The BEST Strategies to Become a Bestselling Author in 2024!

How many sales do you need to become number one in a category? This changes on Amazon all the time, but less than 100 sales will get you to number one if you choose it well. So being an Amazon bestseller is not a gold star like the USA Today, which we will look at now. USA Today is a completely different beast. Why? Because instead of tens of thousands of slots changing every hour, you only have 150 slots every week. So how many books do you need to sell to be in one of those 150 slots? Around 6,000 should do the trick. In a week, only US sales count. So if you're international, you need to focus on U.S. sales and your place of residence. Doesn't matter. I live in Italy and as Alex told you, I've put 91 entrepreneurs on the USA Today bus from all over the world.

What do all of these things have in common? Now listen carefully. An Oscar award, a Grammy award, a Nobel prize, a Super Bowl MVP trophy. USA Today best selling book. A World Series MVP trophy, Induction into the hall of Fame of football. If your answer is all of those have the fact that the person who did these things is extremely outstanding or an authority or a high achiever, then your answer is correct. There's one other thing. All those things are physical. And so yes, we're in the digital age. But something physical where you can curl up on your couch and read it still is old school and still has a huge impact. Now unfortunately for most genius network members, you may not be earning a Nobel Prize or an Oscar or named MVP of the next super bowl, but you do have a great chance. In fact, a chance that tips the scales in your favor to have a best selling book or becoming a best selling author. Author is short for authority. And so listen to the next 10 minutes, lean forward. Because our next speaker has had over 500 entrepreneurs share their stories and has been through the world of her publishing house Leaders Press and she's achieved the USA Today best selling status for not 11, not 51, not 81, but 91 different authors. You know the names of the most prestigious books on the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. And once you make these lists and opportunities can come your way the a trophy. And so from request for you to speak that's what authors do. If you're a best selling author, to establish you as a results leader, not just a thought leader. And in your profession, if you have a book that is a bestseller, it does give you an unfair advantage. Which is fair for you, unfair for everyone else. Great things happen and they will. If you have a best selling book and there is not just the content to writing the book, but the context of making it a bestseller. And our next speaker has cracked the code on that. Most people don't have a clue on how to achieve bestseller status. There are great books out there that don't achieve bestseller status. But in the next 600 seconds and just 10 minutes, you will learn how. In her first 10 minute talk, she helped us overcome the resistance to writing the book. Creating the content. Now she's going to share some of the little known information and strategies on exactly what it takes to create the title of USA Today that's different than Amazon best seller, but USA Today or Wall Street Journal bestseller. Now her title is how you can earn the title of a USA Today or Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Please help me welcome Alinka Rukhovska.

Thank you, Alex. Don't go away. I'm gonna. How many of you have a best selling book? Wave your hand if you have one. How many have a best selling book? Alex, what does that look like?

It looks like a bunch of my sayings and getting a bunch of people to buy it on Amazon and bribing them to make me bestseller status, that's what it looks like for me.

