OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
Last week my ARKANE box-set hit the USA Today bestseller list at #121.
This is a case study describing how I did it in case you want to try it yourself.
But remember, this is only an anecdote and one person's experience, so results will depend on each individual situation.
Why bother trying to hit the list anyway? What does it even matter?
You don't need to hit a list to make a very good living as an author, and many authors just get on with reaching readers without caring about them at all. Authors who are in KDP Select may also be selling FAR more than is needed to hit the list, but the criteria involves selling on multiple stores.
The lists are widely understood to be ‘gameable,' so the results are more like an IQ test. They measure something – but not what you might think 🙂
However, there are a few reasons to want to hit the USA Today list or the New York Times list:
- I was on the USAT and NYT lists as part of a multi-author boxset and I wanted to do it with a single author name
- I see romance authors doing it all the time, even with brand new titles, but there are fewer indie thriller authors who hit the lists. Recently, Michael Lister and Mark Dawson did it as thriller authors with box-sets, so I wanted to see if I could do it too
- I don't like to constantly promote my fiction so I needed some kind of spike promo to aim for. It's good to have a goal like making a list, and then even if you fall short, you still have the benefits of visibility and sales
- It's an interesting demonstration of how fiction book marketing is working right now in terms of paid advertising. I'm also going to be working on the 3rd edition of How to Market a Book soon, so I wanted some personal experience of this kind of ad stacking.
Here are my results and then below that is an explanation of what I did.
Results
Total number of books sold @ 99c (reduced from $6.99 for the week)
- Amazon.com Kindle: 4294
- Kobo: 491
- iBooks: 544
- Nook: 902
- Total books sold: 6231
- Total income from box-set sold: $2524
- Total extra income in the week from other books – comparing previous weeks income so can be extrapolated as related to the promotion: $1654
- Total income: $4178
Ranking
- Started at around 84,000 in the Amazon.com Kindle store
- Top ranking reached on Amazon.com: #34 overall in the Kindle store #1 in Men's Adventure, Women's Adventure, Terrorism, Supernatural Thrillers, Paranormal Suspense
- Top ranking reached on Amazon.co.uk: #106 overall in the Kindle store #1 in Men's Adventure, Women's Adventure
Cost of advertising
- Total paid promotional email list cost (BookBub and others as below): $1261
- Total Facebook Ads: $2131
- Total BookBub extra ads (beta service): $1573
- Total cost: $4965
Overall LOSS: $787
Yes, that is an overall loss, but it is for that week only, and does not take into account future income from sale of other books based on new readers, which I would expect to more than offset that in coming months. It's also worth noting that most companies would consider marketing as an investment and would not expect positive ROI (return on investment) from immediate sales in the week of promotion.
What about other measures of success?
- New signups to my JFPenn email list: 2347
- New Likes to my JFPenn Facebook page (which you often get when you advertise): 111
- No of new readers who now have books 1-3 of my ARKANE series and could go on to buy the other 6 books in that series, or more of my books in general: 6231
- New reviews that will be coming in over the next few weeks
- Revenue from future book sales that will now come in as a result of new readers finding my books
- Intangible benefit of making the USA Today list as a single author
So was it worth it?
Absolutely. Even though it was a slight financial loss in the week of the promotion, I more than expect to get that back over the coming months from new readership and ongoing sales based on boosted ranking.
Here's some tips on how you could try and hit the list yourself.
Tip 1: Make sure it's the right book and a good deal for customers
Established indie authors (mainly romance) hit the USA Today and even the NY Times with new releases all the time, but in the thriller genre, it is mainly traditionally published authors who do that. You also have to sell a decent volume across multiple stores to make the lists so the best idea is to have a time-sensitive deal that people want so they buy on impulse. So I went with:
- ARKANE boxset 1 containing 3 full-length thrillers: Stone of Fire, Crypt of Bone, Ark of Blood. These books have been out for several years and the box-set has been out for over a year
- Reduced from $6.99 to 99c for a limited time – which made it attractive to readers
- 73 reviews with 4.9 star average on Amazon.com – which made it acceptable to the merchandizers
Tip 2: Utilize ad stacking
I got a BookBub Featured Deal for the Wednesday, and then organized other promotional services around it for the week of the promo. I used Booksends, Just Kindle Books, Kindle Nation Daily, BooksButterfly, eReaderNewsToday, and BargainBooksy. These are all paid promotional email list services that promote limited time deals to voracious readers. There are lots of other options but I went with this selection.
