Alex Foster, a self-publishing guru, shared his secret as to how he publishes his books to maximize their sales long term.
The success of your book relies heavily on its performance at launch.
After the first month a book is on the market, Amazon treats it a little differently. For example, a book that's been out for a year with a high sales ranking (500,000 plus) is nearly impossible to move lower. "Nearly impossible," but still possible. The lower the sales ranking, the sooner it appears on pages when searching for its keywords.
But, the first month a book is on the market, it is treated special. Amazon wants to give it a chance to do the best it can. A book doesn’t have much of a chance if it's not given special treatment with all the competition in the market.
The traffic, reviews, and sales it gets give priority data to Amazon about your book. It’s absolutely crucial your book does the best it can the first month in sales and reviews.
As a self-publisher, you should price your book at .99 cents for the first month. Book pricing is elastic, meaning the cheaper the book the more it sells. After the first month, you can keep it at .99 or raise it to your desired amount. The goal is to get more sales than you normally would to juke the data.
Also, use all five days of your free promotion ASAP. It's important to get reviews and sales that first month. You get five days of free promotion every 90 days, so you won’t run out.
Five days of free in a row will generate the maximum amount of sales possible. With a price tag of .99 cents the rest of the month, your sales will be as high as they will ever be.
Amazon also lists your book higher in the listing when it's new for the first month to give it a chance to sell. With your book being free or cheap and the advantage given for being new, your book will provide stellar data to Amazon on its ability to sell and give people what they are looking for.
With all of this traffic to your book, you're statistically more likely to generate reviews.
Now, if you apply these principles to a book that never sells and has been out for a while, you're likely not going to improve its overall sales. The data that Amazon would have collected would show it to be a low performer; five days free or at .99 cents isn’t going to break it out.
For those books, there are two things you can do to help its ranking. One is to offer it for free. And the other is to publish it and publish it as new under a different account or a different name for the book. Starting fresh, you can take advantage of these principles to put the book in a better position.
Some alternatives are to hire a mass purchasing service to buy your book to improve ranking. Each account needs to be unique (you can't purchase a book more then once per account.) Book service sites like HugeOrange.com can improve seller ranking a number of way, but there are fees. I suggest trying everything mentioned above before turning to third parties.
Thank you again for your contribution to this site Alex!