avatarRené Junge

Summary

An author's sixteenth thriller book achieved a high Amazon ranking with a minimal advertising budget by focusing on a core audience and utilizing pre-orders effectively.

Abstract

The author published the sixteenth installment of their thriller series and successfully ranked it within the top 100 on Amazon's general charts in Germany on the first day of release. Despite a modest pre-order number of 101 within a nine-day period and a total advertising spend of just 321€ on vouchers for loyal fans, 120,72€ on Facebook Ads, and 11,27€ on Amazon Ads, the book outperformed previous releases that had significantly higher advertising budgets. The author attributes this success to a targeted advertising strategy that initially focused on a core audience, resulting in a high conversion rate and a self-perpetuating upward trend in sales. The strategy also involved leveraging the pre-order function to establish a sales history and link the e-book and print editions, thereby presenting a more appealing product page to potential customers.

Opinions

  • The author believes that the quality of buyers is more critical than the quantity for achieving success on Amazon.
  • Targeting core fans and using newsletters and Facebook groups are deemed more effective than massive external advertising.
  • External advertising can dilute the data pool that Amazon uses to determine which customers to target, potentially harming a book's visibility.
  • The pre-order function is advantageous for new releases as it allows the book to have a sales history from day one and ensures that e-book and print editions are linked, displaying the correct page count.
  • The author emphasizes the importance of high conversion rates in the initial sales period to trigger Amazon's algorithms to promote the book more widely.
  • Previous marketing strategies, which included higher advertising budgets and broader reach through book advertising sites, were less effective compared to the focused approach used for the sixteenth book.
  • The success of this launch strategy may be replicable for future book releases, as suggested by the author's intentions to apply the same principles going forward.

How to Rank Your Book Higher on Amazon By Spending Less For Ads

On 15.02.2020, I published the sixteenth part of my thriller series. Before that, it was available for pre-order from 06.02.2020 to 14.02.2020. Right on the first day of the sale, it entered the general Top 100 of the Amazon Charts in Germany. In this article, I analyze my launch strategy.

Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash

The book

The series in which the book was published has generated over 200,000 sales between 2015 and today. It is part sixteen of the series. Each book tells a completed story, and only the characters remain the same.

Since volume ten, everything centers around serial killers.

The book has 405 pages and is listed in 10 subcategories. Until now, Amazon has not yet integrated it into the series feature, so it is still available in the shop without any connection to the first fifteen volumes.

The Genre

As I have already written, this is a thriller about a serial killer. Thrillers are the strongest genre on Amazon in Germany right after Romance.

But the competition in this genre is enormous. To get into the Top 100 is therefore very difficult, as the subcategories are also highly competitive. Gaining visibility is, therefore, not easy.

Since there is no separate category for serial killers, I have sorted the book into the next best categories (psychological thriller, suspense, horror, etc.)

The potential in the thriller genre is enormous. I know of authors who sell over 50,000 copies of each new thriller in the first year.

The pre-order

I use the Amazon pre-order function for all my books. I have found that shorter pre-order times work better for me than longer ones.

This time I chose a pre-order period of only nine days.

Within these nine days, the book was only pre-ordered 101 times.

For comparison: In June 2019, I published a book that was pre-ordered 893 times within 21 days. But this book was then only one day in the top 100 and reached 89th place as the best rank.

My new book reached rank 47 the day after its publication and is now still rank 62.

What have I done differently this time? Well, for the book, which was pre-ordered over 800 times, I started to put massive Facebook ads after a few days.

For my current book, I only ran Facebook ads for the last two days of the pre-order period. The budget was only 10€ on the first day and 20€ on the second day.

Most of the pre-orders I generated on the day I advertised the book in the Facebook group, where I gathered my hardcore fandom.

Most of these fans get vouchers for the book on the day of release, but many do without them and pre-order the book as soon as it is possible.

To make a book available for pre-order for a specific time before the actual publication has some significant advantages. For one thing, the book has a sales history on the day of release and is better placed in the rankings than it would be without the pre-order.

Second, the links to other books are already there when the book goes on sale.

