- First and foremost, take your time to write a quality manuscript. Do not rush and publish a first draft. Make sure to go through several rounds of revisions to "trim the fat" i.e. get rid of redundancies, passive voice, and unnecessary wordiness.
- Hire a professional editor to edit your manuscript. A pro book editor should fix grammar, spelling, punctuation, word usage and sentence structure/flow.
- Work with a professional book designer. At this point, you have a solid edited manuscript, but the first thing consumers see is the book cover, so make sure to only use a top-notch cover design. Any seasoned book designer will also handle the essentials for the interior such as table of contents (TOC), page numbering, headers, footers, justification, hyphenation, orphans, widows, and much more.
- Select an established book publisher such as Seacoast Press to publish your book. I own the company, which offers professional editing and book design as recommended above, but also printing, ebook conversion, distribution, publicity and marketing. Working with Seacoast Press allows you to receive all of the above services from one provider, instead of having to hire multiple contractors. Of course, if you'd rather go it alone, there are self-publishing platforms that you can utilize. Just keep in mind that you'll probably face a steep learning curve without the help of a professional publisher.
- Form a book launch team. Enlist a group of readers to join your launch team and to read your book prior to release, post Amazon reviews, and help with promotion heading into and during book launch day. Tip: Create a Facebook group to form and manage your launch team and offer incentives for team members.
- Choose the right book categories. If you publish with Seacoast Press, I'll help you determine the correct categories for your book. A rule of thumb is to try to choose categories without a tremendous amount of competition. For instance, you shouldn't choose the general "Action Adventure" category, as that is too broad and the competition will be fierce. You should instead segment it down to a sub-category with less competition.
- Make sure you use competitive pricing for all your book formats. Look at comparable titles in your genre with a similar page count to determine a proper price point for the paperback and ebook. As with the categories, I can help you determine a correct price point via Seacoast Press.
- Set a book launch date on your own or with the help of your publisher. Choose a weekend date if possible. You want to drive as many sales as possible on Amazon during your launch day. Amazon updates their rankings hourly, so the more sales in a particular day the better. Make sure your launch team is aware of your launch date and encourage them to leave their reviews in time for that launch date and promote the date along with you.
- Run a Best Seller Campaign for your launch date by leveraging social media, sending out press releases, taking out ads on ebook blogs and purchasing spots on e-newsletters. As part of the Seacoast Press Best Seller service package, I actually handle this process for you. I handle all the ad buying for your book and focus on driving sales during your launch day. You can do this yourself, but I've done this successfully numerous times for myself and others and I can save you a lot of time and energy.
Obviously, this isn't an exhaustive list but in my opinion the above outline represents the basic framework for achieving Amazon bestseller status as an author.
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