3 Ways to Become a Bestselling Author on the New York Times, WSJ, and Amazon

Are you wondering how to become a best selling author without those creepy gimmicks that game the system but don't get you real readers? There are many many ways to become a best selling author and sell a lot of books. But there are consistently three ways that we see working. If you want to know how to sell books, then this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers where your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will impact your reader, grow your business and make you money. Our superpower is caring more about you and your book. And what we do differently is we work incredibly hard to get your book into readers hands when it's done. And the best part? You keep all rights and royalties and have full control over your book. Judging by the popularity of the video I put out called Best Selling Book Guaranteed, this is a hot subject. You want to know how to become a best seller? Well first you have to define bestseller for yourself. Because if you're talking New York Times bestseller, you need to know the rules of the game. And know that the rules of the game are more based on curation than actual sales. In other words, you need to be selected to be on that list as much as you need to sell a lot of books. So as a self publishing author, you should probably not spend your time focusing on becoming a New York Times bestseller because it's extremely, extremely rare now. Wall Street Journal bestseller. That can happen. An Amazon bestseller. Certainly the Wall Street Journal uses the Nielsen Bookscan. Nielsen Bookscan is a data provider for the book publishing industry owned by the Nielsen company. BookScan compiles point of sale data for book sales. This is confusing, so I want to be even more clear. It's print sales, Amazon print sales. But only if you publish with Ingram, because Ingram reports back to Nielsen Bookscan. If you self publish through Amazon, this is likely not included. So if you're going for the Wall Street Journal, you need to be set up with IngramSpark for your Amazon print book sales. Got it. Barnes and Noble, Hastings, Target, Walmart, Costco, these are all places that report back to Nielsen Bookscan. To qualify for the Wall Street Journal list, you'll likely need to shoot for selling at least 5,000 books in a week. But some authors have reported hitting it with 3,000. So you might be able to do it for less or it might take more, depending on what hot titles you're up against in any given week. USA Today ranks all print and ebook sales from select groups of booksellers in one massive list. And Amazon updates their list, which they have two different lists and they update them every hour based on real time sales on their site. But here's the thing, those are all retail sales. They're not bulk. They also each have their own nuances and things that are not included. So it's really a game if you want to pursue any bestseller status on any specific list. So that's why I say first you have to define what being a bestseller is for you. And frankly, you should have your own list. And that should be how many copies total you're selling to your ideal audience. And if you make someone else's list while you're selling a lot of books to the right people, that's cool. With that in mind, here's three ways you're going to sell a lot of books and be most likely to hit a best seller list. Number one, your author platform. I was chatting with author Rachel Miller and she said she sold more than 100,000 copies of her book. And she said it was totally to her, her platform, her current audience. Now she's got a seven figure audience, so makes sense that she sold 100,000 books to them. But I've said this before, your author platform is the number one reason a traditional publisher will give you a book deal, because they know your audience is going to buy from you. Even a small but engaged audience can lead to a lot of book sales. Like I talked about when I featured Gillian Gertson in this video, your author platform includes your newsletter list, your social media audience, YouTube, podcast, and even a speaking platform if you have it. Do you wait until you have a platform before you publish if you don't have one already? I wouldn't let that hold you back because a book is also a great way to grow a platform. And building a platform takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. So you could be waiting for years to actually launch your book. Now, how big does your platform have to be? That really depends on how engaged they are. Newsletter subscribers are definitely more engaged than social media followers, but people who attend a talk you give are almost always the most likely to buy. So as a rule of thumb, I would say you can expect less than 0.5% of your social media followers to buy your book, 5% of your newsletter subscribers to buy your book, and maybe 30% of any of the live audiences that you're in front of. The second best way is using the platform of others. And this is how a lot of people make the big lists. They get their influential friends, coworkers, colleagues, whoever they've met to promote their book all at the same week. Often there's an incentive for buying the book in that week as well, or buying two or three copies in that week. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with this strategy. In fact, it's a great way to reward the folks in the audience of your influential friends by giving them something that's so valuable they otherwise would have paid for it and giving it to them as a bonus for buying your book during a certain period of time. If you don't have any influential friends and you don't have a platform of your own, then number three, you're probably going to have to buy your way onto a list. Now, this can literally be done by hiring a company that has an army of people all over the country that will go into the stores and buy your book. Rumor has it, as the article in Forbes says, which I'll link to in the description below, the cost of buying your way onto the New York Times best selling list or the Wall street in 2013 was $100,000. And it's been known that some authors with deep pockets and the desire to be number one have done this. But you can also do this by buying your way there with a lot of paid promotions, Facebook, Google, Amazon, bookbub banners, and more. If you have a smart marketing mind and a juicy budget, you can get those ads flowing and ramped up to cause enough sales to happen in a week so you can nail one of those bestseller lists. The big thing with the lists is coordinated timing of sales. Most of us will need to provide some sort of incentive to drive people to buy during a period of time in order to hit these lists. This takes a lot of effort. It's why most people hire a book launch coordinator if they're really serious about making one of these lists. And it's why I think you should focus on selling books to your ideal reader and worry more about that and creating an awesome plan to do that and reach your ideal reader than worrying about these bestseller lists. But I know it sure can be fun to top the charts. Have you ever made one of these major lists? What worked for you? Or maybe you know someone who made one of these lists? What worked for them? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win where's my swag? Thank you. Some sweet noboringbooks swag like this mug or this oh so soft journal New videos every Tuesday and Friday, so make sure you're the first to know about them by subscribing to the channel and turning the notifications on. You're fun. Let's hang out more, shall we? Here's my take on why social media doesn't actually sell book. And if that's not your jam, then you should watch this one with Gillian Geertsen on how to sell a lot of books with a small audience. All right, I'm waiting for you. I'll see you there.