Cherokee Parks at number one! What an achievement. Having already hit the top in January with Paul L. Thompson, none of us believed that a second top spot taker would be just around the corner. It was a pleasant surprise—a surprise that caused all those other wonderful Cherokee Parks Westerns to jump up and take over the top one hundred. All in all, at this time of writing, ten percent of sales inside the top one hundred are Cherokee Parks. That’s some achievement, and it took a lot of work, but I wanted to share with you the strategy we used to get these books to take off. Here are some of the ideas behind this latest number one bestseller.
This year, 2020, we are subscribing to the SOLES philosophy for moving books. It’s a philosophy that means hard work—but good results. All the books inside the top one hundred that I work on use this philosophy, and I think you could give it a try yourself and make it work for you.
S: SOLES. Yes, the soles of your shoes have to be a solid basis for your footwear. Without the sole, the boot would be useless. This means that we have to take a look at the catalogue of books being sold. The categories, the keywords, the covers, the reviews—will this book move? Is this a book a potential reader will want to read? Do you have the correct SOLE for your catalogue, or will that first nail stick straight into your foot and cripple you? With Cherokee Parks, we decided to re-release his whole catalogue fresh and start from there. It worked. Can this work for you?
O: ORGANIZATION. The way your books are organized can either make or break your sales attempts. For example, are all of your books attached to your author page? Does your series have a series page? Do you have editorial reviews? Is the first book in your series listed as the first? Are you organized to make sales happen?
L: LEARN: Yes, I know, everyone knows everything, right? Well, we don’t. What do you know about the readership? Which books are most popular, which authors are the topsellers, who has new releases coming out, how are other books being sold, are audiobooks the big thing? What is happening within the genre? This is the learning stage. You’ve done everything you can think to sell your books and now you have to look at what others are doing—reading this blog could be considered learning! How can you add to what you already have to create sales success for your books? In the case of Cherokee, it was to go ahead and put together a Mountain Man project—a project we knew readers would go ape for. We were proved correct. That Mountain Man hit went to number one—it’s called “The Trader.”
E: ENERGIZE: Get those books ready for sale, start your ads, get inside the top one hundred of your given categories. Get onto the project and start reeling in those sales. This is the time for advertising, for capitalizing, SEO optimization, for keyword initiatives and cross-promotion. It’s time for getting into the game and bringing those sales into your fold.
S: SALES: The final step is to start counting the sales and find out what worked and what didn’t work. Which book performed best? What worked best for your books? What could you have done to have increased sales? This is the reflection before the whole thing starts again—and it will start again—because you have to go for gold with SOLES to keep those sales coming in!
Anyone can use this strategy outlined above. Sit down and start doing it. You may find that you enjoy the process of selling books more than writing ’em! It’s a good feeling when you hit the top. Now, if you have any questions, send me a note through the form below. Always happy to hear from you!
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