 4th. For Tanya’s book, I also scheduled advertising from the 5th to the 9th of March – advertising that would get her discounted eBook in front of hundreds of thousands of potential readers, letting them know that it was on sale for a limited amount of time.
Everything was going swimmingly until the 4th arrived, which is when I hopped on to Amazon to see if the price change had gone through.
Nope – both books were listed at about $9 in Australia, and $7 in the US.
I wasn’t too worried, though – while it was the 4th in Australia, it was still the 3rd in the US. We’d also checked in last week with Ingram Spark, our distributor, who’d confirmed that the change would