Amazon Nonfiction Best Seller List
- Hi, I'm Amelia, and I'm with Pithy Wordsmithery.
And is my faithful beast, Matilda,
she's almost always behind me
if you haven't seen her before on Zoom.
Today, I wanna talk about the Amazon
non-fiction best seller list.
So, I get a lot of questions about this.
How do you get on a best seller list?
New York Times best selling list, Amazon best selling list.
And a lot of authors are interested in that.
It really helps you gain momentum, and it's a huge
accomplishment to have your book be a best seller.
So, to hit a New York Times best seller list
or any of the other ones that come from the newspapers,
you have to sell about 11,000 copies in one week.
That's a lotta copies.
So, it is doable for certain authors.
For other new authors, that's a little bit of a stretch.
Hitting a list on Amazon is a lot easier.
So, it's a little bit different
because for the newspaper list like New York Times,
they count the sales by the week.
Whereas, Amazon counts it by, they're supposed to do it
every hour, but recently, I've noticed that it
doesn't usually update that much.
So, we say we try to spike the sales in one day.
And instead of having it just be one overarching category
for non-fiction books, like for New York Times,
it's like self-help, non-fiction, how-to,
all those are lumped together.
So like, business books are competing with cookbooks,
and that kinda thing.
For Amazon, they get a little bit more granular than that.
So, when you go look at books, you can click on books,
and then you can drill down into more specific categories.
You can rank for any of those categories.
So, that tends to be a lot easier, just because there are
a lot more chances for you to hit a list,
and hit the number one spot.
So, for most of the authors that we work with,
Amazon is better for trying to target that
for the best seller list than for New York Times.
So, how many do you have to sell in any
of those categories to have it be a number one?
That is a super complicated answer.
And it's kind of like SEO, where it doesn't matter
just what you're doing, it matters
what everyone else is doing.
Because you're ranking against them.
So, it's hard to say exactly how many.
And it depends on how competitive the categories are.
But the best thing that you can possibly do,
is to try to sell as many copies as possible
in that one day, so that the sales numbers spike.
And you do that through really great marketing.
So, talking to people ahead of time,
letting them know that the book is coming out.
You wanna do announcements on social media.
You wanna put it on e-blast, put it on your website.
But I think the thing that helps the most,
is to personally ask people if they will buy it on the day.
When you can get buy-in from people, and you let them know
that their purchase really is super important to you,
and you're trying to hit a best seller list,
and it is important for them to buy it on that day,
I think that authors have the most luck with that.
So, it might feel a little bit awkward, but you know,
if you pay it forward and you also help other people out,
they should have no problem helping you out.
And if this is a huge milestone thing for you,
like becoming an author or writing a book is a big deal,
people are generally really glad to help you out.
So, definitely try to do that with the
Amazon best seller list, it is doable.
We've had a bunch of books hit the best seller list
over the years.
And I think if you just put your efforts into a strong
marketing campaign, you can totally do it.
So, again, this is Amelia from Pithy Wordsmithery.
