In this conversational interview, Speaker B explains how authors can achieve Amazon bestseller status through self‑publishing. The discussion covers the importance of selecting the right Amazon category for the book, using strategic promotion timing (specific days of the week), leveraging a large email list, and employing coupons or giveaways to boost download numbers. Speaker B clarifies that Amazon determines bestseller rankings by tracking the volume of downloads within a category over several days, not by sales revenue. The conversation also explores pricing strategies for high‑value workbooks (e.g., $97‑$297) and the trade‑offs between building a large mailing list, aiming for bestseller status, and maximizing revenue. Finally, the distinction between an Amazon bestseller and other bestseller lists (e.g., New York Times) is highlighted.
Chapters
Now we're going to say the book is written and it's published. It's gone through whatever the process is, which we don't need to know the process, and I have the book in my hand. Okay, you had mentioned that I could become a bestseller with this book. Is there a, a process for that? Because I'm with you, I don't want to buy everything and have it in my garage. I have my car in the garage.
Yeah, there's definitely a process. There's a couple of different processes. Every different publishing company will tell you a different method. Uh, people who do self-publishing like I do, I teach you how to self-publish, or I teach you how to let me publish for you. I'm not a huge publishing company, uh, I'm just pretty published powerful.com. If you want that kind of information that I have, um, I teach you what you need to do, or I will upload it for you and get it to the bestseller status. We will do our level best to get it there. Because I have a large list, it's not that hard, right? There's lots of people. There's a structure for how to get it in there, the particular day of the week that you want to promote it, the categories that you put it in. When, when I say I'm a bestseller, does anybody ever say, yeah, but what category are you a bestseller in? So there's some—
didn't even know there were categories.
So, well, like, self-help is a category, business is a category, health is a category, right? Mental—
makes sense, right?
They even chop it down. Mental illness would be a category in wellness. So where would you put the book, right? Well, what is your book about? So you need to figure out where you want to advertise it. So now, do you want it to be a bestseller, or do you want to build a big list, or do you want to be a bestseller and build a big list, or you want to make a lot of money and it's a very valuable book, so you want to charge $100 for it? It could be a workbook that you actually you know, charge $97 or $297. I bought a book the other day that was $97, and I'm like, this better be a damn good book because I'm not paying $97 for a book. And it was a book that teaches you how to do an entire program, so it was worthwhile to get. And it doesn't teach enough that you're not going to hire the person who wrote the book. If I still want more help, I can still hire that person, and that was the whole point of the book. So there's a lot of different methods.
What does the term bestseller actually mean?
It means that a certain number of people, a large number of people, actually went and took the time and effort to go into your bestseller, your author— Author Central is called on Amazon— and actually downloaded your book, whether it was free or paid or however they got it. Sometimes you can give it away with a coupon. Whatever method, you had a large number of people go to get it, and Amazon Kindle then takes snapshots throughout the period of time over several days and determines that in a certain category you had the most numbers of downloads. And that's how it gets to be a bestseller. It's comparing to other books in the category on certain days.
Okay, so this is an Amazon bestseller, not like a New York Times bestseller or whatever.
Let me tell you about New York Times bestsellers. If you want to be a New York Times bestseller, you're not paying anything less than a quarter of a million dollars to get someone to help you publish that.