You need to book these as soon as possible as many of them sell out. They have varying success rates but for a week of promo, I decided it was a good idea to be everywhere. Thanks to Michael Lister for sharing the services he used for his successful USA Today run, which he discussed on the Sell More Books Show.
Thanks also to Draft2Digital for helping me get some Nook merchandising, as you need sales in more than one store to make the lists. I focused on Nook as it's harder to get movement on iBooks, and Kobo has fewer sales in the US.
As well as the paid email services, I also layered on Facebook Ads a few days BEFORE the promos, so I would start the week at a higher ranking.
On the Monday morning when the book sales started counting, the boxset was already at #7425 on Amazon.com and in the Top 100 for Men's Adventure and Terrorism (up from around #84,000 in the store), so it had a running start.
I then continued to run Facebook Ads for the whole week to fans of authors in the same genre, as well as to my email list and LookaLike lists (more detail below.) As ever, credit due to Mark Dawson for his encouragement around FB Ads. You can listen to this interview if you want to learn more.
After the main BookBub Featured Deal, I also used the beta ad service from BookBub, which shows paid ads at the bottom of the daily emails, to target Kindle and Nook readers for the last 2 days of the run.
Yes, I should have included tracking links per service in order to work out which was most effective, but I didn't, because I'm just not enough of a data geek 🙂 My main approach was ‘be everywhere' and then round up the numbers in total.
Tip 3: Use your email list in multiple ways
Your own email list is a critical asset in your author business. It's like having your own Bookbub, but of course, it takes time to grow. [If you want to grow your author email list, check out this case study of how I grew mine.]
In the words of Gary Vaynerchuk, online marketing is about ‘jab, jab, jab, right hook,' or ‘give, give, give, ask.' So if you have been generous with your readers and fans over time, now's the time for the ‘ask.' If you promote too often, then I don't believe readers will care too much, but if you do deals occasionally (as I do), then you should get good support.
I sent out an email to my JFPenn list notifying them of the deal, plus I mentioned it on The Creative Penn podcast and also sent an email to my Creative Penn list. Many people had already read the separate books, but supported me anyway with 99c, and some tried the book on a whim. Thanks to everyone who bought it or spread the word!
It's also true that you often need to be seen more than once for readers to buy. So I also targeted my email list readers with Facebook Ads and used the list to create a LookaLike list of similar people to advertise to. This is one of the extra benefits of building a list as you can use it for targeted advertising as well as just emails.
If advertising makes you feel negative in any way, consider these questions:
- Do you believe your book is good enough for readers to want to read? Do you want them to know that it's available on a special deal?
- Do you believe that your book will stand out from the crowd without readers being notified that it's on special?
- Do you think that publishers invest money in marketing for books they want people to read?
If you think your books are good enough and that readers will find them entertaining, useful or inspirational, and if you take your author business seriously, and if you want to grow your readership, then I believe that this type of advertising investment is well worth it.
I'd love to hear what you think, so please do join the conversation and leave a comment below.
Thanks for sharing your experience and approach, Joanna. Bookmarked for later!
I echo Brian. Thanks for such a detailed review of what this process looked like for you, Joanna. Bookmarking for later 😉
Wonderfully useful, as always. Thanks Joanna.
Thank you for being so candid with your experience. I’m learning that I’ll more than likely have to lose money in order to succeed. Thanks for showing the way.
I think of it in terms of an “investment” rather than ‘losing money.’ Marketing is an investment for any company.
Congratulations, and thank you so much for openly sharing your process!!
What an awesome post Joanna. Thanks so much for the transparency. It’s great to see how the numbers stack up as they give a much clearer picture of how advertising for authors works.
Congrats on making the list again, Joanna. Fabulous achievement. And there’s definitely cachet to being able to add USA Today bestseller to your name. ?
As others have said, I’ll be bookmarking this too. Something I find encouraging is that, while your sales for the week are outstanding, they are not so impossibly high that small fry like me feel we could never reach such targets. Maybe it’s doable in a few years when I’ve got a bigger list! Onwards. Thank you for your generosity in sharing your secrets.
Exactly 🙂 It was also a slow week – no one seems to do much in August in publishing. The numbers needed for the bumper weeks in Sept/Oct/Nov will be much higher.
