Start A Trend To Sell More Books

The Amazon algorithm hates spikes in book sales.
 
There, now you know.
 
Authors used to use a technique called the “book bomb” to get their books selling, but no one talks about those anymore.
 
A book bomb was a splurge of advertising and promotions on a single day to send a book zooming up the sales rankings, so it would get noticed. But Amazon decided it didn’t like those sorts of spikes, because they weren’t sustainable in terms of sales. If all the marketing was happening on a single day, sales soon started to drop off on subsequent days.
 
Part of that is because of the way that Amazon calculates sales rankings. A sale is counted as a whole number on the day it’s made, but the next day it is only counted as ½ a sale. The day after that it is a ¼ of a sale and so on until the fraction becomes so small it is meaningless.

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That is why you can be riding high in the sales rankings one day and you’re pondlife the next.
 
So, Indie authors had to find a new way of getting the Amazon algorithms working for them that didn’t create a spike but created a trend instead.
 
What they came up with was the stacked promo, or promo stacking if you want to express it the other way around.
 
A well-planned stacked promo campaign can gather you a lot of sales over a longer time period, which creates a trend and gets the attention of the Amazon algorithms. They can also be used in conjunction with Facebook and Amazon ads

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That’s because Amazon wants to sell books because selling books makes them money. And the easiest books for Amazon to sell are the ones that are already selling because the author is promoting them.
 
So, if your sales are creating an upward trend, as they should be over the period of a stacked promotion for a discounted book, the Amazon algorithms will do two things.
 
The first is that they will start to include them in their recommendations listings. You know the ones in the carousels that appear on the sales page for books and act as competition. That’s the “recommended for you” list and the “also bought” list.

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That’s basically free advertising for your book, as a lot of people buy from those lists because it saves them having to do more searches.
 
The second thing it does only applies if your book is subscribed to Kindle Select, the driver behind Kindle Unlimited.
 
A lot of “wide” authors don’t know this, but if your book is in Kindle Select and its starts to sell as an ebook, then it will be recommended to Kindle Unlimited subscribers for them to download. This is because Amazon assumes that if people are buying your book, other people will download it for free on KU and that justifies the subscription price Amazon charges.
 
That is more free advertising and the majority of 6 figure earning authors make most of their money this way, not through sales of the ebook.

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But if you just go for a sales spike, none of that happens.
 
Do stacked promos work?
 
All I can say is that we have just run one for our book The Magi and yes, it worked.
 
How much does it cost?
 
The most expensive book promo site is BookBub and their Featured Deals start at around $100 (£80) and can run as high as $1,000 for the most popular genres. I think it is fair to say that you need to be selling quite a lot of books already if you want to book a slot with them.
 
But many sites offer far cheaper packages than that and they also have a significant reach. They start from around $20 and I don’t think any charge more than $100, but check their prices for yourself.

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Unsurprisingly the best sites are much in demand, so plan ahead.

You need to be looking at least 30 days ahead if you want to secure a slot on a specific day or in a particular week, but for some genres you might have to look as far ahead as 60 days.
 
There are so many book promo sites, how do you know which are good, which are bad, and which are scammers?
 
I’ll provide a link at the end of the blog to another blog by book marketing guru David Gaughran, that lists sites he has used personally, and we have also used some of them. You can trust all those sites. But by all means check with other sources if you don’t trust us or David Gaughran. In fact, I recommend that you do.
 
So, there you have it.
 
Stacked promos are great for promoting your back catalogue on a tight budget, but they also work well as a promotion for a new book in a series, where you can list Book 1 at a heavy discount (99c or even free), Book 2 at a higher price and the latest book at full price.

​Basically, you are building a pricing ladder to encourage the reader to climb down deep into your series and you can do that for anything from a 3 book series to a 10 book (or more) series.

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RESOURCES
 
For David Gaughran’s blog on stacked promotions, including the best sites to use, click here.
 
For more information on making the Amazon algorithms work for you, we recommend David Gaughran’s book “Amazon Decoded”.
 
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