You probably know the Amazon feature that shows customers which books have been bought by customers who have purchased this book (Customers who bought this also bought that).

This feature is vital for the visibility of a book. It is not so much about which books are linked on your product page, but about the backlinks. Your book must appear among other books on their product pages.

Amazon sometimes needs many days before these links appear, which is why it is advantageous to choose a sufficiently long pre-order time so that these links are there when the book goes on sale.

A further advantage of the pre-order function, which should not be underestimated, is that the print edition is already linked to the e-book at the start of sales.

Why is this important? Amazon counts the pages of an e-book very unreliable. Almost always, the e-book is charged considerably fewer pages than the print edition has. If both versions are linked, Amazon takes over the specification of the page count of the print edition for the e-book.

For my new book, 205 pages were initially specified for the e-book on the product page.

After linking to the paperback, it suddenly had 405 pages. Of course, readers prefer to buy longer books than shorter ones. That’s why this linking of both editions is so essential because, without this linking, the reader doesn’t get a realistic picture of the actual length of the book.

Advertising budget and advertising measures

For the new book, I spent 321 € on the vouchers that my most loyal fans receive for each new book.

Also, I invested 120,72€ in Facebook Ads and 11,27€ in Amazon Ads until I entered the Top 100.

This budget is ridiculously low for the results I have achieved with it.

By comparison, the last book I published before the new one only made it into the top 100 for one day with a total budget of 1748€. The best rank achieved was63, and after that, it went downhill quickly.

What was different from the last time

At the moment, I’m still a little speechless myself, because volume sixteen of the series has had the best start of all my books so far.

Most of my other books had only just made it into the Top 100, or not at all, and if they did, they stay there for two days at most.

I have achieved this success with the lowest advertising budget I have ever had.

For most of the previous books, I had to burn hundreds of Euros even to get close to the Top 100.

So what have I done differently this time?

The only thing that was different this time compared to my previous book launches was my advertising strategy. At first, I only did minimal Facebook and Amazon advertising. With all previous books, I had already spent daily budgets of up to 80€ in the pre-order period.

Apart from massive Facebook and Amazon advertising, I had also booked two high-reach book advertising sites.

This time I almost exclusively limited myself to three traffic sources: My newsletter, my list of hardcore fans who received vouchers from me, and my Facebook group.

In total, I have reached an estimated 700 people through these channels. On Facebook and Amazon, I spent considerable amounts on advertising only after that.

My explanation: Due to the restriction to my hardcore fans, I only directed traffic to my product site in the first days, which led to almost one hundred percent purchases.

So Amazon’s algorithms must have registered an unusually high conversion rate. This, in turn, must have led to Amazon showing the book to many more customers who were similar to previous buyers.

As a result, the book then entered an upward trend that generated more and more sales.

If I had additionally placed massive Facebook advertisements instead, the conversion rate would inevitably have been much lower, which would have led to Amazon’s assessment of the book as weaker and showing it to fewer potential buyers.

Conclusion

I had long been aware that for success on Amazon, it is much more critical who buys a book than how many people buy it.

Many buyers who do not belong to the narrowest target group are more likely to harm the further development of the book than to help it. This is because Amazon will take the current buyers as a model for future buyers and then send advertising for the book to the wrong customers.

This will lead to reduced conversion rates, which will signal to Amazon that the book is terrible, so it will not be pushed any further.

What is new for me, however, is the realization to what extent external advertising can pollute the data pool, from which Amazon calculates to whom it should recommend a book.

I suspect that it was above all the abandonment of the two large book advertising sites that helped to keep the data pool clean. But Facebook ads also generate a large number of clicks, which do not lead to sales.

So if I am to answer why I have achieved such a much better result this time than with all the publications before, I come to the following conclusion: Restrict yourself to your core audience at the beginning, which consists of people you know and who you know have bought many books from you.

A newsletter and your community where you gather your fans are the most essential components for a successful book launch. Even a lot of money for advertising campaigns cannot exceed this strategy.

Sometimes it can even be counterproductive to spend too much money on advertising.

I am curious to see if I am right and if I can repeat this good result with my next book.

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