My glamorous life as a five-star-rated Amazon bestseller
I did it — I finally did it. After minutes of not-so-hard work and actually relaxing during the night, my not-awaited, nowhere critically acclaimed book has made it to the top 10 on Amazon. I would like to thank my parents for providing the internet connection to accomplish this feat and a few friends who actually spent EUR 0.89 on a personal copy and gave me a 5 star review. I could not have done it without you!
But let’s take a step back.
It was a sunny weekend in early June of this year. I was staying with my parents during the first relaxation of COVID-related measures and was, frankly speaking, a bit bored. After surfing the internet all day, I came up with the idea of publishing a book and see how far one can take it after reading about it in another blog post.
Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) platform makes it really easy to publish an e-book. Once the initial set-up has been completed, a wizard guides you through the process of publishing your own e-book. As I was not interested in actually writing a novel at this time, I uploaded a whooping 17 word manuscript written in Microsoft Notepad and called it a day (or rather a night). Luckily, Amazon has no restrictions on the length of the text.
Next, the wizard allowed me to upload a custom cover for my book. Not really having an picture ready at the time, I took my running shoes, put them on the carpet and took a picture. Voilà, cover was completed.
After setting the price to the lowest amount possible — EUR 0.89 — I had to overcome the most difficult challenge: finding a category, where I can actually make it to the top 10 of the list. Obviously, the categories crime, science fiction and books about management are highly contested and I won’t ever make it to a top 10 spot. Epistemology, however, is not. Done!
With everything completed, I was ready to publish my book. After sending it to Amazon for verification and publication, I was slightly worried that it might bounce back. With that worry, I went to bed. Publishing the book took me roughly 45 minutes on a Saturday evening.
I woke up the next morning with a lovely e-mail from Amazon: your book has been published and is now available for purchase! Lastly, I had to convince a few friends to buy my book. Some were asking annoying questions — Why? Are you drunk at 9:30am? How did you come up with this stupid idea? — but some were more easily convinced. In the end, I sold four copies that day. Was it enough to break into the realm of the bestseller list?
Yes, it was. As you can see on the picture above, I reached #9 in my category (later on I even reached #5 but was so excited that I forgot to take another overview screenshot). After adding the “Freemasonry” category, I even reached #4 in that category. For some reason, a book on nutrition took the top spot in that category. Not sure, though, what those two topics have in common.
Summarizing this experience, I can confirm that becoming a bestselling author on Amazon is really easy if you pick the right category. At the time of this writing — Amazon takes quite some time to pay out the royalties for books — my book has been taken down for “quality issues”. I’m not sure what they mean. It was clearly a work of high quality.
P.S.: I donated the proceeds (EUR 1.16) to the Austrian Red Cross.
