One type of email book sales campaign is intended to create a “best seller” on Amazon.com. The author sends out an email asking everyone in his or her database to buy a book at the same time, disproportionately affecting Amazon book sales during that peak time.

In exchange for buying at a given time, the author will joint venture with others to offer additional incentives such as bonus ebooks, teleclasses, one-to-one coaching—usually a list of valuable products and services. The joint venture partners will then usually be given a copy of the email list created from the campaign.

There is a lot of work required to prepare an Amazon campaign, including signing up the joint venture partners, creating the offer email, figuring out how to get the bonuses to the book buyers, and dealing with the online receipts that come in from book buyers who send them to prove they bought the book on the right day or hour.

The whole purpose is to have enough book sales to boost the Amazon rank to somewhere in the top 10 books, and preferably to #1, even if only for a very short period of time. Many books have become Amazon.com best sellers for one hour only with as few as fifty books during that time.

To keep track of the Amazon.com rankings for the book, there is a service that will do that for you at $10 for one year for an hour-by-hour tracking. See www.booksandwriters.com.

Elements of the Campaign

Here are the things involved in setting up an Amazon Best Seller Campaign:
• Make sure the book’s Amazon.com listing is all it can be with an author blog, a full description, the book cover, table of contents, etc. visible with Inside the Book.

• Set a date for the campaign, preferably on a weekday and perhaps on a day people will remember, or two to three weeks prior to a major holiday if this is a gift idea.

• About two months before the campaign date, research partners who will provide valuable bonuses that complement the book. You would like to have 10-20 in total and these should be items that really have worth and will be interesting to the same audience as your book is. The best bonuses are downloads such as ebooks, seminar transcripts, audios, free memberships, teleclasses and dollars-off coupons.

• Send out emails to approach partners, and follow up a week later with a phone call. Send out a confirming email when they have agreed. Put their product information (especially including the dollar value) on your web page as soon as possible.

• Work with the web designer to prepare a web page that will show the “offer” with photos of partners and partner’s products, with links to the Amazon.com page for your book. The page should also give detailed instructions for getting the bonuses (where to send their email receipt to get the download page from your site).

• Prepare another web page that is the “download” page from which buyers can get their bonuses, or which has links to the bonuses if they appear on your partners’ web pages.

• Accumulate as many email addresses or commitments to send your campaign out from others as you can.

• Send out a press release to bloggers, ezines and others that match your topic area and ask them to publicize the campaign to their readers. It really helps if you can show you have high profile testimonials or other things they might like to attach their names to.

• Send out an email to all accumulated lists 2 weeks before the event and then a final email a day before or early morning on the day of the event.

• Be prepared to answer email and telephone questions the day of the campaign. Make sure your “retrieve your bonuses page” has all links working.

• Make sure and keep track of your Amazon ranking all day to get a screen shot of the highest ranking you attain. Check Amazon rank on International Amazon sites: www.salesrankexpress.com.

• Send thank you notes to all your partners.

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