All right. I mean, how many of you, okay, how many have a USA Today, Wall Street Journal or New York Times best selling book? What's the percentage of the hands up? I see Alinka and six on the last one. All right, so that's what we're going to talk about today. Let me share my screen. To those of you who said yes, you have a best selling book, I say congratulations, you know the power, authority and credibility that comes with being a best selling author. And to those of you who said no, I say, why not? When adding bestselling author to your signature increases your visibility, your attractiveness as a speaker, as a consultant, it allows you to raise your fees and leave a legacy that will continue being desirable long after you're gone. As you've heard in the intro, having not just a bestseller, but a USA Today or Wall Street Journal bestseller is like having an Oscar or if you're an actor, if you're an actor in Oscar or if you're an athlete, being the most valuable player, it's a door opener. It's the most coveted title. It's your claim to fame. That's what bestseller means in the business world. It opens doors for you just like it has for BJ Fogg, Ben Hardy, James Nestor or Robert Cialdini.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So how do you become a best selling author and what do the different lists mean? Well, some of you know this already. Many of you will finally get the explanation you've wanted for a while. My goal for you today is for you to evaluate how adding best selling author to your signature would impact your business financially. You might end up like this gentleman doing snow angels in money. This is business Success secrets. My publishing house, Leaders Press, launched it to USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller in March. One of the authors, Tam Renaul, says there are very few people who can say they are a USA TODAY bestselling authority and I'm blessed to be in the few. Another author, Tomika Holyfield, said that after becoming a USA TODAY best selling author, she doubled her speaking fee and she's getting booked on twice the number of speaking gigs she was before. This is quitless. We launched it to USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller status in April. One of the authors, Anita Plack, said that being a USA TODAY bestselling author is a huge achievement and and people now treat her differently, making the authority coming from the title palpable. This is Vanessa o', Connor, a college professor, and she said that becoming a USA Today bestselling author instantly elevated her status among her peers. So how do you add this accolade to your title? Well, first you need a book. And this is the easy part because you can totally outsource it. Think Crystal Byrne, Dean Jackson or myself. Use any one of us. We can all help you write a book. We all have a different approach. And the purpose of this talk is for you to discover how you can become a bestseller once you have a book. So let's analyze the different lists and the requirements to hit them. Amazon Being an Amazon bestseller means becoming number one in a category. And I'm not saying number one in nonfiction, which is one of the two categories, fiction and nonfiction. I mean, something like this, if you drill down deep enough and you know where to look, you'll find something loosely related to the topic of your book and you will get to number one in this category. With a modest number of books sold, how many categories are there take a guess. 10,000. More than 10,000? Yes. More than 10,000 categories. And how often does the status change? Every hour. Best selling status on Amazon changes every hour. How many sales do you need to become number one in a category? This changes on Amazon all the time, but less than 100 sales will get you to number one if you choose it well. So being an Amazon bestseller is not a gold star like the USA Today, which we will look at now. USA Today is a completely different beast. Why? Because instead of tens of thousands of slots changing every hour, you only have 150 slots every week. So how many books do you need to sell to be in one of those 150 slots? Around 6,000 should do the trick. In a week, only US sales count. So if you're international, you need to focus on U.S. sales and your place of residence doesn't matter. I live in Italy, and as Alex told you, I've put 91 entrepreneurs on the USA Today bestseller list from all over the world. You need to have about 500 sales on a retailer other than Amazon. It has to be a paid book. It can be either a solo book or an anthology. And the placement is very fair because it depends exclusively on the number of copies sold. Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal is very similar to the USA Today list in that it's a fair list. There are only 10 slots every week in seven categories instead of 6,000. You're likely to hit the list with 3,000 sales. Only US sales count. Your place of residence doesn't matter. It needs to be available in more retailers than one. It must be a paid book. It can be a solo book or an anthology. And placement depends on the number of copies sold in genre. So again, it's a fair list. The New York Times is one of the most recognizable lists, but very few people know that. You might get enough sales to be on it, but the editors will not include you on it because they don't like your publisher, they don't like your topic, they don't like how you spell your name, they don't like your face. Or they don't like the fact that you don't like avocados. So which one is the most coveted and fair? That would be the USA Today. So let's explore the two ways that you can get on it. Let's make a few assumptions for you to do it yourself. Let's assume that your Amazon page converts at 50%, meaning that half of the people that land on it buy your book. Remember, you need to sell 66,000 copies let's assume that your click through rate is 2%, meaning that 2% of the people on your list will click through in your email and will see your Amazon page. That means that you need a mailing list of about 600,000 subscribers to achieve 6,000 sales. Do you have a list of 600,000 U.S. subscribers? If you don't, let's look at other options. You can partner with others. So if you don't have a list of 600,000, you can partner with 30 people who have a list of 20,000. What you do is you come up with a topic that 30 of your influencer buddies can write about and you make sure that they commit to mailing multiple times during launch week. Plan it well and you might just be able to hit the list with this approach. Unfortunately, I've seen many of such attempts fail, the number one reason being lack of buy in from the co authors because they go after a shiny new object at the time of launch. So what do you do now? Well, first you need to be outlining your book and to help you get started yourself, I have a direct download for you made specifically for Genius network members@leaderspress.com genius outline plus it has all the information on how to achieve USA today and wall Street Journal bestselling status and all those numbers I shared with you earlier. So how do you become a USA Today bestselling author? There are multiple ways. And what's the best one? The one that will get your book and your name on the list. And I can tell you that the authors who have achieved the status said it was the turning point in their career. And it can be for you too.

Alex Alinka, that was excellent. I have got a whole list of things. But before I make my comments, I'm going to ask our local audience to show their hands and answer this question. How many of you sitting in the room here live have a very clear picture of the difference between an Amazon bestseller, a Wall Street Journal and New York Times, or a USA Today? How many now see the difference? Raise your hands if that's clear. Is there anybody that doesn't know that there's a difference? All right, that's 100%. The message was clear. Now you and I spent a lot of time working on this. I've got to congratulate you for the preparation that you put in on this because there were so many things that came out even better than the last time you practiced this with me. First of all, the way that you shared the screen only after you connected with the audience and that's. We mentioned yesterday, you need that 45 to 60 seconds to connect with your audience. And you did that. The visuals were greatly improved. And Jenny helped you add some of that humor in there with those giphys. And if you're not familiar with the giphy, that was like the man doing the snow angels. It's a moving picture, but you input it in your slide deck, not like a video, but like an image. So there's very little chance it doesn't work. That was great. So you had the humor. And then one of the concerns I had in hearing this, and this is very important for you as Genius Network members because Eunice is very strong on this point. These 10 minute talks are not sales presentations. They're not a pitch. And when I told the Linka, we have other people that do book publishing. So we went through the list and we found out there were five members that did what Alinka did, except two of them dropped out. So we didn't even talk about them because now there's no connection with them. They're not part of Genius Network anymore. But there is Dean Jackson and there is Chris o' Byrne and both of them as well as Alinka do this. So that's a way to do a non commercial where it's not just about you, but it's selling the idea of having the book. And you did that brilliantly. Excellent idea. Only one suggestion. It was a little confusing with Alex on reading the group, because remember, the biggest group is virtually not locally. So we have maybe 25 people. Eunice, how many people do we have today? Yeah. 23. Oh, 23 people here. And if you look on your screen, I'm going to look down now at that number. Well, Rakim will have to disappear on me. But there were 80 yesterday. How many?

