First, the disclaimers: Since the algorithm Amazon uses to generate its sales ranking is proprietary, the details contained herein are extrapolated from research and field tests. The resulting consensus finds Amazon’s system to provide marginal sales data at best.
Imagine your book at the top of the Best Sellers List of the New York Times. Most authors do. The question is, “How do I get it there and sell millions of copies?”
When planing your book, there is one critical thing that most authors forget – marketing. In the case of book reviewers this means pre-marketing.
Every aspiring author who has struggled to have their work accepted by an agent or a publishing house – only to have collected enough rejection slips to paper a wall – turns to thoughts of self-publishing.
Experienced fiction writers have come to accept that they probably won’t end up millionaires by writing books – and may even have a greater chance of winning the lottery. The success of writers such as Tom Clancy rarely happens.
If book-marketing mistakes were destructive bombs, this mistake would be the nuclear bomb. Yet, this mistake is so obvious in retrospect that it makes me want to scream.