It’s often said that it can’t be done… but anything is possible if you have a brutal seller’s mindset. Bear in mind that every ucdm is a product. Whether it’s a new releases, an old book, a 50-page story, an 800-page epic, fiction, or nonfiction… they all have something in common when it comes to Amazon. As far as Amazon’s search engines are concerned, all of these books are just other products and their ID is – from their point of view – just a unique ASIN. Neither age, nor gender, nor history matters. All that matters is how well a certain ASIN is likely to sell.
So many authors have published their works expecting their books on Amazon to somehow sell themselves, and even possibly appear on Amazon’s top chart – oh, to have such confidence must be a wonderful thing! With some books having substantial marketing budget behind themselves, and some others represented by marketing professionals, many self-published books are unfortunately destined to disappear in the backgrounds, and simply fail. The quality of the book always matter, but nobody could deny that quality alone doesn’t sell books. Professional sales strategy and big advertising budgets make an enormous difference on digital sales channels… but a self-published author can’t compete against companies that have been selling books for decades; after all, their ability and know-how in making a book perfectly sellable is the second biggest asset they have. The first is – obviously – their money. Money buys audiences: it’s a simple law of big numbers, and one we can’t get away from.
Undoubtedly you may have read some success stories in the past. Yes, I know, some self-published authors really did it – and it’s highly impressive that they did. However, the other side of the coin – the sad truth of the matter – is that thousands of other authors have failed to achieve a positive profit margin, while the lucky few managed to make it big with seemingly little effort on their part. One could imagine that Amazon is not only the biggest bookseller in the world, but also the biggest graveyard for books and authors’ aspirations!
A few million books (and that’s not an overstatement, amazingly) are just staying there, resting in limbo, without a single visit for weeks or even months – totally forgotten, marked as a failure, left to fade away. So many potential bestsellers have failed due to the fact that publishing is not a simple task, despite the fact it may look like one when you consider how slick the publishing procedure is on platforms such as Kindle. With just a few clicks, your book has been published! Wow… And then what?
However, your book actually might stand a chance, so long as you adopted a seller’s mindset and acquire some crucial marketing skills – something that I consider a vital element of digital sales success. Let’s drop the technical jargon and dive right into the middle of things. There are several steps to be performed before you engage in publishing on Amazon.
The sales strategy is built on data, not on our own subjective perception of what could turn out well. This is something you’ll have to bear in mind during this entire process. It’s not romantic, it isn’t glamorous… but it’s reality.