81.

81. Okay, so three quarters of the audience is virtual. That's the ones you want to talk to. So congratulations. Let's give her another hand. Big hug for you in Italy. And now let's open it up for some questions, comments, thoughts, or anything else that you'd like. We've got about seven or eight minutes for this, so we're going to start virtually. Tyler, it's your call.

You got it. May we start with Mr. Evan Carmichael and then Ms. Jennifer Hooty right after, please.

All right, let's use your 3G card. Evan. We know a little bit. I think you're in the videos or something.

I don't know.

Something like that. Something like that.

All right, there you are. You stop Jumping this morning.

No, I'm still on my trampoline. Just.

Oh yeah, okay.

When I talk it's a little harder. So. Okay. 3G card member since 2020, I got a YouTube channel with 3 million subscribers, 450 million views that gives kick ass strategies to help you dominate social media and make data driven decisions. And I help thought leaders reach millions of people with your message. I'm looking for help to build to promote my Brandlytics YouTube training course and also help me as a Canadian open up shop in the US and the road to green card. If anybody has suggestions on that. Alinka, awesome job. It was amazing. If anybody checks out her website, there's also a list of pricing of different packages and how much that costs because that was my first question. I was in a breakout room with her, so check that out. My question was can it also help? Do you have a package or plan for existing authors who already have a book who want to do something more with it? Or is it only for brand new people starting a new book?

Thank you, Evan. And thank you for your kind words. Right, so we like working with new authors on new books and launch those because our USP is to get people on the USA Today bestseller list. And we also have a distribution agreement with Simon and Schuster. That's who we distribute it the books with. So it helps. We can do our best work doing that. For people who already have books out, what we like to suggest is that they join one of our USA Today anthologies. So periodically we do these anthologies where we put a bunch of entrepreneurs, about 30 in an anthology and then that hits the list and they all become USA Today best selling authors and then they can put that title on their covers, existing covers. And during the launch, many of the authors that I've spoken to, I didn't put this in the presentation because I only had 10 minutes, but many of them said that they saw that their existing books sales increased during the time that the anthology was launching. So there's that. And then we also have a PR program where we get people podcasts and get articles for them to get going on LinkedIn and pitch for a TED Talk. But that would be our secondary thing that we do. Our primary thing is the launches and the distribution.

Well, thank you, Evan. All right, who's next? Darnet?

Jennifer?

Hoodie, she's got a question.

Jennifer, you gave your talk, so we're going to skip your 3G card because we know your vivid vision and conscious copy.

Cool. Jen, that talk was awesome, so great job. My question is kind of near the end of your talk, you shared the approach of basically having affiliates or partners promoting to their lists. Is that your main strategy for helping your clients then hit the US Today bestseller list is through distribution of other partners promoting the books.

Thank you, Jennifer. Yeah, and I was keeping my fingers crossed that my Internet's not going to play tricks on me. You were super cool yesterday. Yeah. So the main strategy is this, to work with a large number of partners who promote the week that we promote. So we basically orchestrate the launches like six, seven months in advance. There's a really long lead time which also corresponds with the fact that we now distribute through Simon and Schuster. So we also need to have the books in the warehouse three months before the book launches. And yes, we line up a large number of partners who will all do the promotional push in the same week so that all the sales are stacked up that week.

And does your team support with that? Of like say if I had a list of partners. But then your team would help in coordinating and communicating with those people. Kind of like a JV manager.

Right. So we don't do the JV management thing. We do it all in house. But you know, the, the slot that we get out of the 150, we hit about the middle of the list. So if you had us and you had another team, like you're looking at hitting a much higher number on the list.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you, Jennifer. Darna, who's next?

I don't have any questions in the chat, but Denise was asking for your website again. Alinka, do you mind putting that in the chat? Yeah, I see a couple people put it in. It's leaderspress.com was a URL that I came up with when I was at my Mastermind in London with Gene Jackson. And I remember we came up with the idea and I thought, how about we call this Leaders Press? And I looked it up on GoDaddy or something and Dean said, I can't believe it's available. Get it now. So, so now you're going to remember Leaders Press.

And here's another great example of two book people having a collaboration, having this connection through this wonderful genius network that we all have an opportunity to be part of. And that's really the key, knowing this. And if you've been thinking of a book, you've got Alinka, you've got Dean, you've got Chris waiting to help you that understand the world that you're in. And that's what's so great about a genius network member. This is a different universe that we're in.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.