The bumper week? So, after the first round of promotion, you will do another a little bit later on? Do you plan to use the same plan for that one too? Same BookBub and FB ads?
No, sorry – I meant that traditional publishers have ‘bumper’ weeks where they put out a lot of top names. They don’t do this in August so it’s a good time to try and hit the lists. It might take 10,000+ sales to hit the lists at other times of the year.
Brilliant candid breakdown of your experience – thank you, and congratulations!
Congratulations, Joanna, and thanks for sharing your process and results in such detail. I’m curious, though, how does one find out that they’ve made either list? Must you check manually or does something appear in your inbox? Or do cherubim descend from the skies to deliver the news on gilded scrolls and hand-feed you expensive chocolates? I’d love to make a list at some point in my career and I really, really hope it’s the latter.
You just have to check the list manually:) http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/best-selling/
Ah, no chocolate then. Cheers, thanks again!
Hi Joanna. Congratulations. Interesting analysis. Somehow I was under the impression that indies don’t make it to the NYT and USAT best seller lists as they depend on the sales of your print books in book stores (where indies don’t reach). Another question: checking the list manually would be pretty tedious, is there an easier way to search for your book and then see the rankings? 🙂
I think you’d only be checking it if you were doing a promo – it’s unlikely to be random sales that make it. So you would check it in the week you tried to hit the list. It’s not random chance!
Indies hit the list all the time! Check out the list any week and you’ll see romance authors like Liliana Hart, Barbara Freethy, HM Ward, JA Huss and others. Indie authors in other genres are more rare of course, but that’s only because I think romance authors are way ahead in terms of marketing 🙂
Hi Joanna. Do indies hit the list with their e-books or paperbacks available in bookstores? 🙂
Joanna, you inspire me. Many thanks!
Wow, thank you for your candor, Joanna!
I’ve not yet found much into on how to make the different lists, so this has been eye-opening. Congratulations on making USAT!
The USA Today has very transparent criteria: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/06/04/about-usa-todays-best-selling-book-list/2389075/
What a huge achievement, Joanna, and thank you for your generosity in sharing your marketing tips with us!
You’ve given me a great idea to market my series of Nordic romance books. I’ve got three out with the fourth on the way, so I may just run a 99cent promo of the 3 first books after the publication of no 4 , even if I may just concentrate on Amazon sales. ?
Congratulations Joanna! A fabulous achievement. 🙂
Congratulations on your success and thanks for sharing the info! My question is two part: 1) What number do you have to hit on a list like that to be able to call yourself a “best selling” author? Do you have to be #1 or top 10 or just make the list or how does it work? And 2) How does someone accomplish this if they don’t have 4 grand to spend on ads? I have a budget of like $50.00 per month for advertising…. I even got invited to a book fair recently but I don’t think I will be able to go because I don’t have the $500-700 bucks to buy a decent enough amount of books to take with me…. So, what can someone do with very limited money to spend? Thanks a lot! Congratulations again!
(1) If you make anywhere on a bestseller list, you are a bestseller! So if you made #150 on the USA Today, you’d be a USA Today bestseller … this is why many authors claim Amazon Bestseller, which is very easy as you just hit a random sub-category.
(2) If you have limited money, then you won’t be aiming for a list right now – I’d suggest saving for a pro editor to become a better writer – or save for a professional cover, or if you’ve done that, then grow your email list by using free books
I have 20 books and this is my full-time living – therefore, my business invests in advertising. This is not a recommendation for an author with one book – or just starting out 🙂
Finally some clear ideas about how much the marketing costs. Thank you for your openness. Maybe in the future I will be referring to this article with my own books. Thanks again.
Very informative. Based on your sales numbers, I wonder how many books people who hit number 1 on USA today are selling. Must be a lot!
Thanks for sharing, Joanna. It’s great to see the actual numbers you sold on the various platforms. I always refer my author friends to your marketing books. They are terrific. Congratulations on hitting the list!
Thanks Joanna for the inspiration you share. I am in the last legs of writing my first draft. Although excited, I am also terrified of marketing. I listened to the session with Nick and that has spurred me on. Any advice is welcome…
It’s all just step by step. In Jan 2008, I started with 0 books, 0 readers, 0 people on my email list, 0 author friends, 0 website and not much knowledge … how things change 🙂 Just put something into action every day and you will get there …
Congratulations, Joanna. And thank you for sharing the process you went through in such detail. Very helpful! 🙂